Word: bille
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...highway bill pending before Congress would instruct all 50 states to require all motorists convicted of driving under the influence to equip their cars with interlock systems that shut down a vehicle when a measured amount of alcohol is detected. (See the most important cars of all time...
...Thirteen years after the end of the tests in the Pacific, the bill I am presenting today is to allow our country to serenely close a chapter of its history," Defense Minister Hervé Morin told the lower house on June 25, as he proposed the legislation for debate. "France showed its greatness in the political, strategic challenge that brought us into the very small circle of nuclear powers. It must show greatness in its determination to repair its mistakes...
...passage, Morin's text is only the latest of 18 similar plans introduced since 2002 that have outlined compensation for people exposed to the blasts. All of those previous plans eventually petered out. This time, Morin has minimized the number of victims he says will be covered by his bill as "several hundred" - an optimistic estimation, experts say, given the 150,000 people that independent studies calculate were exposed in various degrees to the explosions. (Read "French Doubts Up After Nuke Mishaps...
...Given enough time - and pressure - that too may change. Veterans' groups intensively scrutinized the bill as it was being drafted and as a result won considerable concessions, including the shift of the burden of proof from the claimant to the government: now the state will have to prove radiation wasn't the cause of illness if it wants to avoid paying compensation, rather than victims having to establish the contrary before their claims are recognized. But Marhic says the proposal is still too restrictive on whom it will accept as sufficiently radiated by tests to apply for compensation...
...Whatever its final form, once it becomes law, Morin's bill will set up for France a system not unlike that established by the U.S.'s Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, which has approved over $1.38 billion in health-care or damages payments so far. That could have the unintended benefit of increasing the pressure on Britain to drop its long-standing refusal to compensate people who claim they were radiated during the U.K.'s nuclear testing from 1952 to 1991. The eventual passage of the French bill will leave London as the only Western nuclear power without...