Are you as afflicted by the ice-cold January weather as we are here in the Netherlands? Those of you dear readers living in the Southern Hemisphere – my statistics tell me that there are a few – I exclude from the get-go, but otherwise a story-book January does seem to be in effect in Europe, North America, and throughout Asia.

Love that or hate it (I’m not so enthusastic, to tell you the truth), there will always be winners emerging from this situation. Among these are clearly Holland’s ice-skate sellers, as we see from an article in Het Parool (Gekkenhuis ["Crazy-House"] at ice-skate factories).

The unnamed reporter from the Dutch news agency ANP sought out for his/her story the firms “Viking” in Almere and “Zandstra” in Joure (a city in Friesland, the Dutch province especially known for its ice-skating ardor). They’re likely not the only ones in the Netherlands, but provided some good material nonetheless. Normally, says Viking director Jaap Havekotte, they sell around 20,000 pairs of skates per year; this year they are on track for 50,000 or 60,000 pairs. “Our skates are flying out the door,” says the Dutchman. (Yes, that’s really the quote: Onze schaatsen vliegen de deur uit.) Zandstra spokesman Marco Vlap doesn’t want to reveal exact numbers, but confirms that his firm is also working like mad but probably won’t be able to keep up with this year’s demand.

Actually, points out Havekotte, last winter in December (2008) we also had a bit of a cold spell that set people to skating and so brought with it elevated sales figures. He doesn’t have to explicitly say it, but in most Dutch minds it had yet another effect: raising hopes for the holding of the Elfstedentocht, an eleven-city race over the frozen streams and canals of Friesland that occupies an honored and central place in Frisian and Dutch culture and is held whenever ice conditions permit – which they last did only back in January of 1997! Think of the Super Bowl – to come up with an American cultural equivalent – but one strictly subject to the weather year after year for its happening at all! (You can check it out at the Elfstedentocht website, including the race-route, but the text is available only in Dutch or Frisian!) The cold didn’t last long enough then for that, but maybe it will this time, in which case you can expect some tenths-of-a-percentage point to be shaved from the 2010 GDP in the blizzard of sick-days taken as people flock up to Friesland and/or in front of their TV sets.

While you’re waiting to see if that happens, this article in English (“Amsterdam prepares canals for ice skating fun”) tells of our fine city’s preparations for letting people skate on certain of the historic canals, should the cold weather indeed continue. Personally, I sincerely hope that it won’t, but nonetheless those measures now being undertaken are mainly banning boat traffic on certain of the canals to protect the forming ice. You can peruse a map here showing to which stretches of which canal that ban applies, as well as the accompanying detailed list.

Among the many other serious things currently happening on the international front – think Obama’s decision on Afghanistan, for example, or the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen – the knotty problem of Iran is also re-emerging. OK, they’ve had their massive street-demonstrations in the wake of last June’s fraudulent presidential election, but those were suppressed by the authorities, and the resulting show-trials are largely winding down. So you’d think that country could simply settle down into the sort of quiet dissatisfied-people-under-dictatorship status that Eastern Europe under Soviet rule displayed for decades (with periodic violent interruptions) and let the rest of the world get on with its other urgent business.

It’s not quite like that, though, because even if we get “All Quiet on the Iranian Front,” that tranquillity could be shattered on any given morning as Europe and the US wake up to news of an Israeli airstrike against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities. Furthermore, the current heightening confrontation – in which the Iranian regime has recently announced that it has plans to build 10 more nuclear fuel-enrichment plants – was admittedly sparked by last Friday’s demand to Iran from the International Atomic Energy Agency that it freeze operations at its already-existing uranium enrichment plant at Qom. And this, as Atlantic journalist James Fallows would have it, was itself a result of successful behind-the-scenes diplomacy in Beijing during President Obama’s recent Asia trip.

