Lobbying is where an interested group tries to influence the vote of an elected official through legal means, which can include such things as an appeal to principle, or overall economic good, or popular opinion, or simply political reality. For example, a lobbyist might broker a deal between two politicians to get them to vote for legislation which benefits each others' constituency, and which also benefits whoever hired the lobbyist.
As long as it's all legal, there is nothing criminal about lobbying. In many cases, of course, the actual transaction might be legally grey, but that's what makes politics such good television.
Lobbying crosses the line into bribery when the lobbyist makes an actual pay-to-play offer, in the form of cash or any other item of value. For example, there are numerous rules that limit the kinds of gifts an elected official may receive, and how those gifts may be used, transferred, or sold.
"Influence peddling" is illegal activity in the opposite direction, where a public official in some position of power contacts a special-interest group and offers to exchange votes or services for some kind of personal compensation. Again, if the offer would be of benefit to the public, it might not be illegal, but rather politics as usual.
The public official must make the offer for personal gain for it to be considered "influence peddling". This can be as simple as offering to fix a parking violation in exchange for concert tickets, or approving a zoning permit in exchange for a loan at a favorable interest rate.
This kind of thing is also called "graft", "payola", or the catch-all term "corruption".
They're right. If you want to specify that an event is to take place at a specific time, using the preposition from would be wrong. Your example containing from does sound strange and, what's more, unnatural. No one would ever say something like that. With time, the preposition that we tend to use most often would be at. For example:
We will meet at 2 o'clock at the hot dog stand. So, I'll see you there.
You would use the construction from ... to ... (notice that it's two prepositions, not one) to specify the duration of an event (how long it lasts, in other words):
The meeting lasted one hour, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM.
Best Answer
They are almost the same but on the fringes only makes sense used figuratively. While on the fringe makes sense both literally and figuratively.
From your example, one could physically be on the fringe of a crowd, or they could be socially on the fringe of a crowd (just barely a part of that group of people). But to say one was on the fringes of a crowd could only mean the latter.