Word: rios
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President Bill Clinton and scores of other world leaders met last week at United Nations headquarters in New York City to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the 1992 environmental be-in known as the Rio Earth Summit. The heads of state were supposed to decide what further steps should be taken to halt the decline of Earth's life-support systems. In fact, this meeting had much the flavor of the original Earth Summit. To wit: empty promises, hollow rhetoric, hypocritical posturing, bickering between rich and poor, and irrelevant initiatives. Think Congress in slow motion...
Despite a massive investigation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Texas Department of Health, the cause of this epidemic was never identified. But families of the dead and deformed babies filed a lawsuit blaming pollution from U.S.-owned factories located just across the Rio Grande in the heavily industrialized Mexican town of Matamoros. The defendants all denied causing the epidemic of birth defects. But just days before the case was scheduled for trial in 1995, the last of the companies agreed to settle the lawsuit. Dozens of companies paid a total of $17 million to the families...
Even as the pages were being set up, the surviving disciples were distancing themselves from the man who goes by the names Rio D'Angelo and Richard Ford, the cult member who discovered the bodies and alerted the police. They claim that Rio has taken over the cult's original Website and is out for profit, having signed a movie deal with ABC; he has ceased communicating with them. The dissension is likely to reverberate. While Applewhite led 38 followers into apparently blissful self-annihilation, his 20-year odyssey may have drawn a total of 200 to 500 adherents, many...
...Heaven's Gate victims did more than leave suicide notes; they left suicide press kits. One of the first to receive the materials was a former cult member using the name Rio D'Angelo (police say he is really Richard Ford), who got a Federal Express package containing two videotapes, a letter and two computer discs. He took the tape home last Tuesday night and watched it. On Wednesday he came to work at the Interact Entertainment Group in Beverly Hills, California, which had employed Higher Source, the cult's Web-page design service. Rio told his boss, Nick Matzorkis...
When Matzorkis and Rio finally watched the video together with the sheriff's deputies in the middle of the night, they were stunned by what they saw. The cult members were not just unthreatening in life, they were mild in death. Says Matzorkis: "They were sharing their joy and glee. The excitement really showed." When Matzorkis scanned the computer discs on Saturday evening, TIME learned, he found that they contained messages from cult members intended to be posted on the group's Website-in effect, suicide notes. One, from a woman who signed herself "Goldenody," seemed to support the notion...