Word: draconian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even be given Kurdish names until as little as a decade ago. But because of its desire to join the European Union, the Turkish government has begun publicly imploring the acceptance of the Kurds residing within its borders. These efforts though, for the most part, disguise the ongoing draconian regulation of the Kurds. Just this past July, several Kurdish activists were charged by Turkish police for speaking in their native tongue at a political rally. While the trumped-up charges were later dropped because of massive international outcry, the fact that they were levied at all demonstrates clearly that Kurds...
...risk for all sides. The uprising poses a grave challenge to the seven-week-old interim government, which has yet to establish popular legitimacy or law and order amid the chaos of post-Saddam Iraq. Allawi had set himself up as a tough guy ready to impose draconian measures to quell the country's relentless violence. Yet taking the fight all the way to the golden-domed Imam Ali shrine, where al-Sadr's men were dug in, could spark uncontrollable rage among the country's majority Shi'ite population. Unrest had quickly spread across the Shi'ite south...
...ARRESTED. ISAMU KANEKO, 33, software developer charged with creating a widely distributed Japanese-language file-sharing program similar to Kazaa; in Kyoto. An outspoken opponent of Japan's Draconian copyright laws, Kaneko is the first creator of peer-to-peer programs arrested there. He is charged with writing Winny, an application that allowed computer users to anonymously swap content, such as movies and video games...
Israel was staggered in March 2002, when terrorists killed 130 people, including 30 murdered in the memorable Passover massacre in Netanya. That spring, the Israeli army stormed into the West Bank, fought pitched battles with armed and not-so-armed Palestinians, and imposed draconian security measures--in effect, turning the Palestinian areas into a vast prison camp. "We also began to rebuild our intelligence networks in the West Bank," a retired intelligence officer told me. "You know how that works--money, money and more money. You buy collaborators. And cell by cell, we rolled up most of the West Bank...
...council member recently intimated that the amendment was “draconian,” claiming that it would have effectively handicapped the council by not ever allowing for a termbill increase to compensate for inflation. However, it seems that the only thing draconian about the current legislation is its insistence on disregarding the wishes of the student body. The council has already tried to ram through the fee hike, which was initially an increase from $35 to $100, without ever holding a referendum—a measure that would have severely delegitimized the efforts of the council...