Word: likenesses
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...some operatives seem to consider this a secondary goal. Instead of endorsing candidates, which would violate the 501(c)(4) stipulation that political campaigns not be such a group's primary purpose, activists like Mandile are taking the long view - preaching civic engagement and educating people about candidates' positions and constitutional principles. "I don't like to focus entirely on November. We're going to lose early battles, and we have lost some," he says. "We're encouraging change at the very local level - in cities, in towns." The goal, he adds, is to "create a farm team, so that...
...commission published rules for the citizens' initiatives, saying that the 1 million names would have to come from at least nine of the E.U.'s 27 member states. There are no restrictions, however, on how people can collect signatures, be it in the street or on social-networking sites like Facebook or Twitter. Once the signatures are in, the commission has four months to either accept the initiative by drafting a proposed law to go before the E.U. Parliament, or reject it. Petitions can be killed off if the commission finds them outside its remit, or if they are "manifestly...
...ambivalence is shared by George Schopflin, a Hungarian member of the European Parliament. "It is hard to think what subject might be suitable [for citizens' initiatives]," he says. "Many E.U. issues are unspeakably complicated. And many others that might engage European citizens, like whether we should all drive on the right, are too absurd for the commission to address...
...talk of stirring democracy, critics say the experience of such schemes in places like California and Switzerland shows that some initiatives fail to generate reasoned debate and open participation. Jean-Thomas Leseuer, head of the Thomas More Institute, a Paris-based think tank, says citizens' initiatives amount to mere democratic window dressing. "It is not with old tools that we will build Europe," he says. "This proposal is too heavy and complicated to impose on Europe before anything like a European consciousness exists. I bet that there will be very few initiatives." (See pictures of Paris expanding...
Experts say this was exactly the aim of the groups that supposedly recruited Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova, who, along with Maryam Sharipova, attacked two Metro stations in Moscow. Around the world, organizations like al-Qaeda are realizing that women can be far more effective than men at penetrating security checkpoints, making their attacks deeper and more lethal. Almost as important, a female face makes it harder to dismiss radical Islamism as simply evil. "We all have mothers. We all tend to idealize women as nonviolent," says Anne Speckhard, who chairs a NATO expert group on the psychological and social aspects of terrorism...