Word: amsterdams
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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...
Beginning last year, the city has intensified its pursuit of financial investigations into the neighborhood's sex and drug businesses. The officials' best tool is an anti-money-laundering law that obliges all business owners in Amsterdam's red-light district to disclose their financial records when they apply for permits and licenses; anyone suspected of criminal activity can have their application suspended or refused, whether or not the charges have been proved. The strategy has sent a chill through De Wallen, where long-time building owners - some nearing retirement age - have little stomach for long legal wrangles...
...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...