Sure, it’s the cheap, easy, cynical view to adopt that the bail-out/splintering of the French/Belgian/Luxembourgish bank Dexia, worked out over the weekend, is just going to be the first of many such episodes. Then again, it’s also the de rigueur statement for any finance minister involved to make under such circumstances – “No, I don’t think so, certainly not French banks” – such as that which French finance minister François Baroin uttered when asked by reporters if there would be any others.

Of course there will be others. For heaven’s sake, there were already two others (i.e. European bank nationalizations) happening even as Dexia hogged the headlines the past few days. (Details here, in English: namely a Greek bank – surprise! – that was nationalized after getting in trouble over money-laundering, and a Danish bank that made foolish real estate loans.) And now we have further explicit confirmation of this from Kleis Jager at the Dutch newspaper Trouw: French prepare in secret for more misery.

Topped by an unfortunate photo of current (unelected) Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme and France’s PM François Fillon with sly, conspiratorial smiles on their faces, Jager’s piece tells of how, even before Dexia, the French government realized that it needed to get ready to save at least “two or three” big banks – preferably by forcing them to sell themselves to outsiders with big money.

(Just as Luxembourg did with its part of Dexia, selling it to the Qataris, for example. You’ve got to admire the Luxemburgers, though – on the very Sunday (9 October) that Dexia was collapsing, finance ministers were feverishly meeting, and Qataris were presumably being wined-and-dined, they were also holding their national elections!)

Wait, you want names? No problem: according to Trouw, the French had in mind specifically BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole as the banks where they would need to intervene. No Dexia on that list! But all of these have done good business through the years – “good” so far – providing loaned money to not only Greece, but also Spain and Italy.

To be fair, this is not Jager’s scoop, but rather one he credits to the French paper Journal du Dimanche. BNP Paribas and Société Générale immediately issued denials once the latter had published its report. But I refer you again to Finance Minister François Baroin’s comments cited above.

This is something that one is rather surprised has not received more notice – other than a mention in The Times (behind paywall), and of course my tweet a little while ago, inspired by a piece in the Polish paper Rzeczpospolita. Sarah Palin, rejoice! Not only can you see Russia from Alaska, in a few years’ time you’ll also be able to ship stuff there directly, as there’s going to be a 100km-long railroad tunnel built across/under the Bering Strait. This is from a recent piece in the Dutch paper De Volkskrant.

That’s the result of a conference that took place last week in Yakutsk, the middle-of-nowhere capital of the biggest chunk of Siberia, one that was attended by representatives of the US and Russian governments, but also the Chinese and the British. The total cost is calculated at €68 billion, of which the US and Russian governments will each cover 25% and investors and international financial institutions the rest. It will take between 10 and 15 years to build.

This is in line with the Russian plans to substantially broaden railroad coverage within Siberia, with a view towards further developing that region’s economic potential (and perhaps thus not leave it so devoid of people, and so such a temptation to Chinese encroachment). This mega-project will also (eventually) enable someone to travel from, say, London to Washington exclusively overland, by train – taking the long way eastward through much of the EurAsian continent!

Another chance here to hit on the theme of the Netherlands leading the way to the Moral Apocalypse.

Saturday was quite a day for carousing, probably the year’s peak, at least for Amsterdam, for while the yearly Gay Pride Canal Parade which I treated in my previous post was proceeding, something called Dance Valley was going on as well – also yearly, consisting of tens of thousands congregating in an area of farmland called Spaarnewoude, just west of Amsterdam, to spend the day gyrating to electronic music coming out of huge speakers.

“Nothing really wrong with that,” you might say – and some of you might even add “. . . especially if that diverted some impressionable youth from otherwise spending their Saturday watching the homosexuals do their thing on Amsterdam’s canals!” True enough, were it not for one particular “impressionable youth” so diverted: our very own Prime Minister, Mark Rutte! The Algemeen Dagblad has the story: Mark Rutte dances along at Dance Valley, complete with pictures and even a brief video of the PM swaying along with the crowd. (I would embed it here, but it’s not all that interesting.) He’s the dude with the shades and the open-necked white shirt, who apparently likes to pose with chicks (with shades). Well, he is only 44, but he heads the VVD, the right-wing businessman’s party, so you’d think he would at least wear a tie!

For the sake of any of you who might gain satisfaction anew from the fact, let me repeat here my observation from that earlier post that the Canal Parade (and therefore Dance Valley, only about 15km to the west) had to deal with repeated interruptions of heavy rains and thunder/lightning. Also, from the AD article, Rutte has attended Dance Valley before, as recently as 2008, when he lost his telephone and so had his friends treated to rude SMS messages from same. But he wasn’t Netherlands head-of-government then.

Today is once again the climax of the Amsterdam Gay Pride festival, namely the infamous Canal Parade. And now it has a dedicated YouTube channel, so anyone from elsewhere who was not already aware can gauge the depths to which our Western Civilization has fallen. Or maybe it’s just a bunch of people having some flamboyant fun:

Yes, those guys there in uniform on one of the floats towards the end waving to the crowds were police officers – you noticed them?

Keep in mind, though, that this short clip was the teaser – so to speak – for the live broadcast of this year’s/today’s Canal Parade planned by the Dutch media organization AVRO, i.e. it shows a parade from some past year. For this year, some of you out there might be pleased to hear that festivities have been repeatedly interrupted by heavy downpours, accompanied occasionally by thunder and lightning! Make of that what you will.

Prague takes its turn at this sort of thing next weekend – meaning a Gay Pride festival, and actually for the very first time. Should be interesting! I mean, how will society there react to events like this? No canals there though – just a river, and it’s too wide for any such aquatic parade.

