Word: ax
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This fall, the Freedom Tree was removed after vandals attacked it with an ax. And city officials planning to plant a replacement tree one week from today received a rude surprise this week when they realized that the soil on the site intended for Freedom Tree II had been poisoned with calcium chloride...
Today a few Algonans fear their town will be indelibly marked by Robert's madness, the way Villisca, Iowa, is by the brutal ax murder of eight residents there back in 1912. But uppermost in everyone's mind is the hope that the Dreesmans will be remembered for all they did, not for the way they died. The hospital addition will help, although Robert almost killed that possibility too, by assuming he could dispose of his family's wealth with his own will, since he would be the last to die. For some contorted reason, he left $1 to each...
...catch, though. Hollywood, like the characters it puts on the screen, wants to be loved at the final fade-out. So Bonfire ends in a brotherhood-of-man speech instead of a race riot. The evil nurse in Misery doesn't chop her captive's foot off with an ax; she breaks it with a mallet. The heroine in Sleeping with the Enemy doesn't bravely confront her husband on her own terms; she cringes like a silent-film maiden tied to the railroad tracks. Plus ca change. Movies, even if they have literary beginnings, still need Hollywood endings...
...Killing in a Small Town (CBS). A repressed Texas schoolteacher (Barbara Hershey, in a shattering performance) pays a visit to her neighbor, who is later found hacked to death with an ax. This disturbing TV movie took the overworked true-crime genre and infused it with a sense of spiritual desolation...
...faith in Slovakia, the country's rustic eastern wing. But his remedy -- asking for the temporary right to rule by fiat if necessary -- differed only in degree from Walesa's ideal of an almost mystically righteous ruler who, as Poland's new President put it, can take "an ax" to obstacles. And Slobodan Milosevic, the steely leader elected by Serbs, won by virtue of his frank jingoism...