Word: unionized
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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...
Earlier in the festivities, a few people had made speeches. One of the presenters, a retired professor of economics from Duke University named Thomas Naylor, 73, who heads up a secessionist movement in Vermont, suggested that Maine secede from the union. I asked Naylor, who doesn't own or particularly like guns, what he thought of the Second Maine Militia. "It's a variation on the Swiss shooting club, with social and political overlays," he explained. "It's a fairly benign way of confronting one's powerlessness...
...European Commission in Brussels also took steps to address the problem from a procedural standpoint by issuing new rules for dealing with asylum seekers. Officials set a six-month time limit for governments to hold refugee application hearings and advised all 27 European Union countries to introduce the same asylum procedures, rather than wildly varying standards. Jacques Barrot, the commission's vice president, said the changes aimed to offer "a more level playing field" to the huge numbers of people from Africa, Asia and elsewhere flooding into Europe. (See pictures of the French cracking down on migrants...
...Afghanistan war drags into its ninth year and the Iraq war its seventh year, the European Union faces a unique challenge in trying to stop refugees from these countries. Unlike the huge numbers of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe, Iraqi and Afghan migrants face only an overland journey - though one that can take months. Once they reach the E.U., usually by crossing from Turkey into Greece, migrants can easily slip over internal E.U. borders, crossing numerous countries without detection. Many of them attempt to make it Britain, where they speak the language and have relatives. Those...
...Europe is clamping down: "For the first time since 2002, the press freedom index's top 20 is not quite so European. Only 15 of the 20 leading countries are from the Old Continent, compared with 18 in 2008. Eleven of these 15 countries are European Union members. They include the top three, Denmark, Finland and Ireland. Another E.U. member, Bulgaria, has been falling steadily since it joined in 2007 and is now 68th (against 59th in 2008). This is the lowest ranking of any member of the union." (Read about the future of Europe's newspapers...