De ongemakkelijke kussen van Merkel en Sarkozy http://bit.ly/oL54CI #merkozy

July 22, 2011 9:34 am via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

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De Volkskrant

One little-known roadblock to the EU’s ability to come up with a collective solutions to Greece and any number of other problems is the sheer antipathy said to prevail between the heads of the two most-powerful member-states, i.e. Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. Indeed, the dominating primacy of this “Franco-German axis” long ago reached cliché status among analysts of the European Union (though it’s no longer quite so true, naturally), meaning that the personal chemistry between the inhabitants of L’Élysée and the Reich Chancellery assumed a outsized importance to the two nations’ fortunes.

Unfortunately so, because Merkel and Sarkozy have apparently not been on speaking terms – at the personal level; their offices communicate just fine, thank you – for quite some time. Or maybe you don’t believe me and would like to see for yourself – well, the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant now enables you to do that by presenting this fantastically-awesome photo-series compilation of thirty-six (yes! count ‘em!) kisses, embraces and similar close encounters – all fully-clothed: s’il vous plaît, je vous en prie! – between the two, entitled “The uneasy kisses of Merkel and Sarkozy” (and soon to be a major motion picture!). (more…)

“U-S-A! U-S-A!” Europeans woke up to the news, while cheering Americans put off bedtime for a while to go congregate and rejoice. The killing of Osama Bin Laden dominates world news today, while analyses of the consequences and of Bin Laden’s extraordinary life are likely to occupy much print and many pixels in the days to come.

Naturally, such pieces are already forthcoming. One of the best I’ve seen so far comes from an expected source, Prof. Juan Cole’s blog Informed Comment, although it does veer at the end to the realm of personal reminiscences. (The September 11, 2001 attacks were after all the inspiration for setting up that blog, as they were for so many other things e.g. US Army/Marines enlistments.)

Plus, as always Prof. Cole’s treatment is in English, which is not really within the remit of the blog you’re reading now. Let’s turn to Der Spiegel instead:

Osama Bin Laden: Der Terrorfürst… http://tinyurl.com/635z5g5

May 2, 2011 5:19 am via SPIEGEL ONLINEReplyRetweetFavorite

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SPIEGEL Politik

That link leads to an article entitled The Prince of Terror, by Yassin Musharbash. (Despite the name, a born-and-bred German journalist.) The photo-series you’ll find starting at the article’s head – basically a series of Osama TV-stills – is nothing to write home about, but what Musharbash writes about his historical background is quite interesting. For the world’s premier terrorist could very well have become its leading playboy instead; he was born into quite a wealthy Saudi family, which had made its money in the construction business. But no, he chose religion over worldly things, and became known over his lifetime for his qualities of patience, modest living, and friendliness – “friendliness” to a select few, at least, since he never was so enthusiastic about Westerners and his strict religious convictions kept him from shaking any female’s hand from an early age, as well from any music, photography, or television (except for the news).

Nonetheless, from a position as an outsider he soon became one of the leading heroes within the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Of course, it was from the (mostly Arab) fighting elements he assembled there for that original purpose that he would go on to build his “Al-Qaeda” network. (The name in Arabic literally means “network,” as well as a number of other things.) But Musharbash helpfully reminds us of another, later instance when the West’s and Bin Laden’s military interests coincided, namely in Bosnia during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s: A nascent Al-Qaeda then supplied fighters to defend that break-away republic from Serb depredations long before Europe or the US had made up their mind what to do themselves.

The Dutch paper De Volkskrant is also quick off the blocks with its own Profile: This is how Bin Laden became the most-wanted terrorist on Earth. No photo-series this time – but really, by now haven’t we all had to gaze on his face more times than we have really wanted? – just a Bin Laden background, with a couple new and interesting facts. Supposedly he originally started working in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there just to try to recruit for and supply the resistance, not take up arms himself, but he changed his mind one day when he happened to be attacked by some Russian helicopters. Also, although after his success there he returned to his native Saudi Arabia as a famous hero, he soon fell afoul of the authorities there by shooting his mouth off against them too often, to the point that they confiscated both his passport and much of his property. (Of course, that didn’t stop him from moving to Sudan, by way of Yemen, and thence back to Afghanistan.)

There’s just one strange thing here: the (unnamed) Volkskrant reporter writes about how, even after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Bin Laden still managed to run Al-Qaeda – in a loose way – “with his satellite and computer.” I can easily imagine Bin Laden weilding a laptop (although the power-supply could have been problematic), but not a “satellite” as the world’s authorities keep careful tabs on what’s allowed up into space. Perhaps the author meant “satellite-telephone.”

Just after Christmas (“Boxing Day”) in 2004 it was “Surf’s up!” throughout South Asia as a tremendous tsunami hit lands as widely-separated as Indonesia and Tanzania. Then only a bit less than three weeks ago another tsunami washed over most of northeast Japan, devastating many coastal habitations and setting off certain nuclear problems.

Here in the Netherlands we can only sympathize and send assistance, financial and otherwise (which I understand we’ve done to a great degree). However, something similar might very well be in store for us soon, according to today’s article in the Algemeen Dagblad with the pleasing title Tsunami wipes out Netherlands population in 2012. That at least is the message of doom being put forward by the “Watchers of the Night,” a religious group out in the provinces who are already preparing for catastrophe by making themselves economically self-sufficient, laying in substantial stores of food and water.

What is their reasoning? you may very well ask. Well, it seems to involve some combination of Revelations, Nostradamus, and that Mayan thing you might have heard of that predicted doom for the planet in 2012, and they are by no means the only ones thinking along these lines. Many of this ilk see Japan’s earthquake/tsunami together with the widespread Middle East unrest as a sure sign that the prophecies are correct and there will be even worse to come next year. Even for the Netherlands.

