Word: communed
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There is something different in the air at Christiania these days - the usual spicy aroma of marijuana smoke now occasionally mixes with the smell of tear gas and burning tires. That's because, more than three decades after Europe's oldest and largest commune was established as an antidote to "selfish society," Danish authorities are moving to close it down. More than 90 people were arrested a few weeks ago after groups of youths fought running battles with police, throwing bottles and cobblestones and burning homemade barricades. The riot, a rare occurrence in this normally placid Scandinavian country, was prompted...
...Since 1971 the commune's 800 residents, inspired by the ideals of peace and free love, have maintained a free-wheeling idyll in this former navy base - an overgrown woodland spotted with lakes and pretty redbrick and wood houses that provides a retreat for artists, musicians and free-thinkers of all stripes in a self-declared "free state" that flies its own flag and does not pay market property tax rates...
...Traditionally, the commune's friction with local police has been over drug policy. Pusher Street, Christiania's ramshackle main thoroughfare, allowed cannabis dealers to display their wares in glass-topped cabinets, graded according to strength - until a police incursion in 2003. Still, the authorities claim, some $200,000 of marijuana is still bought and sold every day in Christiania, and critics charge that the commune long ago sold out its ideals...
Before the Web, PWs say they had little chance to connect and commune. "There weren't networks," says Becky Hunter, 55, wife of the well-known pastor Joel Hunter of Orlando-based Northland, a Church Distributed. "There were denominational groups and retreat-type things." The Web, she says, offers more immediate and constant support. Hunter is president of the GPWN, spun off from the Global Pastors Network five years ago. "When we started researching other resources, we found there was just remarkably little available for the wife of the pastor. Our issues were so similar yet so private"--issues that...
...other actresses roamed the Golden Globe Awards dressed in wisps of lemon yellow and cerulean blue and glistening with diamonds, Angelina Jolie showed up wearing a solemn sheath the color of a Mao jacket, as if perhaps she had missed a turn on her way to a very chic commune. While her look indeed turned heads, conspicuous for its anti-glamour, in a way it made more sense than the alternative. After all, with her philanthropy and travels through Africa and emphasis on family values, motherhood and global awareness, wouldn't it have been a glaring clash to be flashy...