Word: amsterdams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Until now, that is. In a break with Amsterdam's "anything goes" attitude, Cohen and city officials have vowed to finally crack down on what they say are extensive criminal networks operating in the neighborhood. Their campaign won't bring an end to prostitution, which has been legal in the Netherlands since 2000; nor will they systematically uproot the red-light district's scores of coffeehouses, where the sale of marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms has long been allowed. But the easy tolerance of sex and drugs that has so long characterized Amsterdam is fading fast. In its place comes...
...Maurits Van Brunschot, the breaking point came nearly 21 years after he first settled amid the cobblestone alleyways of De Wallen, Amsterdam's red-light district. Van Brunschot began taking his infant daughter to day care. The neighborhood's public nursery was squeezed between two brothels, where nearly naked women in the windows beckon adult passersby. "Can you imagine this is what she sees every day?" says Van Brunschot, a food-company executive...
That question is perhaps too rarely posed by the millions of people who visit Amsterdam each year. For them, the city's liberal laws and attitudes offer a stark contrast to the heavy policing of sex and drugs elsewhere in Europe and in the U.S., and make this tiny neighborhood one of Amsterdam's most intriguing attractions. "Often people go to the museums and then to the red-light district," says the city's mayor, Job Cohen, sitting in his office with a sweeping view of the Ij River. "It is part of the image of tolerant Amsterdam...
...conflict with Georgia is undeniably "having an impact," agrees Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who represents Russia's most famous economic victim: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once headed the Yukos oil company. In 2003, Khodorkovsky was hounded out of business and he now languishes in a Siberian jail. "People who were among the most bullish on Russia are now ready to be the most aggressive in demonizing it," says Amsterdam...
...Lawyer Amsterdam believes the fighting in South Ossetia is filled with important messages for the West. Among them: Putin's central role, even after ceding the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, and Russia's apparent attempt to bomb an oil pipeline to the West, one of several new alternatives to the Russian-controlled network. It was a warning shot, he and others argue, against those who would try to challenge Russia's dominance of oil and gas supplies to Europe...