Word: letters
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...Supreme Court considered one kind of ranting not long ago in the 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...
...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...
...after the blast news organizations in West Germany received a 2½ page letter in German jointly signed by two terrorist groups, West Germany's Red Army Faction and France's Direct Action. Composed on paper carrying the R.A.F.'s symbol, a five-pointed star overlaid with a submachine gun, the letter said in stilted, jargon-filled language that the attack had been the work of a joint "politico-military front in Western Europe with NATO as its main target." It called the Rhein-Main base a "pivotal point for war against the Third World and a nest of spies...
...agents. VSD and L'Evénement du Jeudi charged that agents of the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE), France's CIA, had arranged the sabotage of the Greenpeace vessel. The accusation brought an immediate response from President François Mitterrand, who dispatched a letter to Lange. "The information that has been sent to us leads us to think that a link may exist between the French service and two persons implicated by New Zealand authorities in the affair of the Rainbow Warrior," he wrote. Mitterrand then appointed Bernard Tricot, a highly respected former aide...
...pastoral letter from El Salvador's Roman Catholic bishops was pessimistic. It cited the "grave situation affecting almost all Salvadorans . . . due most of all to the violence of war" and warned of an imminent escalation in the country's six-year civil conflict. The bishops pointed with concern to the "stagnation and deterioration" of the peace talks initiated last October between rebels of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front and the government of Salvadoran President José Napoleón Duarte. Concluded the letter: "If the dialogue fails, no other path will remain for El Salvador but total destruction, with a very...