Word: referendum
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...late 1930s as a grandiose portal to his thousand-year Reich. The city's plan to close Tempelhof to air traffic later this year and turn it into a public park has run into unexpected turbulence from a coalition of leading businessmen, conservative politicians and urban nostalgists. In a referendum scheduled for April 27, Berliners will get a chance to weigh in on the fate of a landmark that has become, as Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said, "a symbol of the city's history...
...announcer on Burmese state television only had two sentences to offer, but they were supposed to herald good news. On May 10th, he declared, Burma would hold a constitutional referendum, giving citizens a rare chance to participate in the political process. In the wake of global condemnation of crushed protests last year, Burma's secretive junta had apparently committed itself to a modicum of reform. Among the first steps would be a plebiscite on the army-drafted charter. (The previous constitution was torn up by the junta 18 years ago, and the country has operated without a basic law since...
...country's main opposition party, the National League for Democracy, has called for Burmese voters to reject the draft. But given that Burma's generals (who prefer to call their country Myanmar) rejected a plea by the United Nations to allow international monitoring of the referendum, no outside observer will be able to indicate whether voting irregularities take place. Furthermore, a February law has made criticizing the referendum a crime punishable by imprisonment - hardly an ideal environment for open debate on the charter draft. Amnesty International estimates 700 political prisoners still crowd the country's jails as a result...
...Burmese illegal immigrants who were hoping to find work as day laborers. At least 54 of the passengers had suffocated to death. Even though the incident highlights the dangers of illegal immigration, plenty more Burmese will likely flood over the border. And there's little chance that a constitutional referendum is going to stem that tide...
...some period of transition toward a full-blown United States of Europe, if only because the great majority of Europeans neither want it nor would feel any sense of allegiance to it. This is as true of France as of Britain. I was living in France during the 2005 referendum campaign, and it was clear that the treaty was rejected largely because the French were fed up with change after change being imposed on them in the name of Europe. What they wanted was stability: to know where they stood, and to remain first and foremost French...