Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Input: Consider Input: Last minute Christmas shopping: Five things to avoid. This weekend millions of Americans will take to the mall to get last-minute gifts for their loved ones . They will pour through the already-picked-over selections to try and find "the gift." For those of you who are forced into the mall this weekend : I'm sorry . Here are five things to avoid as we enter the final shopping days before Christmas . 1 \. Believe the best bargains are found if you wait until the last minute . While it's true , retailers are starting their after-Christmas sales earlier than ever - just as the Christmas shopping season starts before you get to Thanksgiving dessert - seasoned shoppers know(1) value and(2) bargain do not mean the same thing . We all know just because something is cheap doesn't mean it's "a bargain" or a "value." It's only a bargain if it is truly something you want or need, and are able to get it at a deep discount . Often last minute shoppers don't know what they want . For those shopping this weekend you will have to settle for what circumstances present , which in many cases will be cheap materials, but not a bargains . The value is the ratio of quality (or quantity) to price . Low quality at a low price is no value , especially when compared to high quality at a low price . Values tend go early in the holiday shopping season . Cheap stays on the shelf until it's all that's left . 2 . Believe there is still money to spend in your budget this month . Last minute shopping, particularly for December, means buying during the back half of the month . That's typically when most income for the month is already committed , and any incremental spending means "borrowing against the future." It's better to buy early - and spread the purchasing over time - so you can more easily absorb the expense . Nobody likes that "January surprise." And for new last- minute shoppers, that surprise can be surprisingly BIG! 3 . Believe you can still find "just the right gift for Uncle George." Waiting until the last minute to shop means having to make compromises . Time and selection are your two greatest "friends" when you shop early . But for last minute shoppers they become your two greatest nightmares : you're pressed for time and all the best colors, sizes and values, are gone . Don't put yourself under a lot of pressure to find that perfect gift . At this stage in the game, a gift will do . 4 . Believe you still need "just one more" gift . We should all take a lesson out of Santa's playbook: 1. Make a list. 2. Check it twice . Too often last minute shopping isn't just an indication you've waited to the bitter end to buy those needed gifts . It also means you've waited too long to plan that shopping . And when that happens you're never quite sure if you have all the gifts you need (it seems keeping track of what you've bought is just as hard as planning what to buy in advance!) . So you keep buying just one more gift... just to make sure you've covered all your bases . By the way, that's when shoppers are especially susceptible to impulse buying . An attention-arresting display will attract last minute shoppers like honey attracts flies! 5 . Believe that the shopper has the advantage . While it is true that the Saturday before Christmas is still one of the busiest shopping days of the year , the advantage has swung back in favor of the retailer . With fewer hours to shop until Santa fills his sack, the retailer has the upper hand , especially if they've had a strong Q4 . For some, shopping the weekend before Christmas can bring the ultimate sense of that holiday experience . For those who enjoy shopping as a pastime, it's one of the best times to be in the mall , but for those folks who need to fulfill a shopping list, it can be one of the worst . The early bird still does get the worm . And the late bird gets ... the opportunity to pick over the dregs with a lot of other "late birds." With the brief time remaining before Christmas, use it to "shop for fun" not for necessity . It will truly help keep you in the Christmas spirit .

Output: Here are five things to avoid as we enter the final shopping days before Christmas This weekend millions of Americans will take to the mall to get last-minute gifts for their loved ones