Nicholas Jackson of the Atlantic has a quite interesting blogpost up entitled “What’s Yours Is Mine: Using a Wireless Network You Don’t Own.” Is that theft? Or is it simply OK, no big deal?

The immediate impetus to his post is a recent ruling in the Netherlands, to the effect that that is in fact just no big deal, even if the wireless network you’re using happens to be secured, so that you have succeeded in breaking that security to use it! A controversial point-of-view, to be sure, which has also set off a mini-firestorm of discussion over on Slashdot.

Many of the legal issues here are somewhat subtle, meaning that reliance on machine-translation of the original Dutch report on the judge’s ruling is likely to be misleading. But that is where EuroSavant can step in; what follows is my own human-translated version of that piece, as a contribution to the discussion.
(more…)

Undoubtedly one of the major advances of the past decades in the field of criminal investigation has been the use of DNA samples for exact, individual perpetrator identification. The sheer scale of the difference such a tool has made from the way serious crimes were solved previously can be seen – shockingly – in the many US capital cases where these techniques have managed to prove the innocence of those already convicted and on death row. These in turn were an important factor in recently convincing Illinois governor Pat Quinn to do away with the death penalty in his state entirely.

Fine, then: DNA is good stuff. Except that it can’t work every time unless everyone has his/her DNA on file – you never can quite be sure who will turn out to be the next crazed murderer! That at least was the idea of Rotterdam police chief Frank Pauw (= “Frank the Peacock”), as reported in today’s Telegraaf. For freedom is not free, and similarly according to Frank “If you want the make the world safer, you’ve got to pay a price.”

Wait a second.

Whatever happened to privacy? To “innocent until proven guilty,” as opposed to seeing in every citizen a potential cutthroat? The crazy thing is, you would think the Dutch would be particularly sensitive on this point, as they had an excellent system of citizen records – complete with ID cards that were practically unforgeable – going into German occupation starting in 1940. The Nazis were quite pleased and grateful for the considerable assistance such a system afforded the various sociological projects they then undertook in the country, like keeping tabs on the entire population bar that segment they explicitly set out to segregate, ship away, and murder.

Have no fear, though, for Frank the Peacock’s proposal has been shot down within the same business day, as we can see in this dispatch from Joost Schellevis* at the Dutch site tweakers.net (h/t to Erwin Boogert). The official word comes from no less than the official spokesman for the Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, Wim van der Weegen: “We reject the proposal. . . . There are only few people who commit this sort of serious crimes, and the current system of [DNA] registration takes care of those.” The current system is namely that only suspects of crimes for which the punishment can be four or more years of prison have to submit DNA samples for permanent storage.

The alacrity with which Pauw’s suggestion was rejected is nice to see. On the other hand, it would also have been interesting had there been no governmental reaction, just as a sort of experiment to gauge Dutch society’s readiness to spring to the defense of its civil freedoms. In the long run, many (including this author) might consider such general DNA registration to be inevitable, probably to be instituted during the hysteria following some terrorist outrage. For now, though, you’d like to think Pauw’s proposal, left officially unchecked, would have attracted the attention of organizations like Bits of Freedom (though, admittedly, they concentrate on digital civil rights) who might even have crowned it with one of their famed annual Big Brother awards.

* No, not “Joost the Shellfish”; if you must know, it’s more like “Joost the Haddock”!

The alert came today in a brief article in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant: Pakistan has been picked as chairman of the Board of Governors of the IAEA, the Vienna-based international agency charged as the watchdog against any use of nuclear energy for military purposes, even as at the same time it is supposed to promote it for peaceful uses.

For anyone reasonably informed about recent nuclear weapons history, the name “Pakistan” does call forth many associations – but all of them related precisely to the sort of nuclear misuse that the IAEA is supposed to stop. Admittedly, the Volkskrant piece does devote a full three-quarters of its exiguous length to listing some of these doubts: Pakistan has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; Pakistan has been locked in a dangerous nuclear stand-off with arch-rival India ever since first conducting nuclear explosions in 1998; the Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was primarily responsible not only for his own country gaining a nuclear weapons capability, but also (for a price) North Korea, Libya (since dismantled) and potentially Iran.

Still, the irony of another Pakistani being chosen to chair the IAEA’s governors was better captured by the lead paragraph in this report from the AFP (and not just because it’s in English):

VIENNA, Austria — Pakistan, which refuses to sign the nuclear [sic] Non-Proliferation Treaty and was home to a notorious nuclear smuggling ring, was named head of the UN nuclear watchdog’s governing board here Monday.

The AFP also judiciously supplements the previous reasons to doubt Pakistan’s anti-nuclear credentials with the additional fact that that country’s atomic weapons stockpiles are now the focus of widespread worry that they will somehow fall into Taliban and/or Al-Qaeda hands.

Yet, strangely, the tail-end of this AFP piece describes how many at the top levels of international nuclear policy find this new situation not to be at all unusual. “They are a member” of the IAEA after all, notes one diplomat, quoted anonymously. And the US ambassador to the IAEA declares that “The United States of America looks forward very much to working with the Pakistani governor as chairman of the board of governors.” In this light, appointing a Greenlander, say, to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization would be positively a breath of fresh air; at least no Greenlander has been known to go around burning grain warehouses to the ground.

