Word: civility
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...vote has sparked the usual questions about whether there is a fundamental cultural divide between the U.S. and Europe over balancing security concerns with civil liberties. But the real significance may be simply institutional: the European Parliament, freshly endowed with new lawmaking powers following the passage of the Lisbon Treaty last year, is flexing its muscles as an emerging player in European politics. Suddenly, the legislative body has a semblance of real power - something it never really had before. (See the worst business deals...
...controversial initiative. It was secretly set up after the Sept. 11 attacks, allowing CIA agents and U.S. Treasury officials to sift through the European financial messaging data collected by SWIFT, an international bank transfer consortium based in Belgium. When the arrangement came to light in 2006, it outraged civil liberties advocates and prompted the European Union to outline certain conditions under which the U.S. could access the information - the precursor to the arrangement just struck down by the Parliament...
Legislators who voted against the pact, however, said it was a victory for civil liberties. "Nobody is challenging the need for finance tracking to fight terrorism," says Reinhard Bütikofer, the leader of the German Parliament members from the Green Party. "But we challenge the idea this can only be done without privacy guarantees. We devalue democracy when we compromise on fundamental rights...
Perhaps the biggest message from the vote is that European governments will now have to adapt to working with an increasingly emboldened Parliament. Thomas Klau, who heads the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), says that while Parliament members were sincere in their concerns over civil liberties, some were perhaps also a little over-excited to exercise their new authority. "The institutional landscape has changed," he says. "This is an early affirmation of the European Parliament's increased powers and self-confidence in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty. And it now has political ambition...
...Africa's largest deposits of uranium, needed to build nuclear power stations and weapons. And lawlessness is endemic. While I was reporting in Niamey last April, my car was attacked twice by mobs wielding steel poles and lumps of concrete, battering its side and smashing its windows. A senior civil servant who got into the car shortly afterward said such attacks happened every day and dismissed the rioters as "des gosses" - "kids" - as he carefully brushed broken glass off his seat...