Input: Consider Input: Cameron would rather look 'frit' than face a bashing from Farage. Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage have each written to David Cameron saying they are willing to have TV election debates even if he doesn't take part . Cameron's people insist he won't come on unless the Greens are there too . Listen carefully and there is a faint creaking noise, the sound of a politician trying to wind back the great clock of politics . In Cameron's case, he wants it back to the happy days before Gordon Brown conceded the prime ministerial veto on TV debates . It might just work . Rule one in any prime minister's handbook is never give up an advantage . In an election, that's what being prime minister is - an advantage . That's why it took 12 general elections between most voters having access to a television in 1964 and the first (and last?) television debate in 2010 . Yet debates are as old as politics itself , and putting them on TV has had that "well, obviously" feel to it ever since the first US presidential debate in 1960 . It must have helped perpetuate the brand, that first contest , for it was between the two men whose lives and deaths shadowed the rest of the American century: the beautiful young upstart John F Kennedy and the so much less telegenic, even rather sweaty, Richard Nixon . Cameron's people have been trying to back out of TV debates in 2015 almost since the lights went down on the last debate of the last election campaign . It has been a carefully played, inch-by-inch retreat covered by protestations of enthusiasm, framed in the context of a wider concern for the state of democracy . Last August he ruminated on the way they sucked the oxygen out of the last campaign (and poured a good deal of it into the Lib Dems' camp) . Now he says he is standing up for the right of the Greens, excluded for- according to Ofcom - not being big enough . Questioning the value of the debates is easy . The doyen of electoral coverage, David Dimbleby, who chaired the BBC session, said later that he thought they didn't let in as much light as when politicians were made to face the voters on their own in the kind of Question Time event that, as it happens, he also chairs . There' s no doubt that accidental encounters with ordinary people- Brown's "bigoted woman", or Margaret Thatcher being confronted over the sinking of the Belgrano - have earned a place in history as moments of truth that have told a bigger story . There is something rather odd about the"one of these people will be prime minister" hype before a debate that has been widened to include Farage . But , of course, the debates aren't about debating in the traditional sense of the word , even when they are between two very different versions of the future , as they were in Scotland . What really mattered in those brutal encounters between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling was the extraordinary depth of Darling's antipathy to Salmond and, for a while, the unexpected haplessness of Salmond under pressure . That first debate will always be remembered as the moment the rabbit bit the car . All the same, Cameron's opponents cannot take victory for granted . They accuse him of running scared . The Twittersphere throbs with shouts of "frit" . It is a charge that might have a price for the Tory leader . It will certainly disconcert his less politically savvy supporters . But mainly it will just confirm the prejudices of those who were never going to vote Conservative anyway . What it does prove, if proof were needed, is that the Tories are running a core vote strategy . If the broadcasters find the nerve to go ahead anyway, which is a punt in itself , an empty podium would not look good . But try to imagine the view from the perspective of a Tory strategist : the bill for looking frit is tiny compared with the enduring burden of being savaged by Farage . For Cameron, the strategist would reckon, it would be like being assessed for a job by someone who had watched you in conversation with the pub bore . Putting the two together is on a par with divorce proceedings where the party who has walked out stands and shouts a string of excuses unconnected with the facts in a way that is somehow illogically appealing . Just say you've gone off him! And ,  of course, that's why it must be made to happen . Let's hear Cameron talking to both wings of his party at once . And just as importantly, please, please let's have the Greens in the room too . It really would be an outrage not to .

Output: Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage have each written to David Cameron saying they are willing to have TV election debates Cameron's people insist he won't come on


