Welcome

Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Killers All

Marihuana, the Devil's Weed

Maniac

Suffrage

 

Why would a 17th-century writer warn people that a chapel was only for "private or secret suffrages"? Because suffrage has been used since the 14th century to mean "prayer" (especially a prayer requesting divine help or intercession). So how did suffrage come to mean "a vote" or "the right to vote"? To answer that, we must look to the word's Medieval Latin ancestor, suffrāgium, which can be translated as meaning "vote," "support," or "prayer." That term produced descendants in a number of languages, and English picked up its senses of suffrage from two different places. We took the "prayer" sense from a Middle French suffrāgium offspring that emphasized the word's spiritual aspects, and we elected to adopt the "voting" senses directly from the original Latin.



Targeted killings of journalists surged in 2020, group says

 

 PARIS (AP) — More journalists are being killed outside of war zones, and the overwhelming majority of this year's grim total of at least 50 dead were deliberately targeted, many of them murdered while investigating organized crime, corruption and environmental degradation, Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday.

Its tally of journalists and media workers killed in connection with their work by mid-December was just slightly lower than in 2019, when the press freedom group counted 53 dead, even though many journalists reported less from the field in 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The group said 68% were killed outside of war zones this year. That confirms a trend noted by the group since 2016, when only four out of 10 deaths were in countries not at war.

Targeted killings of journalists surged in 2020, accounting for 84% of deaths, sharply up from 63% in 2019, the group said.

It again listed Mexico as the deadliest country for media workers, counting at least eight journalists killed there in connection with their work in 2020. Among them was Julio Valdivia, a newspaper reporter whose decapitated body was found in September in an area ridden with organized crime.

Among six media deaths that the group counted in Iraq was the killing in July of Hisham al-Hashimi, a leading expert on the Islamic State and other armed groups, who was shot dead outside his Baghdad home.

Reporters Without Borders also noted an increase in the killings of investigative journalists, including four who were looking into organized crime groups, 10 who were reporting on corruption and the misuse of public funds and three who were working on environmental issues including illegal mining and land grabs.

Reporting on civil unrest also proved particularly deadly, the group said, with seven journalists killed while covering protests — four of them in Iraq, two in Nigeria and one in Colombia.

Reporters Without Borders report: https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/rsf_round-up_killed.pdf

be all you can be

 


God



Franchise

 Franchise was voted into early 14th-century English as both a noun and verb. It is from the Anglo-French verb franchir, meaning "to free," itself from franc, "free." To be perfectly frank, the word franchise  is most often encountered today with reference to restaurant chains or professional sports teams (e.g., "a franchise quarterback"), not to mention branded retail stores and sequel-driven movies and novels. These commercial meanings are far from the original meaning of the word in English: "freedom or immunity from some burden or restriction vested in a person or group." This meaning evolved into the "right to vote" sense of the word.