A brief mention here of an article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw that just might represent something quintessentially Dutch. It’s actually in the paper’s Groen! (“Green!”) section, which makes a lot of sense since it’s mainly a report – on the website of a major national newspaper, mind you – about the fortunes of a pair of common waterfowl, specifically two coots. Reporter Koos Dijksterhuis’ lede:

The coots had already been busy for weeks with the defense of their nest. Every presumed enemy was driven away with elan by a fierce flapping of wings. Finally the family swam around, but with seven chicks.

And so on, continuing to the depiction of an idyllic family meal. But it’s hardly all sweetness and light. There’s mention of parent coots even pecking their young to death if they find them too much trouble, but in this case things don’t come to that. Instead, Dijksterhuis notes that none of the seven chicks are to be seen after only five days, victims of one predator or another. Especially suspicious as culprits are the sea gulls (specifically, black-backed gulls), which have even been known to hunt young coot chicks in pairs: the first swoops over, prompting the chick to dive in panic, but then the second is there to snatch it when it resurfaces.

Dijksterhuis goes on to note that he sees many more such gulls than he can recall in the past. Is it because of the prey of this sort that they can find inland, or something else? Anyway, note well that this piece – labeled natuurdagboek or “nature diary,” so that it seems to be part of a series – appeared the very same day as nationalwide elections were happening here in the Netherlands. The “printing” capacity of the Internet is truly without limit.

Who knows? It’s seems more possible than it has been before – even in the Netherlands, with its softer-than-usual policy towards such things as marijuana – after an opinion piece (Save the country, allow drugs), co-written by some local political notables, appeared yesterday in the leading quality newspaper, the NRC Handelsblad. Among the article’s nine co-signatories, the ones that stand out above the rest are probably Dr. Els Borst-Eilers and Ms. Hedy d’Ancona, both former national Ministers of Health, and most definitely Prof. Frits Bolkestein, former Dutch Eurocommissioner, former Minister of Defense, and one of the most influential politicians on the national scene in the last twenty years.

Even here, such a policy suggestion is highly controversial and, in view of the high-profile names attached to it, it immediately provoked comment within the Dutch press – from within the NRC itself, of course, but also in the form of a press-agency treatment available in other newspapers, among which Trouw (Bolkestein wants to legalize all drugs). (more…)

A quick mention here of the interesting recent article from the Amsterdam weekly De Groene Amsterdammer about the evolution and impact on Danish politics of the Dansk Folkeparti, or Danish People’s Party. That’s the main anti-immigrant party there, which nonetheless in the mere 15 years since its founding has attained a powerful and even respected position within the edifice of Danish politics, as the article describes very clearly.

But just don’t take my word for this, even if you can’t read Dutch. In fact, I first became aware myself of this piece from an English translation posted on the Presseurop site. There’s just one main discrepancy that I can see, though. That Danish People’s Party: why would De Groene Amsterdammer happen to be writing about them just now? Silly – there’s a general election about to occur here in the Netherlands on June 9, and one of its biggest sub-plots is how favorable the results will turn out to be for the PVV or Party for Freedom, which, yes, is the main anti-immigrant party in this country. Indeed, the lede to De Groene Amsterdammer’s piece cites the Dansk Folkeparti as “a beautiful source of inspiration” for Geert Wilders, the PVV’s leader.

On the other hand, the Presseurop piece makes no mention at all of the PVV! I must ask: why? Because English-language-only readers should not have their intellects burdened further with an additional consideration such as this? Because it would just not be “politically correct,” due to the PVV’s shady reputation in many circles, to mention what is – after all – the really sole motivation for why this particular article appeared in De Groene Amsterdammer at this particular time? I hate to break it to the Presseurop editors but, although the Dutch and the Danish feel quite a bit of common cultural make-up between them, the Dutch (at least) are not terribly interested in the details of the Danish political system or its workings for most of the time!

It’s now early May, the time of year when many West European countries celebrate their liberation at the end of World War II. Today is in fact Liberation Day in the Netherlands, a public holiday, while yesterday was Dodenherdenkingdag – Day for the Remembrance of the Dead. And at a ceremony in The Hague a certain Eberhard van der Laan, a former government minister for the Dutch Labor Party, gave an interesting, even provocative speech (covered here in the Algemeen Dagblad) calling for a line of a certain sort to be drawn under the WWII experience so that society can finally move on.

The “hook” to Van der Laan’s speech, as it were, was the fact that it has now been 65 years since the end of the war – that’s the standard retirement age, at least within Europe, so why don’t we finally put WWII out to retirement as well? With this, the ex-politician was giving voice to what many in Europe surely have always thought in secret about the War (especially those too young to have lived through it): for how long will we have to keep paying respect, keep letting it influence our lives? It’s a very pertinent question, especially when applied to Germany and the issue of when, if ever, the guilt for what that nation perpetrated will finally be washed away and made irrelevant through the eroding effect of all the passing years. (more…)

And now we have the proverbial bomb going off in the middle of a crowded Times Square in New York City – a rather crude explosive device, we’re told, but one that could certainly have taken many lives and caused who-knows-what other damage to the markets, to American Constitutional liberties, etc. had it not been for an alert sidewalk T-shirt seller who noticed something strange and notified the police in time.

Notice something? That tragedy (almost) happened, not in Baghdad or some exotic place like that, but in one of the most American of American places. And don’t forget Major Hasan and his homicidal rage at another bastion of the red-white-and-blue, Fort Hood, TX. What ever happened to President George W. Bush’s 2003 promise: “We are fighting that enemy [i.e. terrorists] in Iraq and Afghanistan today so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities”? I guess American soldiers are not fighting so much anymore in Iraq, at least; could that be the reason? (more…)

In the hysteria that continues to reverberate four months after the ill-fated flight of the “Underwear Bomber” from Amsterdam to Detroit last Christmas Eve, it has become clear that we cannot rely on our elected authorities to safeguard our fundamental rights to privacy while we travel. As we read in this brief piece from Trouw, probably our only remaining hope lies in the sheer bureaucratic incompetence of those same officials.

