Word: hungering
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...criminals. We are ready and willing to meet an agonizing death to establish that we are political prisoners." So saying, seven inmates between the ages of 25 and 32, all of them convicted as Irish Republican terrorists (three for murder), went on a hunger strike on Oct. 27 in Northern Ireland's Maze Prison, 13 miles outside Belfast. As the prisoners passed the 40th day of their fast last week, there were increasing fears that one or more might die. If so, the troubled province could be in for a new round of bloodshed and sectarian violence. In sympathy...
British officials insist that neither the hunger strike nor the terrorist actions of the I.R.A.'s Provisional wing are supported by a majority of Ulster's Catholic community. Initially, that judgment was probably correct, but Catholic political leaders are now troubled by a shift in attitude since the prisoners began their fast. If even one of the hunger strikers dies, warned Seamus Mallon, the moderate deputy leader of the Social Democratic and Labor Party, there will be a new outbreak of violence. "It will make martyrs of those men," he said...
...hunger strikers' principal demand is for restoration of the "special category status" that prisoners convicted of politically motivated crimes were granted by the Tory government of Edward Heath in 1972. At that time, several hunger strikers, who also came close to death, persuaded William Whitelaw, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to grant them the status of political prisoners. Whitelaw, who is now Mrs. Thatcher's Home Secretary, later said the concession had been a mistake. It was withdrawn in 1976, and as a result there is something of a double standard at Maze Prison. Those convicted...
That first revolution, which began two centuries ago, created the technology of modern life, but at a high cost in hardship and hunger. Some experts see analogous dangers in the robot revolution. If robots can do men's work faster, better and more cheaply, then what will men do? They will be retrained for other things, the robotmakers answer. But by whom, and for what? Almost 20 years ago, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano portrayed a future society in which the elite few run the machines while the unemployable majority subsists on handouts in resentful idleness...
...striking prisoners take a cup of water each day and survive "by will," she said. She added that past hunger strikes have involved inmates who refused to eat for more than 40 days...