Word: dying
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian at the government agency that maintains the Stasi files today, was a teenager in 1988 and worked as a doorman in East Berlin. He was also a die-hard Pink Floyd fan and determined to get close enough to the Wall to hear the concert. He wound his way through backstreets to a building near the Wall and climbed onto the roof from a window in the building's attic. Yet despite his efforts, he could hardly hear a thing. (See pictures of people around the world mourning Michael Jackson...
Plenty of quintessentially 20th century businesses that have been sickening will now, finally, die. A generation or two of managers in those industries coasted along in denial, behaving as if the dark horizon would remain perpetually a ways off. With this recession, many of them are arriving at the abyss. However, people will still want to buy cars, still need to buy houses, still want to read quality journalism, watch TV series and movies at home, listen to recorded music, and all the rest. And so starting now, as some of the huge, dominant, old-growth trees of our economic...
...removal of feeding tubes, the withdrawal of respirators, the replacement of aggressive treatment with palliative care; these can all be wise and merciful choices. But each step forward gets a little more slippery. Is there some point, visible in the cloudy moral distance, where the right to die becomes a duty to die? We don't need to set Grandma adrift on her ice floe; the pressures would be subtle, wrapped in the language of reason and romance - the bereaved widower who sees no reason to try to start over, the quadriplegic rugby player whose memories paralyze his hopes...
This isn't the first time someone has challenged the clarity of Britain's assisted-suicide law. In a similar case eight years ago, Diane Pretty, who had motor neuron disease, wanted to know whether her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her die at home or accompanied her to an assisted-suicide clinic abroad. But the court rejected her request for clarification, and her illness took her life...
...thing is for sure, though: the clarified rules will deal only with people who travel overseas to assist with suicide and won't change the fact that helping someone die in Britain is illegal. And that, says Dominic Wilkinson, a medical-research fellow at Oxford University, raises other ethical considerations. "If we think it's O.K. for people to go overseas to end their lives, and it's not illegal for them to do it or for people to help them do it," he asks, "why do we think that people who want to do the same thing in this...