Word: draconian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lingle's two-year contract with the teachers union and its 13,000 members amounts to a 7.9% pay cut. The bulk of the union's teachers will have 17 furlough days a year, giving Hawaii the shortest school year in the nation. "It's completely Draconian," says Vernadette Gonzalez, whose 5-year-old daughter, Inez Anderson, is a kindergartner at Noelani. "People are shocked when they hear that this was allowed, or even considered as a sane solution to the budget crisis." Gonzalez fears that students will not be able to make up for the lost school time, noting...
...creating Silicon Valley, San Diego's biotech cluster and the state's other private-sector centers of innovation. So it's been a juicy target for right-wingers who consider Schwarzenegger a squishy sellout. If a low-carbon, Big Government, change-obsessed state with high taxes on the wealthy, draconian environmental regulations, a porous border and the nation's most vibrant labor movement were imploding, what would that say about the age of Obama...
...elusive. Finance Ministers of the G-20 nations earlier this month agreed that bonuses should be more clearly tied to performance, but Britain and the U.S. resisted demands by France and Germany to have them capped. Sensing the prevailing political winds, some bankers are already moving to forestall draconian new rules. The Dutch banking association announced that its members have agreed to cap bonuses and severance pay. And in France, bankers have been so frequently called to the Elysée Palace this year to be chided in person by Sarkozy that they're rewriting their rules...
Meanwhile, the CAS is calling for more draconian measures. Now that it has uncovered the NHTSA research, it is filing a petition calling for all new cars to have a device installed that allows only emergency calls. "We do not see how [NHTSA] can turn down a problem that's rapidly turning out to be as bad as drunk driving," says Clarence Ditlow, CAS's executive director. "We're asking that technology be installed in cars to disable their cell phones whenever you shift out of park...
...interviews with parents, students, teachers and administrators, and supplemented with data from the U.S. Department of Education, the report reveals how the spare-the-rod-spoil-the-child philosophy continues to rule thousands of classrooms across America, and how students with disabilities are disproportionately affected by such draconian methods of discipline...