Word: wishes
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...said Sir William de Tracy when he stepped forward at the end of T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral to tell why he and three other loyal servants of Britain's King Henry II had just carried out the poisonous wish implicit in the King's angry question, "Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest...
Eliot intended for us to despise the knights' oily justifications for the butchery, but history has been somewhat kinder to the King, who may or may not have wanted his wish thus fulfilled. As soon as Henry learned that the knights who overheard his question had hastily departed from his court, he guessed their mission and sent a messenger to summon them back. And when he heard that his onetime friend Becket had indeed been murdered, according to the contemporary chronicle of Arnulf of Lisieux, "the King burst into loud cries of grief ... At times he seemed stupefied with suffering...
...from "domination" by blacks. The last, best hope seemed destined to meet the same fate as so many other attempts to achieve racial harmony. The white opposition Progressive Federal Party, which had participated in the conference, termed the rejection "a reaction from bigots who seem to have a death wish for South Africa...
Despite the condemnation of the Natal proposals by the local leader of the ruling National Party, South African State President P.W. Botha, the party head, has been careful not to take a formal position. The recommendations go further than he would wish, but his government is reluctant to reject them outright for fear of setting off more racial unrest. Said John Kane-Berman, conference deputy chairman: "I have no illusions about the difficulties of persuading the government to accept the plan." The Indaba's proposal for Natal may be dead for the moment, but the idea of some form...
Before construction begins, Leathers holds a Design Day, when he meets with local residents to solicit their suggestions. He especially invites children to submit drawings and wish lists; castles and mazes are among the most popular requests. Leathers can be quite obliging: he built a wooden Alamo, equipped with an armadillo-shaped drawbridge, for a Dallas elementary school and fashioned a crude telephone system out of three-inch plastic piping for Hamilton, Va. Safety considerations, however, usually force him to reject water slides, underground tunnels, bike racetracks and skateboard ramps...