Be that all as it may, this Iran-vs.-the-World stand-off is indeed getting steadily nastier, as is described in that previously-cited NYT article from today but also by another piece in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (“Iran weighs pulling out of nuclear treaty”). That “nuclear treaty” is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT), originally from 1968, in which treaty-signatories who don’t have nuclear weapons pledge never to try to get them, in exchange for those that do have them working to (eventually) give them up. Iran is a signatory to the NNPT, which among other important things means it is obliged to allow period visits from IAEA inspectors, which it has done. (Although that enrichment plant in Qom was for some reason kept secret – ooops, sorry about that! – and that was the main point of the IAEA’s complaint of last Friday.) The Trouw article cites growing sentiment from among important Iranian parliamentarians that their country might as well just withdraw from the NNPT regime if it’s going to be treated that way. And while they are at it, they say, why not just explicitly bar entry to any more IAEA inspectors as well?

It must be borne in mind that, as the article also points out, such thoughts are for now being aired only within the Iranian parliament, not by government officials. Furthermore, the intent here may just be – for now – to bluff and remind Iran’s accusers at the IAEA of what further non-cooperation they could provoke if they go too far with their demands. But surely all of this also brings that much closer to us all that terrible morning when we wake up to news of the Israeli attack.

Away from all the headlines, there’s an interesting development now in relations between the United States and Kenya, reported in the Dutch press from an ANP report by, among others, the Volkskrant (US follows through with threat to Kenyans).

American relations with Kenya will always be of special interest during the term of the Obama administration because of Obama’s personal ties and family history there, as will be relations with Indonesia for the same reason. However, and very interestingly, so far this effect is operating in the opposite way that you would expect. It almost seems as if both countries need to suffer a little bit, just to show that Obama is not going to play any favorites. In mid-November, for example, the American president is scheduled for an important tour of Asian countries: China, Japan, Korea, of course, also Singapore – but not Indonesia. Of course, it’s merely the most-populous Muslim nation; perhaps Obama is taking a break now from his “Arab outreach” efforts that previously featured a speech to Iranians and a speech directed to the Arab World, given in Cairo.

And then there is Kenya and the ANP report. The US “threat” is namely directed against high government officials and other “high-earners” there, and amounts to a refusal to give them visas anymore to visit the US. That apparently really hurts; rich Kenyans just love to head to the States to spend their money. But in the judgment of the US government nothing has been done to bring about promised reforms ever since the mess of the disputed national election at the end of 2007/beginning of 2008, which led to violence in which around 1,300 people died. In fact, no one has even been prosecuted in connection with that violence. So a fire needs to be lit under some people there.

The thing that caught my eye here, though – other than that it involves Kenya, homeland of Barack Obama Sr. – was the US official charged with paying a visit to Nairobi to deliver the bad news: Johnnie Carson, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Of course he’s not the real Johnny Carson (also note the different spelling), or he would be showing up just to practice his golf-swing. He’s merely a distinguished American career diplomat, a multiple award-winner for his service (including for directing the US Government’s anti-HIV/AIDS efforts in Kenya), who previously served as American ambassador to Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

That great Dutch daily Trouw has a brief but significant piece up now: “Newspapers return to paid sites”. If you spend any other time on the ‘Net (other than poring over EuroSavant, that is!) you might be aware that there has already been talk of many American newspapers returning to some sort of pay-for-your-news format in a last bid to survive financially. Well, this piece (sourced to the Dutch news agency ANP) is mainly about a new study out of the Free University of Brussels, conducted among 87 Western European newspapers, which concludes that something similar is also in the works over here. Such papers have watched closely as leading publications such as the New York Times and the Financial Times a few years ago tried making themselves totally free once again, hoping to earn big with advertising, only to see that ad revenue go mainly to Google, where it did not instead shrink in absolute terms due to worsening economic conditions.

Mind, not a single paper is named here – it’s just a warning shot across the bow, so to speak. But while the message is interesting in itself, despite the lack of specifics, astute readers will recognize the direct relevance here to this very weblog. My policy continues to be that I review only freely-available on-line publications, so that any reader who wants to can click through to see the article(s) I am discussing him/herself. (The furthest concession I made in the past to any restrictions was covering papers that required initial free registration.) This news therefore seems somewhat ominous; I guess we’ll simply have to see what actually happens – i.e. which publications do decide to retreat behind a pay-wall – and then come up with a reaction from there.

