Word: strasbourg
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Europe's increasingly muscular brand of secularism has an unofficial capital: Strasbourg, France. Over the past decade, the quaint city of 273,000 near the German border - home to the European Parliament and other key international bodies - has been the site of a series of repeated slap-downs to those who are fighting to hold on to the Old Continent's fading religious impulses...
...latest religious vestige to be targeted is the crucifix that still hangs on the walls of many Italian public schools, a fixture the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights has now ruled is a violation of religious and education freedom. The Italian government announced it would appeal the Nov. 3 decision that would force Italy to pay a €5,000 ($7,400) fine to a mother in northern Italy who fought for eight years to have the crucifixes removed from her children's classrooms. Though the European court's decision does not call for the immediate removal...
...even to the religiously inclined - where separation of church and state is drawn with clear lines. But while faith is fading in Italy as it is across Europe, the crucifix is widely accepted by Italians as a cultural as well as religious symbol. The decision in Strasbourg was swiftly condemned by most of Italy's political establishment, from the divorced and famously loose-living Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to the center-left leader and onetime Communist Party member Pier Luigi Bersani, who called the ruling an example of "good sense as victim of legalities...
...Largely as a result of the cartoon controversy, Turkey opposed his selection as NATO Secretary-General, claiming he would impede support for the alliance from Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Turkey relented after President Obama personally intervened during April's NATO summit in Strasbourg, holding a private meeting with Rasmussen and Turkish President Abdullah...
...point of noting, stop after stop, that America's fate is tied to that of developing nations. He also says repeatedly that despite America's commitment to open societies with democratic governance, the U.S. will not seek to impose its views or form of governance on other countries. In Strasbourg, France, in April, Obama described this view, asserting that it takes nothing away from America's extraordinary position in the world to say that the U.S. will not always lead. "The fact that I am very proud of my country - and I think that we've got a whole...