Word: raft
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...residents are grappling with new limits on their personal lives. On Sept. 14, Aceh's legislative council used the semiautonomy granted by a post-tsunami peace agreement to vote unanimously for a raft of Shari'a-inspired punishments, including possible death by stoning for adultery and whipping for homosexual activity. People caught having premarital sex could be subjected to 100 public lashes. The new laws are the strictest in the nation. Although Indonesia is overwhelmingly Muslim, most of the country's citizens are committed to a far more moderate form of the faith...
...What changed? First, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou eschewed the breakaway bluster of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian and, amid the global recession, hitched Taiwan's economic future to China's growth engine. In just the 15 months Ma has been in office, Taiwan and China have launched a raft of trade, investment, transport and cultural initiatives and exchanges that are inexorably binding the two together. As much as it will ever trust any Taiwan leader, Beijing sees Ma as a pragmatic politician with whom it can do business. (Read "Building Bridges to China...
...Geithner, testifying on Thursday in front of an oversight panel reviewing the government's financial rescue efforts, faced a raft of questions about the effectiveness and the use of those funds. Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor and chairperson of the panel, said the average American has seen little or no benefit from the TARP spending. Damon Silvers, associate counsel for the AFL-CIO union, questioned whether TARP had really restored some of its biggest recipients, namely Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, to health...
...this point, everyone is familiar with the raft of cost-saving measures the ever-so-wise college administration has implemented in order to slice a few million dollars out of what was apparently a bloated operating budget. These cuts come in the face of—and this is just ballpark, folks—about 10 billion lost dollars in our endowment (summary of the budget fiasco thus far: salaried administrators 1, wage-earning Harvard employees 0). Recently, the powers that be realized the silliness of their proposed changes in the shuttle schedules and repented. Why can?...
...with local papers proudly chronicling the hairy heroics. Rambo, an 11-month-old Labrador, helped save a drowning 47-year-old bather near the east-coast city of Foggia, while Massi, a Newfoundland, and Labrador Romeo were patrolling the super-chic Amalfi coast aboard a motorized, rubber coast-guard raft when they helped two would-be victims. Other four-legged studs have offered staged demonstrations of water safety for vacationers near Venice...