Word: draconian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...question of if, but how the Vatican will try to restrict homosexuals from joining the priesthood. As 256 of the world's bishops gathered in Rome for a three-week synod--the first under Pope Benedict XVI--details filtered out to the Italian press that something a bit less draconian than a blanket ban was in the works. A long-shelved document providing specific admission instructions to seminaries is expected to be issued in November. The "instruction" from the Congregation for Catholic Education would add some teeth to a long-standing but often loosely enforced ban on the ordination...
Even more outrageous, however, is the Pentagon’s draconian enforcement of a statute that essentially forces academic institutions to condone the suppression of a minority group’s civil rights. By threatening to withhold its grants, the federal government is implying that it is more important that military recruiters are given on campus resources than it is to support the many humanitarian, medical, and academic efforts that these grants underwrite at Harvard. Remove the politically charged debate surrounding the Solomon Amendment from the equation, and we suspect even staunch Solomon supporters would trade a few extra...
Since 1980, when China began fully carrying out what is commonly known as the one-child policy, officials in the provinces have often resorted to draconian measures--forced sterilizations and late-term abortions among them--to prevent the country's population of 1.3 billion from expanding into a Malthusian nightmare. Government leaders credit China's stringent population control with helping spur economic growth by reducing the number of mouths that must be fed. But in 2002, as personal freedoms proliferated in other areas of life, parliament voted to ease the deeply unpopular policy. Instead of forbidding extra children outright...
...Such draconian restrictions could well become commonplace. Across Western Europe last week, special precautions went into effect in response to the Rome and Vienna bloodbaths. Austrian officials strengthened the special antiterrorist unit that guards Vienna's Schwechat Airport but ruled out isolating the El Al check-in area in a remote corner of the airport because, as one spokesman put it, the airline did not want to operate in "a ghetto." Highly visible armed police patrolled El Al check-in areas at Frankfurt, Munich and Paris airports. Passengers on the twice-weekly El Al flight between Tel Aviv and Madrid...
...Draconian measures may also be in store for an area reaching well beyond Arizona. Six other states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada and California) fall inside the Colorado River basin. Under an agreement reached in 1922, each state is entitled to a portion of the river's waters. Arizona's share was set at 2.8 million acre-feet, roughly one-fifth of the Colorado's flow. Because it lacked transporting capacity, however, the state has used less than half of its legal entitlement, allowing California to take much of the remainder. The CAP's new flow will thus...