Input: Consider Input: Punishment, not apology after CIA torture report. What a dark day for the United States . Five years and nine months after Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kit Bond, the chair and vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, announced a review of the CIA's detention and interrogation programme in the so-called "war on terror", the 500-page executive summary of that report has been made publicly available . Its conclusions are shocking . As Feinstein explained in an interview with the Los Angeles Times at the weekend,"We have to get this report out. Anybody who reads this is going to never let this happen again." Let us hope so - and let us also hope that senior officials in the Bush administration, as well as senior CIA personnel, will eventually be held accountable for their actions . The CIA's torture programme, initiated almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, remained a closely guarded secret for many years . An early revelation was a June 2004 leak of a memo which purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA . The memo was written by John Yoo, a lawyer in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) , who was close to Dick Cheney . The CIA's "black sites" in Europe were not publicly exposed until November 2005 . The Bush administration still refused to openly acknowledge the programme until September 2006 , when then President George W Bush announced that, with the arrival of 14 "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo from various "black sites", the programme he had denied the existence of until that time had now closed down . That statement, we subsequently learned, was not entirely true , as a few other prisoners arrived at Guantanamo from CIA custody in 2007 and 2008 , but the torture report provides conclusive proof . "By March 2006," the report states,"the programme was operating in only one country. The CIA last used its enhanced interrogation techniques on November 8, 2007. The CIA did not hold any detainees after April 2008." After the arrival of the "high-value detainees" at Guantanamo, numerous attempts were made to pierce the veil of secrecy that surrounded the programme . In 2007, Swiss Senator Dick Marty published an influential report for the Council of Europe about secret prisons and rendition in Europe . In February 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden admitted that three "high-value detainees" had been subjected to waterboarding . In December 2008, the Senate Armed Services Committee published a powerful report about how the policies for dealing with prisoners in the "war on terror" had developed - including detailed analysis of how the US military's SERE programme (intended to train US personnel to resist torture if captured by a hostile enemy) had been reverse-engineered for the "war on terror" . In April 2009, harrowing interviews with the 14 "high-value detainees", conducted by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, were leaked , and in August 2009 an internal CIA report from 2004 into the agency's detention and interrogation policies after 9/11 was released containing details of how one prisoner, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (one of the three men waterboarded, along with Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Muhammad), was physically abused and threatened with a gun and power drill while hooded at a "black site" in Thailand . In 2010 I wrote a detailed analysis of the secret detention programme for a UN study , in which I sought to ascertain the identities of the 94 "ghost prisoners" in CIA custody - including 28 subjected to "enhanced interrogation"  - who were referred to in a memo from 2005 by OLC lawyer Steven G Bradbury that was released by the Obama administration in April 2009 . Another major report, by the Constitution Project, was published in 2013 . And yet , although some of the gruesome facts about the torture programme were known , the Senate Intelligence Committee's report provides far more . In its "Findings and Conclusions", for example, the report states :. There are many more examples . The report states :. In addition , "sleep deprivation involved keeping detainees awake for up to 180 hours" , and although some "experienced disturbing hallucinations", in at least two cases the CIA continued its abuse . These examples - and many more in the summary - demonstrate clearly the committee's conclusion that the interrogations "were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others" . Perhaps more importantly, however, the committee also concludes that torture was "not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees", that the CIA made "inaccurate claims" about the "effectiveness" of the programme in an attempt to justify it and that it led to friction with other agencies that endangered national security, as well as providing false statements that led to costly and worthless wild goose chases . The report also concludes that non-approved techniques were used widely , and that "[a]t least 17 detainees were subjected to CIA enhanced interrogation techniques without authorisation from CIA headquarters", and that "multiple detainees were subjected to techniques that were applied in ways that diverged from the specific authorisation, or were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques by interrogators who had not been authorised to use them" . The committee was also critical of the central role played by two contract psychologists from the SERE programme , even though neither of them "had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialised knowledge of al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise" . The committee also concluded that Steven Bradbury's numbers were wrong, and that the CIA "detained at least 119 individuals, of whom at least 39 were subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques" . Moreover ,  of these 119 "at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard" in the still-secret Bush administration memorandum establishing the programme in September 2001 . In the days and weeks to come, there will be concerted efforts by the CIA and by former Bush administration officials to defend their actions , but the report makes clear that any kind of defence is untenable . Crimes were committed, authorised at the highest level of the US government , and , although Obama came into office in 2009 expressing "a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" , that is not acceptable . The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report - all 6,700 pages of it, costing $40m and involving an analysis of more than six million pages of classified documents - must be the trigger not just for an airing of apologies, but for those who instigated and authorised the torture programme to be held accountable - up to and including President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney .


Output: The Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report - all 6,700 pages of it, costing $40m and involving an analysis of more than six million pages of classified documents - must be the trigger not just for an airing of apologies, but for those who instigated and authorised the torture programme to be held accountable - up to and including President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney