Word: heinous
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Minutes after the attack, the commander of the Bangladeshi battalion in * Bihac requested an air strike by NATO planes under the standard rules of engagement. Despite the fact that the U.N. Security Council would shortly condemn the assault as "a heinous act of violence," U.N. commanders in Sarajevo refused to pass the request on to NATO. As the Serbs continued to harass U.N. forces, holding peacekeepers hostage and closing down the Sarajevo airport, U.N. commanders did nothing. "The U.N. is never going to fight back," remarked one American official, in an attempt to explain the commanders' conviction that air strikes...
Eventually an observant janitor realizes the extent of the abuse in the orphanage and, together with one of the older boys, reports these heinous acts to doctors and authorities. The coldness and brutality of the external world is again shown, this time not in the form of the wintry Newfoundland landscape, but in the heartless bureaucracy of the state. In a painful scene, the efforts of one investigator to expose these moral injustices are blocked by the venal relations between the church and state. Part I of the film may end with the transfer of the guilty priests from...
...previous offenses aren't always disclosed to judges who rule on subsequent ones. When New York State passed its juvenile-offender law in 1978, the outcome was regarded as the toughest new arrangement in the nation. On the surface, it was: those from 13 through 15 accused of heinous felonies were moved from Family Court, where the maximum penalty was 18 months regardless of the crime, to the State Supreme Court. But the law allows only for lighter sentences than would be given to adults who are convicted of equivalent crimes -- meaning the kids are often back on the streets...
...protests from the Vatican, which sees "control their reproductive lives" as a code phrase calling not only for access to artificial birth-control methods but also for abortion on demand. When Pope John Paul II met with Sadik earlier this year, he delivered a message condemning abortion as a "heinous evil" and followed up by calling the proposed plan a "project of systematic death." Sadik maintains that the conference plan does not endorse or encourage abortion, but merely declares that the millions of abortions performed every year should be done under conditions that ensure the safety of the women...
...parents' marriage -- and send him on his way. From top to bottom, American society is soaked with the sense that with enough explaining, a good lawyer and the pressing of the right buttons of guilt and victimology, there is a way out of most things. The most heinous acts get a round of applause on the talk-show circuit, as if confession were a substitute for contrition. Forgiveness has its place, but so does retribution. There's a way well short of lashing an American abroad to restore the notion that acts have consequences, and it could have started...