These days, more and more, it’s Hitler this! Hitler that! I just wish that Adolf Hitler would go away! The Nazi dictator stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger more than 64 years ago anyway, isn’t that right?

But no, Hitler is a meme that will just not disappear (especially, I suspect, because it is in the public domain, so you don’t have to pay anyone any royalties to bring it up). I’ll just briefly mention here the ridiculous “Obama/Nancy Pelosi-as-Hitler” theme turning up lately, such as at last weekend’s “Tea Party” rally in Washington, DC. Then there is that German AIDS awareness ad you might have heard about recently, depicting a young woman having sex with Hitler and various other historical dictators. (After all, AIDS – like Hitler & Stalin et al. – “is a mass-murderer.”)

Now the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad brings us the latest (by way of the Italian Corriere della Sera). A French tourist browsing in an Italian supermarket (namely Carrefour, headquartered in France) was shocked to find wine being sold in bottles bearing the likenesses of Hitler and Mussolini – and, for that matter, with various fascist slogans inscribed on the labels as well! This particular tourist happened to be of Jewish extraction; she immediately complained to store management, with the result that Carrefour soon removed from its shelves all such bottles. The article adds, however, that other wine bottles remain that are decorated with images of Pope John Paul II, Che Guevara, and Bob Marley. They sell fairly well.

Even as America is consumed with its health care reform debate – with the associated “Tea Party” mass-demonstrations in the nation’s capital, rants on Fox TV, etc. – rest assured that it’s not as if over here in Europe we’re living in some sort of public health paradise. Far from it, in fact, although at least the local press is willing to give problems the necessary public airing-out. Like De Volkskrant here in the Netherlands, for example, and its recent piece (credited to the Dutch national news agency ANP): “Half of all cats have behavioral problems.”

Really now – where does it end? You do your best to ensure a healthy and happy life for all your human family members, but then the inconvenient prospect pops up that the housecat may well be bonkers. Although it seems we have at least had canine psychiatric care covered here for a while now, at least according to one Sonja van Leeuwen quoted in the article, who states “. . . it is already quite normal to have your dog with behavioral problems treated, but for cats this is not really accepted yet.” Instead, too many cat-owners here (who among them own 3 million cats) still have to suffer from feline friends which become too aggressive, or which urinate inside the house as an expression of some problem they are trying to communicate. Or which expropriate the seat of the only family scooter and refuse to move from it.

Then again, perhaps Ms. Van Leeuwen has an interest in talking up the potential travails of cat-ownership, since she intends next year to start a new course in cat-behavior therapy, in cooperation with a local dog-training academy. If you’re interested, well, you’ll have to know Dutch, and then be ready to make yourself available over the year-and-a-half course – at Lelystad, in the relatively-new province of Flevoland – to attend a total of 43 lesson-days. You’ll get to know a lot about cats, of course, but you’ll also get some insights into human psychology as well since, as Ms. Van Leeuwen is at pains to note, “Many problems are caused or worsened by the owner.”

Ah yes, Holland: Land of prostitutes-in-windows, of “coffee shops” where what’s mainly at issue (meaning what’s issued) is not coffee at all – everyone knows about all that. So perhaps you would also expect that that would be one country where a reigning beauty-queen would also feel free to pose nude – but preferably “tastefully” – in any publication she might desire, without recriminations. Alas, that is not yet true, as an article in the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad today reminds us about the appearance in the new issue of the Dutch Playboy of the current Miss World Netherlands.

