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...Supreme Court's landmark ruling: in Furman vs. Georgia, the court decided that state laws permitted judges and juries so much leeway in prescribing death that the sentence as applied was arbitrary, and thus unconstitutional. Capital punishment, wrote Justice Potter Stewart, was "freakishly imposed" on a "capriciously selected random handful" of murderers. However, in three simultaneous 1976 decisions, the court clarified its views on the subject, most significantly by declaring that the death penalty is not unconstitutional per se. Today all 37 states with capital punishment on the books have laws that were drafted specifically to conform with...
...controllers desperately began sending random messages on every possible frequency. Finally, only minutes away from a fatal fuel freeze, Anik answered and accepted the lifesaving instructions. What had gone wrong? A computer programmer had apparently goofed, reversing the number of the correct communications frequency...
Respondents to a random telephone poll indicated that a combination of pure dedication and the hope of using academic training for non-academic careers has inspired many students to set their sights on disciplines such as biology, fine arts and economics...
ROBERT LOWELL by Ian Hamilton Random House; 527pages...
...rename the year? It is a perplexing question. Like the Israeli Minister, I tried picking at random a combination of numbers which would add up to this desired number, and the results were ominous: 1984 can be written as 1300 (thus frightening triskadecaphobes for an entire year) plus 666 plus three sixes (which would offend religious people as well as those who saw the "Omen" movies...