``The Second Coming'', by William Butler Yeats. Material in italics is from The Baltimore Sun, Tuesday, August 22, 1995.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
NEW YORK - A melee between about 100 police officers and hundred of parishioners broke out Sunday night at a Pentecostal church in Queens...injuring 34 people...By the time the standoff ended about 4:30 a.m., 28 churchgoers and six police officers had been hurt, and seven people were arrested on charges that included rioting and obstructing justice...
``Everyone rushed out of church with bottles...They surrounded the officers and the guy they were trying to arrest....''
``I saw church people throwing bottles at police...A couple of cops threw bottles back. They were Macing kids.''...
``Bottles and debris started coming down as the additional police arrived...Several officers were pepper-sprayed by the church security guards, and we also used some pepper-spray.''...
``The police ambushed the church...The police charge on them from their hiding spot, spraying Mace on children, men and women, and pointing guns to the heads of babies and the men. They beat up men, women, teen-agers and the children who were trying to run.''
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
DETROIT - As dozens of onlookers cheered, three men pulled a woman from her car, ripped off her clothes, then chased her until she either jumped or was forced off a bridge to her death.None of the 40 or so passers-by tried to help Deletha Word during the confrontation...
One of the men smashed her car with a crowbar and pulled her from the car, ripping off some of her clothes...The man pushed her against the car and beat her...
When Ms. Word tried to run away, police said the man with the crowbar chased her. What happened after that is unclear....
``They...made her leap over that bridge and beat her hands - she was holding onto the bridge - and beat her hands away from that banister...''
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland - As Northern Ireland celebrates a year of peace, Belfast Murders magazine is marking its anniversary with fresh tales of gore, matricide, and strangulation.Sales are strong, and the publishers see no irony in bringing a new catalog of killings - the bloodier the better - into people's homes now that political violence has left the streets....
[T]he magazine aims to prove that there is more to Belfast than brutal political murders - there is plenty of rape, pillage, and mindless murder, too....
There is an advertisement from April 1847 promising an entertaining ``Grand Moral Spectacle'' - admission free - at which a 17-year-old woman was to be publicly strangled....
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
CHESHIRE, Conn. - Over the past decade, the bodies of 19 women have been dumped along roads across central Connecticut....Authorities do not believe all the killings were committed by the same person. Ms. Delgado was killed by a blunt trauma to the head. Most of the other victims have either been strangled or stabbed...
The Second Coming! Hardly those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:
...[O]ver the weekend, the London Observer reported that...Iraq had been only three months away from testing a nuclear bomb when the 1991 war broke out.......[D]efectors are also the sources for believing that Saddam Hussein was planning invasions of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia soon...
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
JERUSALEM - A suicide bombing killed five people and sparked anti-government protests yesterday...Demonstrations flared last night throughout Israel as the first of the victims was buried...
About 100 people were wounded in the bomb blast or by flying glass, seven of them seriously. The other fatalities included an Israeli policeman en route to work and a 26-year-old Israeli woman who was en route to a hospital volunteer job.
It was the seventh bus bombing in 18 months....
The blast occurred shortly before 8 a.m., as an ``accordion'' tandem bus overtook another public bus....The explosion peeled open the first bus and blew through the windows of the second.
``It was sudden. I didn't see everything because I was covered in blood - not my blood...''
A leaflet issued in the name of the radical Islamic group Hamas claimed responsibility for the blast, and said a man carried out the ``heroic action.''...
Members of the Jewish ultra-Orthodox burial society scoured the street near the buses yesterday to recover pieces of flesh, as an angry crowd gathered. They scuffled with police...
``This is our home. The Arabs should go back to other Arab states...''
``We should bomb Arab buses'' shouted another man....
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Tom Swiss