Back at the time, Schiphol management announced with great fanfare that they would install full-body scanners to screen all passengers with destinations in the US to ensure nothing like this embarrassing incident ever happened again. By now 73 of those things were supposed to be in place; in fact, only 23 are – and even some of those present are not in use. The problem apparently lies in obtaining security clearances for the workmen who are supposed to go perform the installation of the rest of the machines in those super-secure areas behind the passenger-screening stations.

At the same time, these machines – whether installed or not – remain hideously expensive. Interestingly, the Trouw article concludes with the sentence “It is not certain whether the powder [i.e. the explosive Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was concealing in his briefs] would have been detected by the scanners.” Rest assured, from one of the world’s leading security consultants: it would not have.

UPDATE: More on the uselessness of these full-body scanners here and here.

In case you were wondering how we were coping here in the Netherlands with the flights shut-down stemming from the volcano-ash, a recent article in De Volkskrant by Carien ten Have lays out all the effects pretty well. The executive summary would read: Dutch life has suddenly gotten a lot less romantic for a while, and just when Spring has come and the trees are in bloom!

Even if you don’t read Dutch, that article might be worth a click anyway due to the attractive, if “canned” (i.e. from one of those photo agencies, in this case Colourbox), photo of roses at the top. ‘Cause if there’s one thing everyone associates with Holland, it’s flowers, and that business is heavily dependent on air transport for product-delivery that usually has to happen within a span of a few days, at most. What may come as a surprise is that much of that flower product-delivery to buyers is within the Netherlands – or within the immediate vicinity in Northwest Europe – and sourced with flowers usually flown in from more exotic locales like Kenya and Ecuador. Those are of course now cut-off, and that is the main cause for the steep price-rises now seen here for flowers, whether for foreign ones that got here anyway (or were here before the Eyjafjallajökull volcano blew) or the domestically-grown variety. Still, never fear (if you’ve got the money to pay): “There are sufficient Dutch flowers to supply the European market,” declares Herman de Boon, who is the Dutch answer to Mr. Bean even as he serves at the same time as Chairman of the Dutch Association of Flower Wholesalers.

The situation is similar when it comes to other exotic things that have to be flown in: fruits & vegetables, for instance. There’s still enough in stock, just don’t expect to be able to take your Spring sweetheart to a restaurant to enjoy things like Peruvian asparagus or Egyptian green beans for a while. Unfortunately, the pharmaceutical and medical sectors have also felt the flight-ban’s effects; for example, apparently some radiation-based medicines for fighting cancer must be used within 24 hours or they go to waste.

Here’s an informative English-language run-down from Global Post on how the Dutch flower industry has been dealing with a difficult week – including some good news at least for those hospitals, mentioned at the very end.

I reported a couple months ago about what I termed Potemkin Shanghai, that is, about the authorities in that city applying what we could call the “Chinese Treatment” in advance of the 2010 World Exposition due to kick-off there on May 1. I go so far as to call it that because we already witnessed this in Beijing prior to the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, namely city administration and police going to ridiculous lengths to present the city’s “best face” to the hordes of foreign visitors they expect to welcome. In Beijing, for example, whole city blocks were razed to make way for the erection of more eye-pleasing buildings; in Shanghai attractive women are reportedly being shipped in from the countryside to man – excuse the expression – bus-ticket sales counters.

But a new piece from the Dutch Algemeen Dagblad (Thousands of arrests for Expo Shanghai) brings an altogether new and sinister tinge to this. It’s not just those arrests, totalling 6,042 from the massive police-sweeps conducted so far, and said to be for the offences of “theft, gambling, prostitution, sales of pornographic materials, drug trafficking, and swindling practices.” It’s also the bodyscan machines that the authorities plan to place at each of the 870 entrances to the Shanghai metro while the Expo is going on (1 May through 31 October) – and they’ll be looking not just for weapons but for anything they don’t happen to want people to have. And then there’s the security guards that will be riding in all the buses for which those Sichuan sweeties will have sold you a ticket.

He doesn’t live there anymore, but when he did James Fallows of the Atlantic painted a convincing picture of a Middle Kingdom that, far from being some monolith state of worker-ants bent on world domination, was actually still rather poor, somewhat diverse rather than uniform, and very messy in daily life as people there actually had to live it. Still, this “Chinese Treatment” stuff also convinces me – together with their infamous Internet “Chinese Wall” – that the Communist Party authorities over there are hell-bent to recreate George Orwell’s Oceania.

Just a reminder here about a European political figure probably destined to become rather more important in the near future. That’s Geert Wilders, head of the rather recent Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (PVV: “Freedom Party”). The party is mainly known for its anti-Islam and anti-immigrant views; the politician is often known as “Mozart” due to his uncommon hair-do, of an artificial blond coloring. You’re likely get a chance to take a gander at that fairly soon on some newspaper frontpage/homepage, since we now have a national election scheduled for early June here in the Netherlands and, unfortunately, opinion polls show the PVV poised to make major gains, even though no other party is willing to work with them to form a new government.

For now, though, Wilders’ anti-Islam stance has earned him top-billing in a documentary film, with his name even in the title, “Islam Rising: Geert Wilders’ Warning to the West,” produced by PRB films, an American company, in cooperation with the Christian Action Network. And, as both the Volkskrant and Trouw report, he was supposed to travel to Los Angeles to attend the film’s premiere on 1 May. (more…)

The financial travails of the Greek government go on, and will do so for some time even in the best of scenarios. So at least one thing is fixed: simple arithmetic quite clearly shows a noticeable imbalance in that country’s public financial resources and the amounts it customarily spends. Unfortunately, all other considerations surrounding that predicament and how best to address it seem to be stuck in a kaleidoscope-like flux.