She is Carmen Kool, out of Amsterdam, and in addition to her name (if it actually is real, of course), I really like her attitude, especially for a 23-year-old. She was already clearly unrepentant in a slightly earlier piece from the AD (entitled Miss Netherlands with bare bottom) that first brought her exhibitionist transgression to light and speculated that she “was gambling with her crown.” “I think that the [Miss World] organization won’t be happy with my photo-shoot for Playboy. Unfortunately. I myself have nothing against nakedness. What’s more: I like to be a bit of a rebel.” She added, “I am Miss Netherlands. My countrymen have a right to it,” where by “it” she seems to be referring, again, to her naked photo-shoot. Again, a rather refreshing, even somewhat surprising attitude.

The axe did inevitably fall on her title shortly afterwards, and that follow-up piece announcing the sad news recounts a bit of a she said/he said dispute between Kool and a spokesman from the Miss World Netherlands organization about whether the latter sufficiently supported her in getting further opportunities for acting, TV commercials, and the like – in short, in getting further exposure, which she implies is why she felt she finally had to turn to the world-famous masters at providing exposure, as it were. Of course, the Algemeen Dagblad itself had now rendered its own assistance in that regard: you can click either of those two article links above to marvel at a photo which provides a coy sampling of her considerable charms (as well as an object lesson in how what is deemed proper for a European news publication often would not pass muster in the US).

As for Playboy.nl, for now it has only this entry in what it calls its “Playblog” announcing the coup, together with a shrunken rendition of the cover of that current issue on Netherlands newsstands now. (The Naakt! you see there of course means “Naked!”, as in “Hey wow! Look who we got!”) More revealing images tend to migrate to the website after subsequent issues, and subsequent centerfolds, follow, but I’ll have to leave it over to my dear readers to keep checking back on that Playboy.nl site to see when that happens, if desired. Alerting you to that here (if I even ever find out myself) is really not the purpose of this weblog. For that matter, perhaps this very subject is not really its purpose, although it does involve the “European non-English-language press.” In the end, I think I’m supposed to determine what that purpose is, but I nonetheless welcome any more e-mail contributions of opinion you might care to send!

The Dutch daily Trouw has a brief piece about the success Indonesia has had lately in rounding up a terrorist network established in that country. These suspects are thought to have been involved in the suicide-bombings that occurred at the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta last July 17, and to have been planning a further attack on the president himself on the upcoming (next Monday) Indonesian Independence Day.

Then again, let’s remember that reports of “terrorist suspects” being rounded up should always be met with skepticism, given the propensity to label as “terrorists” anyone they don’t like that has been repeatedly demonstrated by governments from the Third World to Russia to the United States. However, it’s also true that that aforementioned Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was handily re-elected to his position last month, just before those attacks, in an election widely regarded as free and fair.

Anyway, it’s easy to see why Yudhoyono would continue to attract electoral support, if the rest of his rhetoric matches his recent message to suicide-attack terrorists: “This is not the way that leads to Paradise. On the contrary, it is a stupid death.”

The Tour de France rolled on to its final destination at the Champs Élysées in Paris on Sunday, to wind up what for this weblog has frankly been a most disappointing spectacle. Why? Because we have something against Alberto Contador and would rather have seen Lance Armstrong win the thing for the eighth time? Hardly; anyone who has been following coverage of the Tour de France on this weblog knows perfectly well that I do so through one prism only: doping. And – glory be! – it does seem that there was not one kerfluffle involving doping on this year’s Tour. What can that mean?

Fortunately, this is a question that the Dutch Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad ((Motto: Don’t try to access us on the Sabbath, we shut the site down”) now addresses: Who knows whether the Tour was clean in 2009. And indeed, we can’t know yet whether that absence of doping incidents this year actually meant that no one was cheating. (“No one was cheating”: that’s a concept rather difficult to wrap your mind around in any case, no?) We can’t know now, but we can get a better idea with the passage of time, because that is what in fact has been the big recent advance in anti-doping techniques according to this article: after-the-fact (or retrospective) analysis. Since 1 January of this year the procedures for conducting that have been set down in an iron-clad legal and procedural framework. (more…)

More serendipity today, this time in Trouw. Really, though, how could my roving eye not take note of a headline that reads A horn in the crotch? It’s a brief piece, by Wim Boevink, but the five photos are really what it’s all about rather than the text per se. All you animal rights activists out there, come clicking, because here you can behold your ultimate revenge fantasy as, for once, it’s the bull that gets the better of the matador. He calls himself “El Cid,” after Spain’s national hero (the matador does, not the bull), but nonetheless found himself rather unheroically caught by a horn both in the thigh and the “crotch” (Dutch: kruis).

