Word: virginia
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Each year on Nov. 11, the U.S. celebrates Veterans Day in honor of those who have fought - and those who have died - for the country. Wreath-laying ceremonies take place at cemeteries across the land, including at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Though the commemoration officially began in Arlington as Armistice Day, with the burial of an anonymous World War I soldier at the Tomb of the Unknowns in 1921, the occasion didn't become a federal holiday in the U.S. until 1938. (In 1954 its name was changed to Veterans Day.) Accounts differ on when the tradition began...
...have to be careful not to let our definition of terrorism become too broad," said former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff last year. "Particularly when we get to the individual lone wolf, then it really does become hard to distinguish between the person who killed the students at Virginia Tech and the person who might do the same thing simply because they read something on the Internet about bin Laden and that happened to appeal to their psychology." Once everything is terrorism, he warned, then nothing is. But while the motivations of the Virginia Tech gunman seemed perversely personal, Hasan...
...Hasan's early life offers few clues to what came later. He was born in Virginia to Palestinian parents who had chased the American Dream from the West Bank to Roanoke. They opened a couple of restaurants and a convenience store and had great hopes for their three sons - which did not include their eldest joining the Army, even if just as a way to get a free education. Hasan graduated from Virginia Tech with honors in biochemistry, then went to medical school, where, an uncle told the Los Angeles Times, he decided to major in psychiatry after he fainted...
...state of Virginia has executed John Allen Muhammad via lethal injection on Nov. 10. Muhammad, known as the D.C. sniper, was sentenced to death for the murder of Dean Harold Meyers, one of 10 victims gunned down during a three-week rampage around the capital in 2002. Muhammad is the highest-profile inmate to die by lethal injection since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April 2008 that the state of Kentucky was not violating a statute prohibiting "cruel and unusual punishment" by executing prisoners using the controversial method. The ruling effectively allowed executions by lethal injection to recommence after...
...which executes more people than any other nation by far, is phasing out death by gunshot in favor of lethal injection; the government provides mobile execution vans, which travel to smaller cities and towns that don't have permanent death chambers. While that morbid procession wouldn't fly in Virginia, the state clearly considers lethal injection the most humane option. When prisoners - like Muhammad - decline to specify whether they want to be executed by electrocution or lethal injection, Virginia gives them the latter by default...