Take for example the blogpost found on this site a couple weeks ago: there, resort to the IMF to assist Greece out of its bind was unthinkable, and the proposed solution – suggested by no lesser figure than the current German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble – was instead to set up some sort of Monetary Fund within the institutions of the European Union. You can scratch that now; according to no less than Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (who of course outranks Schäuble), IMF involvement would be perfectly OK and, if there is to be some sort of within-the-EU Monetary Fund, then it certainly won’t be able to appear in time to have anything to do with solving the Greek case. Oh, and another point I made was that the preferred technique so far of EU heads-of-government for dealing with the Greek situation was simply to issue declarations of support without actually doing anything to back them up, and that is also no longer completely true. Mind you, it’s not that the EU leaders now are trying to back them up; it’s that some, such as Bundeskanzlerin Merkel, don’t even want to talk about it any more, including shutting Greece’s problems off of the agenda for another EU summit meeting scheduled to be held next week.

But it gets even worse, as we see in an article in today’s issue of the Dutch business newspaper Het Financiële Dagblad. Merkel now is willing to countenance IMF involvement, but Nicolas Sarkozy still insists publicly that that is out of the question. Furthermore, the French President (together with Jose Manuel Barroso, Chairman of the European Commission) does want to talk about Greece at next week’s summit, at least to the extent of issuing another ringing declaration that the country will not be let down by its EU brother-states – thereby accomplishing a lowering of its borrowing costs, at least for a while.

Unfortunately, it seems that an IMF team has already been called in to take a look at the Greek situation, according to this HFD piece. Plus, the suspicion remains (although it is mentioned elsewhere, not here) that Sarkozy mainly wants to shut out the IMF in order to deny credit/glory to that organization’s head, Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who might well run in 2012 to replace Sarkozy as French president. But this now-open disagreement on fundamental aspects of how to deal with the situation between the heads of the EU’s two leading states can only worsen investor confidence in Greece’s finances, and thereby the situation as a whole.

OK, the report I caught about this is from the Dutch press (specifically, the Algemeen Dagblad – I don’t routinely cover the Swedish press due to language incapability). But it’s an instructive tale nonetheless: after some guy had announced (anonymously) on an Internet forum site his intention to head to the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (a state technical university located in Stockholm) and kill as many people as he could find there, police managed to track him down and arrest him before any harm could be done.

How instructive? First of all, this sort of thing is not supposed to happen in a place like Sweden, due to the much stricter gun-control there, but mainly because of what people assume is a more non-violent culture that doesn’t lend itself to that sort of thing. (Although one shouldn’t forget how Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was gunned down on a Stockholm street back in 1986, in a murder that is unsolved to this day.) Secondly, the authorities did manage to track the proto-perpetrator down – even behind the veil of supposed Internet anonymity – and detain him before he could actually perpetrate. What does this say about how genuine this supposed “anonymity” on the Internet actually is – and how genuine should it ultimately be allowed to be, when lives are on the line? Thirdly: Were lives truly on the line? How can anyone tell whether the suspect really meant to do what he declared he intended to do? That must still be unsure – you commit a crime only by doing it, not by only thinking it or even announcing it. (The latter probably constitutes a crime in itself, but of a different sort and one calling for nowhere near as much punishment as actually killing.)

Anyway: in the final analysis we seem to have here in Sweden one pole of a spectrum whose other pole is Seung-Hui Cho and 32 people shot at Virginia Tech. Where do you, and the society where you live, want to be on that spectrum? “At the pole of the Swedish incident that was prevented in time” may not truly be the answer, given the injury to privacy rights that was an important part of that episode.

“Sports car maker Porsche has a problem in America,” an article up now in the “Autoworld” section of Holland’s Algemeen Dagblad announces. And indeed it does, as you might figure out from that piece’s headline, whether you understand Dutch or not: Porsches slurpen te veel voor VS (even though slurpen in Dutch does not mean “slurp,” not quite, it means “gulp,” as in “to drink something fast.”)

That’s just the problem: Porsches do “gulp,” they don’t just “slurp.” But up to very recently no one really cared about what sort of MPG a Porsche would get – if you had to worry about that, then you certainly could not afford the car in the first place. In these energy-conscious times, however, that’s not allowed anymore: everyone has to worry about MPG, says the US government, and that includes Porsche. Or eventually it will, at least, for the American authorities did grant Porsche an exception to the requirement put out last year that all autos sold in the US meet minimum MPG requirements – that in exchange for collecting from the German company a couple hundred dollars as a “fine” for every such car that is presently sold.

But that’s a temporary exception, and it expires in 2016. For Porsche cars to meet the requirement then, the article reports, they would have to achieve an average 10% improvement in MPG each year in-between. Yes, hybrid Porsches are on the way, but not in time for 2016. And that’s when that little “fine” presently being collected balloons up to amounts that can reach $37,500 per vehicle sold.

The big story here over the weekend in the Netherlands, for once, is one with ripples that extend out to touch many other countries. It’s namely the fall of our coalition government, called “Balkenende IV,” but more precisely it’s the reason the government fell, which was simple: one part of it (CDA, CU – both of those C’s stand for “Christian,” by the way) wanted to waffle on the plans to withdraw Dutch troops from Afghanistan by next August; the other part (PvdA) insisted that there be no waffling. Result: there will be no waffling, because the plans are going through, the troops will be back home by the end of the summer, and as an added bonus it looks like there will be (premature) national elections in May to determine a new parliament (Tweede Kamer) and a new government.

