The International Herald Tribune

News analysis interprets information that is usually conveyed in hard news articles. These articles contain some data: statistics, experts’ opinions, they give more details about the event, background information.

§ If you quote a source putting forward one opinion, there must be an opposing view put forward by another source.

§ inverted pyramid style: most important facts at the top, least important at the bottom

The following example shows the succession of information in news analysis. Inside the pyramid the information stream can have various forms, but the most efficient is the following:

Paragraph length: one or two sentences in the initial summary paragraphs (1 & 2); later paragraphs can be three of four sentences

Some top police officers are now backing the idea that hard drugs should be decriminalised. Is this a brave but foolhardy idea, asks Tim Luckhurst

Since large-scale heroin trafficking began in the late 1980s, the impact has been devastating. One study puts the costs of drug addiction at more than £2 billion per year. The toll in human misery includes countless acts of street prostitution and children who witness food money injected into mummy’s veins.

Drug enforcement rarely catches the men police call "Mr. Big." The criminal bosses are rarely caught. A senior member of a Scottish police drug squad once described to me "our typical Big Man". He lives in an expensive home in one of the affluent* suburbs of a Scottish city. There are matching "his and hers" Mercedes cars on the drive. His children attend private schools and shop in designer stores where they pay in cash.

Street dealers get caught. But they say little about their source of supply. Mr. Big has friends on both sides of the prison wall. He can afford to regard his couriers and dealers as dispensable assets. There are thousands more begging to be recruited.

Faced with this knowledge, some frontline officers* attending last week’s national conference of the Scottish Police Federation demanded the legalisation of hard drugs. They proposed a licensing scheme that would make drugs available to addicts under controlled circumstances. Inspector Jim Duffy of Strathclyde Police said: "We are not winning this war or anywhere close to it. The status quo is not an option. If the current rules of engagement do not change we are destined to continue to fail."

Until recently the legalisation of hard drugs was associated almost exclusively with radical libertarianism. It is a measure of just how deep-seated Scotland’s drug problem has become that it is now being heard from police officers.

The logic is superficially compelling. Supporters argue that criminalising addictive substances has had the same effect as America’s experiment with prohibition of alcohol. Instead of limiting consumption it has delivered the trade into the hands of criminals. They become rich by meeting a demand that can never be entirely eradicated and which is in their interests to expand. Legalisation, say supporters, would get rid of the gangs and ensure the purity of drugs.

Converts to the cause tend to become evangelical, often moving on to assert that it would eradicate criminality all the way back to the opium fields and coca plantations.

The criminal gangs could choose to undercut the state price. Or they could respond by selling more potent versions of the drugs addicts crave. History suggests gangs tend to diversify. People-smuggling is already taking a grim toll among young women from eastern Europe. Legalising drugs would put rocket boosters under that repulsive trade in slave prostitutes.

Legalisation is not the catch-all solution proponents imagine, but there remains a possibility that it might dent the drugs trade more than endless efforts to catch other Mr Bigs who run operations more sophisticated than Gorman’s. It is a debate worth having, although proponents of legalisation might perhaps care to note that Dutch politicians who pioneered some of the most liberal drugs laws in Europe are now seeking to tighten them after discovering that liberalisation was leading to increased drug usage.

* frontline officers – офицеры полиции, работающие на территории своих участков.

WASHINGTON: In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: Despite the Democrats' victory last month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff are concluding that an American pullout would open the way to all-out civil war. The bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose report will land on the president's desk next week, has shied away from explicit timelines in favor of a vaguely defined pullback, advocating a "phased redeployment" that would, at a minimum, leave a force of 70,000 or more troops in the country for a long time to train Iraqis and to insure against total collapse of the Iraqi forces.

Even the Democrats, with an eye toward 2008, have dropped talk of a race for the exits, in favor of a brisk stroll.

But that may be the only solace facing President George W. Bush as he returns from a messy encounter with Iraq's prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

In the three weeks since the election, the debate in Washington and much of the country appears to have turned away from Bush's insistence that the only option is to stay and fight and toward a last-ditch effort to take one more shot at training the Iraqis, while laying the ground for a gradual withdrawal.

So far, Bush seems uninterested. Standing next to Maliki on Thursday in Amman, he declared that Iraqis need not fear that he was looking for "some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq."

But a graceful exit – or even an awkward one – appears to be exactly what the commission headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton tried to design in the compromise reached by Republicans and Democrats on the Iraq Study Group.

The question now is whether Bush will be persuaded and whether he might now be willing to define victory less expansively.

"What the Baker group appears to have done is try to change the direction of the political momentum on Iraq," Stephen Cohen, a scholar at the Israel Policy Forum, said Thursday. "They have made clear that there isn't a scenario for a democratic Iraq, at least for a very long time. They have called into question the logic of a lengthy American presence. And once you've done that, what is the case for Americans' dying in order to have this end slowly?"

In the days just after the Republican defeat on Nov. 7, Bush suggested that he was open to new ideas about Iraq. But more recently, the president has, if anything seemed to harden his position.

In Hanoi nearly two weeks ago, he suggested that the Baker-Hamilton report would be but one voice among many. In Riga, Latvia, two days ago he all but pounded the podium as he declared that "there's one thing I'm not going to do: I'm not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."

In private, some members of the Iraq Study Group have expressed concern that next week they will appear in open confrontation with Bush. "He's a true believer," one participant in the group's debates said. "Finessing the differences is not going to be easy."

ЧТО ПРОИСХОДИТ, КОГДА МЫ ССОРИМСЯ Не понимая различий, существующих между мужчинами и женщинами, очень легко довести дело до ссоры...

ЧТО ПРОИСХОДИТ ВО ВЗРОСЛОЙ ЖИЗНИ? Если вы все еще «неправильно» связаны с матерью, вы избегаете отделения и независимого взрослого существования...

ЧТО И КАК ПИСАЛИ О МОДЕ В ЖУРНАЛАХ НАЧАЛА XX ВЕКА Первый номер журнала «Аполлон» за 1909 г. начинался, по сути, с программного заявления редакции журнала...

Система охраняемых территорий в США Изучение особо охраняемых природных территорий(ООПТ) США представляет особый интерес по многим причинам...

Не нашли то, что искали? Воспользуйтесь поиском гугл на сайте: