Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...eight grim men seated around the defendants' table may have looked like a group of grandfathers, but to Chief Prosecutor Michael Chertoff, they were directors of the "largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States." Last week twelve anonymous members of a federal jury in New York City seemed to agree. They convicted the eight men, among whom were the leaders of three of New York City's five Mob families, of running the Mafia as a criminal organization controlled by a powerful commission. Among its activities: murder, extortion and racketeering...
...took only a single paragraph (four sentences, 91 words) to change the course of an ancient debate. "There is now no doubt," said Surgeon General C. Everett Koop in his grim report on AIDS last month, "that we need sex education in schools and that it must include information on heterosexual and homosexual relationships." With characteristic bluntness, Koop made it clear that he was talking about graphic instruction starting "at the lowest grade possible," which he later identified as Grade 3. Because of the "deadly health hazard," he said later, "we have to be as explicit as necessary...
What gave the panel findings extra punch was that they followed by only a week an equally grim report by U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that urged an all-out effort to educate the populace, beginning with young children, to the dangers of AIDS and ways to avoid them. Though they worked independently, Koop and the NAS committee each knew of the other's studies. Their reports contained little that had not been published before in the way of scientific information about AIDS or predictions about its spread. What distinguished them from previous pronouncements was the authority of their...
Last week a committee of 28 biologists, clinicians, public-health scientists and other experts assembled by the prestigious Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences gave some grim answers. AIDS, according to the panel's 374-page report, "could become a catastrophe" unless the spread of the killer virus is checked. That will require "perhaps the most wide-ranging and intensive efforts ever made against an infectious disease," specifically research and education programs that would probably cost $2 billion a year, at the minimum...
...against that grim background last week that Koop, in a dramatic report to the public (see box), warned that AIDS will spread beyond its current high-risk groups into the general population. He called for greater use of the only weapons currently at hand for controlling the AIDS epidemic: education about the disease beginning as early as the third grade and prevention. Koop's report was educational in itself. It was comprehensive and accurate, and its warnings were expressed in sexually explicit language that readers could not fail to understand...