One way you can tell this is truly a “big story” (if ipso facto is not itself sufficient for your reasoning process) is that the weekend is not even over, yet reports of repercussions are already coming in. Here’s a piece from Trouw reporting how the governor of Uruzgan (the province in southern Afghanistan where most of the Dutch combat troops are), Asadullah Hamdam, is already getting worried and has called upon the Dutch government to change its mind. On the other hand, Afghan General Juma Gul Himat, chief of police there, says he’s willing to live with a Dutch withdrawal – for a price. He wants better training, better air support, faster economic development, and better equipment: mine-detectors, helicopters. (Ah, mon cher général – what part of “We’re outta here!” don’t you understand?) (more…)

Here is another delightful micro-article from the Dutch paper Trouw. Worshippers attending midnight Mass next Saturday night at the Lutheran church in Cologne, Germany, presided over by Pastor Hans Mörtter, will first have to pass through the sort of “all-body scanner” increasingly put into use at airports around the world to enter the house of worship.

Keep in mind, though, that we’re coming up on Carnival time, and that Cologne is in fact really the epicenter of Carnival celebration in Germany, with the biggest and most-famous parades and general public carousing. Pastor Mörtter publicly claims that his intention with these scanners (which really don’t work) is to weed out those who are not Lutheran and so to ensure a “heretic-free” zone inside his church for his parishioners. In reality, though, it’s just a Carnival stunt, whose only possible constructive contribution to public discourse is as a gesture against what German media reports about this stunt (which I have not been able to find on-line) call our modern “total-fear culture.”

Most societies are marked by one or more characteristic, high-profile addictions: khat in Yemen, for example, coca leaves in Bolivia, vodka in Russia, etc. Some might be tempted to add “weed in the Netherlands” to that list, but apparently that really isn’t true anymore.

How about “video games” instead? The Dutch newspaper Trouw has a piece up now about that. (Game industry must warn against addiction; it’s credited to the Novum news agency, based in Amsterdam, of which I had never heard before.) Its starting-point is a recent report from the Rotterdam-based research bureau IVO, which must be an interesting place to work since it indeed specializes in “lifestyle” and addiction issues. (Check out its English page here, and you can download their video game report here, although it’s in Dutch and they’ll first ask you to enter some information about yourself.) IVO claims that the gaming industry is shirking its public responsibility by doing nothing to counteract video game addiction. In the meantime, the estimated number of such addicts in the Netherlands has reached between 30,000 and 80,000 (out of a population of 16 million).

Not only is that a conclusion that these companies don’t enjoy having made public, but IVO conducted the report in the first place on a commission from the Dutch Ministry of Health. Reaction has been swift from the NVPI, the Dutch industry association for “the entertainment industry.” Yes we do act against addiction, a spokesman claimed: we put recommended-age indications on the boxes of all such games, together with additional warnings if they involve such nasty things as sex, drugs, or violence. What else can you do?

That’s a valid point: what else? A further action discussed here is putting on some sort of “Watch out! This game can be addictive!” warning-label on as well. But that won’t work because 1) It’s lame; 2) If it has any effect, it will merely attract more buyers; and 3) For most players by far, the game will turn out not to be addicting.

Another interesting bit came up today on the site of the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Second-hand smoke is also harmful to the smoker. (I do like these miniscule on-line pieces from Trouw, that nevertheless usually manage to communicate a well-defined, thought-provoking point. This sort of material helps this blog to move closer to the aggregation function that has been suggested for it.)

Basically, while the health risks of second-hand smoke for non-smokers in the same general vicinity have been subject to exhaustive investigation, the impact of that smoke on the smokers who were emitting it in the first place has been neglected, on the assumption that they had enough health problems just taking into account their direct puffing. But no! A smoker may think he has smoked, say, fourteen cigarettes on a given evening – because he sees fourteen butts in the ashtray – but in reality the harmful effect on him is on the order of 16.6 cigarettes, precisely because of the second-hand smoke he created but then breathed in again.

This is out of a study from the (Italian) National Institute for Cancer Research, where they conducted their research on smoking newstand kiosk-owners, who sit there most of the day just smoking by themselves. But mathematicians out there will justifiably wonder whether 16.6 in that particular case is really the final figure, or whether it is instead even higher. After all, that second-hand smoke that you breathe in you then exhale again (making it third-hand smoke), which then you partially breathe in again, etc. etc. This sounds to me like an infinite sequence problem! (Which, as any good mathematician can tell you, under certain conditions will still yield a non-infinite, final answer.)

No joke, this – at least the report comes from the respected Dutch newspaper Trouw, not known for putting out spoof articles. The lede:

Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has called upon the world to boycott American goods and the dollar, because the US and other Western lands, according to him, are guilty of global warming. That is on a tape-recording that the television station Al-Jazeera played on Friday [today].

Yes, according to Osama the US economy must be brought to a halt if global warming is to be stopped. You’ll admit he is starting to get a bit more innovative now with his propaganda angles, what with this new “green” direction – although you should also keep in mind that the authenticity of this latest alleged cave-missive has not yet been verified.

UPDATE: Renowned Middle East blogger Prof. Juan Cole accepts that that latest Bin Laden message is for real, and in an extended blogpost highlights the Saudi fugitive’s hypocrisy, detailing how “[g]lobal terrorism is a high-carbon activity and very bad for the environment, not to mention humans and other living things.” (Some of you of proper age will hear in his word-choice a distinctive 1960s-echo that surely could not have gone unintended.)

