Word: strucke
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Suddenly doctors are talking about little else. In a decision that took legal scholars and medical ethicists by surprise last week, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a New York State law that prohibited physicians from helping their patients die. It's already legal for doctors to withhold or withdraw treatment at a patient's request. Now, as long as a patient is in the final stages of a terminal disease, mentally competent and able to take a lethal dose of medicine on his or her own, the state can't bar a doctor from prescribing that dose...
Still, American paranoias come in waves, and the past year or have seen a surge in the dark dynamic: Waco and Ruby Ridge, then Oklahoma City, a commemoration of April 19, which has become a savage Guy Fawkes Day. Five days after Oklahoma City, the Unabomber struck in Sacramento, California, as if envious and eager to reclaim the attention. The paranoid screams self-importance; insignificance transforms itself into destructive power...
...suspect to whom (evidently) I owe the distinction, I will pass over in silence the fact that he is a Harvard man, and otherwise he doesn't interest me. The tendency among some intellectuals and journalists to dignify with analysis the thinking of violent criminals has always struck me as low and contemptible. I couldn't care less what the man's views on technology are or what message he intended to deliver; the message I got was that in any society, no matter how rich, just and free, you can rely on there being a certain number of evil...
...media reports have focused on Kaczynski's ties to Harvard College. Much of the country seems to be surprised that such a bizarre character was educated at Harvard. However, many Harvard students are not surprised by these developments at all. In retrospect, it makes sense that a bomber who struck Yale and Berkeley but not Harvard was probably a graduate who still had a bit of respect for his alma mater. And now, many undergraduates are looking around at their classmates with increased interest, wondering who will be suspected of committing odd crimes long after graduation...
...also proved embarrassingly hard to implement. A blue-ribbon panel dithered over a national history standard and eventually brought forth a politically correct screed that was denounced by professional historians and rejected last year by a Senate vote of 99 to 1. A similar report on national English standards struck many people as so poorly written as to be useless...