Relatives of Terri Schiavo who have been fighting to prolong the life of the brain-damaged 41-year-old woman began to abandon their quest yesterday and to withdraw from public view.
Although two appeals filed in support of their cause remain pending in state courts, Schiavo's parents lost their latest emergency petition to the Florida Supreme Court and abandoned the federal part of their legal battle.
"I'm going to concentrate now on my mom and my family," Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler said when asked what the family would do after their latest defeat.
PHOTO: AP
He thanked supporters who have gathered to pray, protest and hold vigils outside the hospice where nine days ago Schiavo's feeding tube was removed.
"We appreciate what everybody has done, it really lifted us up," he said.
A spokesman for the family, Brother Paul O'Donnell, urged people gathered outside to go home for the Christian holiday of Easter.
"They've just exhausted all judicial means," O'Donnell said of the family, adding that starting yesterday they would no longer be speaking with the media, choosing instead to spend time at Schiavo's bedside.
O'Donnell said Schiavo "is really showing signs of starvation and dehydration" and begged Florida Governor Jeb Bush to take action, as he did when a similar standoff unfolded in 2003.
"Governor Bush, you do have the authority to stop the killing of Terri Schiavo .... We beg you to have courage and take action."
Bush has said, however, that his powers to intervene are limited.
Schiavo has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years since suffering severe brain damage during a cardiac arrest in 1990. Her husband and legal guardian Michael Schiavo has fought for years to have her feeding tube removed, saying she would not want to be kept alive artificially and should be allowed to die.
The battle has raged through the state court and legislature, but escalated after the US Congress stepped in last weekend and passed an unprecedented bill, signed by President George W. Bush, allowing the case to be heard in federal court.
Since then the family has experienced a string of court defeats including on Saturday when a state judge rejected the family's argument that Schiavo had tried to say "I want to live" before her feeding tube was removed.
Judge George Greer, who has consistently ruled in favor of the husband, found that any sound she made was a reflex and not a conscious act, based on medical evaluations of her condition presented in court. The Florida Supreme Court rejected the family's appeal of the decision late Saturday.
Meanwhile the family decided to cease their efforts in the federal court after losing their case twice in a federal district court, three times in an appeals court and five times with the US Supreme Court.
Attorney David Gibbs announced that the family had given up the federal court fight late Saturday.
That seemed to deflate the hopes of some 100 people gathered outside the hospice. But some said they would keep their vigil until the end.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS