Word: draconian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most Brazilians believe he's the reason their country is surviving the current downturn better than other places. In past crises, Brazil was usually the nation in need of the largest life preserver. If it wasn't drowning under fiscal recklessness, it was being held under by draconian austerity plans. Brazil, the old joke goes, is the country of the future - and always will be. Now, in the middle of the worst global downturn for decades, Brazil could finally be the country of the moment. According to a recent study by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD...
There is an irony in passing such a draconian budget in the shadow of President Obama's recent incentives. "This budget plan has been really counter-intuitive from what people have been hearing about the federal stimulus package," Baldassare says. "We recognize that here's a circumstance where the federal government is moving in one direction, which is to encourage [funding] increases and tax cuts to stimulate, and the state is moving in a different direction." However, Baldassare says he is pleased the state budget is finally balanced: "Getting this budget issue behind us was the most important thing California...
...Barmak seeks to show the human side of tragedy. In Osama, about a young girl in Taliban-era Kabul who poses as a boy in order to provide for her widowed mother, he highlights the plight of women under that draconian regime. His awareness of the human side of history was honed early on. At age 5 he was transfixed by a showing of Lawrence of Arabia at his hometown cinema hall in Kabul. He haunted movie theaters after that, taping together remnants of filmstrips to make his own films, which he would then show to his friends in tiny...
...backseat and allow pragmatism to lead the way. This seems to have informed Tsvangirai’s decision. The MDC and various pro-democracy forces have attempted democratic change for over a decade. Yet these efforts have been brutally thwarted by the Zimbabwean government through the introduction of draconian laws, alleged human-rights abuses, and the skewing of democratic space against the opposition, among other measures. Surely, the world should one day demand accountability for these actions. Pragmatically, that time is not now. Mugabe has no intention of exiting the political picture and forcing him out is simply impractical...
...Changing policy priorities in Latin America shouldn't be that tall an order. Nor should the more symbolic gestures - like Obama's plans to close the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo or lift Bush's draconian restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to Cuba - which mean a lot in a region where Monroe Doctrine is a dirty term. If Obama demonstrates that he's more interested in helping Haiti with green-energy projects like jatropha-seed oil than he is in making Bolivia eradicate more and more coca bushes, or more committed to steering U.S. aid toward...