Word: citizens
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...case of a North Carolina man who wrote two colorful letters to the President urging him not to appoint a judge named David Smith as U.S. Attorney for North Carolina. Smith sued the man for libel. The letter writer said that the First Amendment surely protected a citizen's right to send an angry letter to Washington. The court said no, a nasty letter to the President or Congress, even if sent in exercise of the constitutional right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," is just as much open to a libel suit as, say, a newspaper...
...even shaming. Sometimes, if it issues forth from a politician or religious zealot with ambitions, it becomes sinister. The U.S. has a fairly rich tradition of ranters, from Thomas Paine to Joseph McCarthy to Spiro Agnew (whose ranting was actually a satire on the form) to Louis Farrakhan. A citizen named Peter Muggins caught the essense of the rant in an intense if repetitious letter to Abraham Lincoln: "God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell...
...died from alcohol and drugs. In Sind province, most business came to a standstill. Some defied the ban on entering Sind for the funeral rites. Said Malik Mohammed Qasim, secretary-general of one faction of the Pakistan Muslim League: "To attend a funeral is the basic right of a citizen, and to prevent a Muslim from doing so is un-Islamic." The struggle between Zia and the Bhutto family is evidently far from over...
...commissioners of Alabama's Jefferson County announced last week that they would no longer use prison inmates on road gangs. Penal reform? No. In part, at least, a fear of AIDS. If a citizen caught the incurable disease from a prisoner, explained Commissioner Ray Moore, the county might be sued. Despite evidence that the AIDS virus can be transmitted only through an exchange of blood or semen, Moore claimed that "the danger was great," even though the likelihood of anyone's having intimate contact with convicts on a road crew would seem slight...
...interest rates climb or the economy falls into a recession. Other critics call going private a waste of scarce capital. "As a financier, I regard it as an easy way to get rich," says Martin Whitman, president of M.J. Whitman & Co., a Manhattan investment firm. "But as a citizen who loves his country, I think there are better and more productive uses of the nation's money supply than to create debt to pay off stockholders...