Word: membership
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...radical populist who has been convicted of assault (the conviction was erased when he entered parliament) and is under investigation for allegedly libelous attacks on his opponents. He made his name in violent street demonstrations in the mid-1990s and has blasted free-market reforms and E.U. membership for Poland. Only this month he was criticized for declaring that he had wanted to slap a television journalist during an interview. Even so, an official from the ruling center-right Law and Justice party (pis) said it had "no alternative" but to invite Lepper into government because it could not find...
Opus Dei is not a kind of spiritual pick-me-up for casual Catholics. It features a small, committed membership (85,500 worldwide and a mere 3,000 in the U.S.), many of whom come from pious families and are prepared to embrace unpopular church teachings such as its birth-control ban. Members take part in a rigorous course of spiritual "formation" stressing church doctrine and contemplation plus Escrivá's philosophy of work and personal holiness. Opus' core is its "numeraries," the 20% who, despite remaining lay, pledge celibacy, live together in one of about 1,700 sex-segregated "centers...
Some 70% of the membership, called supernumeraries, are much more of this world. They bend Opus' daily two hours of religious observance around a more typical--or perhaps retro, given the large size of many of their families--existence. Opus' sureties provide a spiritual grounding to life's everyday chaos and ambiguities. While she was raising seven children in the anything-goes 1970s, says Cathy Hickey of Larchmont, N.Y., Opus gave her "an underlying stream of peace and joy." Members bring a pious concentration to jobs that might otherwise be done less ethically or carefully. Heil, the Columbia student, says...
...show of disregard for multilateralism and compromise†but rather a vote for effective human rights protection. The new Council is not an improvement from its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission. Other than where a country is located, there is not a single criterion for membership, and countries must rotate off the Council after a two-year term. Thus, the new organization merely ensures that human rights abusers will continue to occupy seats on the Council and that countries which value and protect human rights will lose their seats after two years. There is no hope for effective...
...creation of the Human Rights Council. Despite the U.S. move, fortunately, the General Assembly approved the new Council in a 170 to 4 vote, and this approval marks a step in the right direction for the U.N., whose former Human Rights Commission had been discredited by its questionable membership of such nations as Cuba and Iran. The U.S. justified its vote by heralding its own high standards for human rights, while lambasting the current resolution for its lenient admission procedures. John R. Bolton, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., sharply criticized the newly established Human Rights Council, calling it only...