Four days on, and most of the world’s attention is still focused on the earthquake-disaster in Haiti. You’ll get no complaint about that out of me, and in fact I’ve finally come up with some things to pass on here that you might find interesting. Keep in mind, though, that I try only to do so when it’s material you probably have not encountered through the English-language press. Often, as here, that means it offers an unconventional, even perverse perspective.

For instance: Brazil is another country ready to assist the Haitians in their hour of need, as you would expect. But in Brazil’s case it is the Ministry of Defense that is taking the lead, as the Dutch newspaper Trouw reports: Brazil sends weapons to Haiti. Weapons? For sure: because people are getting so desperate there by this point that there is the very real threat of a complete break-down of public order, so the place stands sorely in need of some guns that shoot rubber bullets, and other crowd-control armaments.

We can see that from yet another Dutch report, this time from the Algemeen Dagblad: Dutch [team] break off rescue-attempt after gunshots. A Dutch “rescue-brigade” of four ten-man teams (and their dogs) specialized in finding and rescuing people from rubble is finally in Port-au-Prince, but they had to stop their first efforts to rescue people under a collapsed bank after gunfire came ever-closer, and now coordinate with local UN officials for an armed escort. And by the way, it’s a Brazilian who is in command of all UN troops in the country, many of which are Brazilian.

Then there is a rather controversial opinion piece placed today in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique: Are blacks incapable? It’s quite interesting that I can’t find the author’s name anywhere on that webpage, although it does seem he is of African origin himself, as he writes of his “brothers of color” and how they are sure to let him know how they don’t like what he is saying. His lede is brief: “Haitians’ liberty has served for nothing but bringing forth tyrannical regimes.” The situation there is catastrophic now – but it was catastrophic even before the earthquake struck. Much the same applies to the countries of Africa, he writes, still trapped in backwardness and poverty, as they have been for decades since the departure of the colonial authorities. (Also, their own silence now when it comes to offering help of their own to Haiti has been deafening.) The mysterious editorialist attributes this state-of-affairs to black culture, for while all human beings have the same capacity for intelligence, the more “emotional” black outlook on life looks always for a strongman to take charge, and ultimately does not care about the corruption and elites-creation that must ensue. As a result, “we must have the courage to affirm that our culture does not favor [economic] development, it is indeed antagonistic to development.”

A low blow during Haiti’s time of Calvary? Or strong words whose uttering is made all-the-more necessary by the emergency? It does seem that Haiti is fated to be a ward of the US and/or the international community, a basket-case in state form, for quite a long time to come. Anyway, it looks like La Libre does not do comments, so I don’t know how this guy’s “brothers of color” are supposed to check in with their anticipated objections. As for you, dear readers, you’re welcome to do so here by e-mail as always, and perhaps then I could pass along any suitable comments to La Libre.

“Cold enough for you?” I know: a trite thing to say, and the worst part is that I used precisely those same first eleven words to begin another blog-post of just four days ago.

Still, I just couldn’t help myself, not when the answer is quite clearly “No!” for Chen Kechai, a Chinese man written about in a brief profile in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad (“Snow-grave for a cool Chinese”). Go ahead and click through: there are three photos as well, featuring Mr. Chen rather extremely under-dressed both for the cold Chinese countryside around him (said to be -10ºC = 14ºF) and the activities in which he is engaging – burying himself in the snow, pouring cold water on his head, that kind of thing. It says here that he has been indulging in these antics since 1989.

Attention scriptwriters! It’s been almost seven months already: why have we yet to see any forthcoming screenplay about the four Uighurs (i.e. western Chinese Muslims) who were released from solitary at Guantánamo after seven years there (they were absolutely innocent of anything even resembling terrorist activities – goes without saying) straight to lovely Bermuda? Just consider this text from Erik Eckholm’s New York Times article:

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos [har har!], the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

C’mon, I mean it practically writes itself! Call the film “The Four Uighurs”; Johnny Depp, in scruffy beard, stars as Abdulahat, who winds up working every day in a wetsuit training dolphins to undertake military missions for the Royal Navy from the nearby naval base. His three buddies eventually pool their earnings from work in private gardens and at popsicle-stands to open up their own seaside camping-ground, which they name Camp Delta. Trouble arrives in the form of a restaurant (originally called “Git Ma,” Chinese for “enemy combatant”) started up in the neighborhood by a pair of Cantonese immigrant families. In the end, though, through various hijinks and comic situations everyone learns to live together again in sun-struck island harmony – in fact, Depp even mentors one dolphin with a surprising aptitude for performing point-to-point coastal Chinese take-out deliveries. Take it from there . . .

Maybe you can’t handle writing about an island situation for some reason? Fine, then consider instead the story of another set of Uighurs from Guantánamo, reported on today in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, whom the Obama administration wants to release into yet another sort of strange, paradise-like environment, namely the alpine hills and valleys of Switzerland. This real-life story, alas, comes with no guaranteed happy ending. As Trouw reports, the Swiss are willing enough to accept the former inmates (two of them this time; completely innocent, of course) to try to get back in the good graces of the Obama administration after some prior trouble involving American demands that the Swiss give up their bank-account secrecy. But the Chinese authorities are objecting here, and have warned the Swiss government against taking them. They say that the Uighurs are legitimate terror-suspects after all, and the only place they should go henceforth is back to China for trial.

This scenario could well end up a tragedy, for you can well imagine the “trial” and generally-unpleasant reception the Chinese have prepared for these men. Unfortunately, the recent record of the Swiss of letting themselves be pushed around is not good: there is still an embarrassing dispute ongoing with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, involving a public apology to Libya by the Swiss president and two Swiss businessmen still held in Tripoli and about to face trial there on trumped-up charges.