Word: draconian
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...1990s, retail advertising began to fall off because, the thinking went, modern businesses wanted broadsheet displays, not shrunken tabloid pages. Reporting talent - disgusted with the paper's draconian management - came and went. The Rocky cut back its statewide coverage and pretty much ignored Colorado's burgeoning Hispanic and newcomer populations. The paper also committed the ultimate sin in journalism: it was boring. What did Scripps do? Reduce subscription prices, mount a few lame marketing campaigns and change the paper's name to the Denver Rocky Mountain News...
...continue at the same pace much longer. California's prisons are so overcrowded and underfunded that a federal judge recently ruled that the state must release roughly a third of its 158,000 prisoners by 2012. The New York State legislature is close to scrapping the draconian Rockefeller drug laws that, by imposing mandatory sentences rather than rehab treatment, have kept many otherwise law-abiding drug users in prison for years. Other states, such as Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina, are either releasing some prisoners who have served their minimum time or putting drug offenders in treatment programs instead...
...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...