Word: parliament
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...anniversary that passed without fanfares or triumphalism. May 23 marked the 30th birthday of the Federal Republic of Germany as a democratic country. Six days earlier, the 518 members of the lower house of parliament had assembled inside Bonn's Bundeshaus ?a white, flat-topped, modern building with none of the grandeur of other, older European parliaments. Under a 30-ft. backdrop of the national insignia, a black eagle with spreading wings, Chancellor Helmut Schmidt took the podium. Sturdy-looking as a Hamburg dock, chin set squarely as a chopping block, he methodically reviewed the state of his nation...
...however, parliament passed a controversial "job ban" aimed at barring extremists and members of the minuscule Communist Party from all public jobs by means of a system of excessive "loyalty" checks. The law has since been modified and now exempts individuals who may have belonged to extremist organizations in the past but are no longer members. Abroad, the residual "Ugly German" image has not been dissipated by the 26 million West German tourists who annually seek the sun (vacations for industrial workers average 4½ weeks a year); as travelers, Germans often come on strong, flaunting their deutsche marks...
...rift between French and English Canada, between its industrialized center and its resource-rich west, was all too evident as the votes rolled in last week for the 282 seats in the newly enlarged Parliament (up from 264). Canada's 14.9 million voters divided along linguistic lines; French-speaking voters overwhelmingly supported Trudeau's Liberals, while most of the 60.2% of the population that claims English as its first or only language backed Clark's Conservatives. The result was a Tory plurality in Parliament: 136 seats for the Conservatives, 114 for the Liberals, 26 for the mildly...
Sultan Qaboos believes absolute rule is a thing of the past and that a modern king must give his people a voice in their own future. "Firepower, color television, air conditioning can't satisfy people wanting their own parliament," he says. "That's the message of the 20th century. Kings and shahs, sultans and emirs, must all bow to it. And dictators...
...voters favored much tighter controls on nuclear construction. No new plant can be built until planners submit proof that 1) it is definitely needed, and 2) the waste-disposal problem is solved. The measure also shifts nuclear regulatory authority from the energy ministry to the Swiss parliament, where interminable delays are expected...