Word: lightful
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...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 a growing concern over the criminal enterprises that have moved...
...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...
...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...
...exception that looked like it might break this Democratic cohesiveness was a midsummer debate over the abortion plank in the party platform - always a particularly touchy issue but even more so in light of the continuing anger of so many female Clinton supporters over the primary campaign. After more than a decade of getting walloped by Republicans over votes against the so-called partial-birth abortion ban and now the Born Alive Act (which says that if a fetus survives an attempted abortion medical care must be used to save it), some Democrats have been exploring a new political...