“[T]he humiliation could hardly be greater,” Boevink observes. But then he continues:

Question: with whom should we sympathize the most, the man or the animal? The former was led off wounded, the latter did not survive. When it comes to sympathy we must fear the worst for our Spanish hero, who was wounded in his manhood. But what the bull did was below the belt [onder de gordel].

Oh I don’t know, that strikes me as unseemly favoritism towards the matador, who after all entered the ring voluntarily (while his opponent did not) and was fully aware of the dangers he ran in so doing. How do my esteemed readers vote in the sympathy-stakes here?

The Dutch government managed to save some face over a bit of past high-handed colonial conduct on Thursday with a rather bizarre ceremony in The Hague, reported on by Sacha van der Zande of the newspaper Trouw: Finally Badu Bonsu and his people are at peace. Badu Bonsu II, King of the Ahanta tribe of Ghana, was finally released to go home after being held in containment by the Dutch authorities. But there are two important things to keep in mind:

1. He’s dead.
   
2. He’s head.

Yes, the actual interaction of Dutch officials with King Bonsu occurred way back in 1838, on his home turf down on Africa’s Gold Coast, and ended with the Dutch executing him by decapitation. Then they took home that head as a souvenir and preserved it for all this time in a jar of formaldehyde-solution at the University of Leiden.

So it was this particular object that was the subject of Thursday’s ceremony, which included the press as well as leaders from the Ahanta tribe residing both in the Netherlands and Ghana. The latter initially seemed pleased at the Dutch government’s gesture – as one Ahanta representative, Veronica van der Kamp, noted, “This is very important. A person without a head is not complete in the afterlife” – and proceeded with some native funeral rituals that involved gin, both drinking it and spilling it on the floor. Soon, however, spirits instead started to rise dangerously high among some of the assembled Ahanta delegates, including King Bonsu’s great-great-grandson, Joseph Jones Amoah, who began to get the crowd agitated by exclaiming “Why did you have to take his head? I’m am so intensely grief-striken [verdrietig] to see him here like this.”

Luckily, certain others present were able to keep their head while everyone else was losing theirs and moved quickly to restore calm, mainly by herding all official attendees (i.e. minus the press) into a separate room to conclude the formalities. A long-awaited homecoming for King Bonsu should follow shortly, and promises to be truly a capital event.

Swine flu is coming soon to hit us again, almost anywhere on Earth we might find ourselves. We know that; indeed, some of us possibly intend to seek out one of those swine flu parties to go to, about which I wrote previously in this space, in order to try to gain immunity against the autumn’s follow-up virus.

Of course, normal social intercourse under the shadow of a communicable disease rather demands that individuals take whatever prophylactic measures are necessary to avoid spreading the virus to others, if one has it, or catching it from others if one does not. That’s why illustrations accompanying swine flu news-reports usually show people wearing medical face-masks. Unfortunately, word has now come from the respected Dutch daily Trouw: Face-masks are not the solution.

Says who? Says Louise Knegtel of the BCM Academy (a.k.a. the Business Continuity & Crisis Management Institute), who these days is going around frenetically conducting three or four workshops per day about the “Mexican” (i.e. swine) flu and how businesses should prepare for it. She notes that face-masks will probably be useless because they only work if they are consistently worn, i.e. by everyone and at all times, and humans are simply not made that way. Sure, you can get all draconian and insist upon and enforce the wearing of face-masks by everyone in your firm, but then what about your suppliers? Your customers who come for a consultation/business meeting?

It probably won’t work (and, believe me, that’s not really the Dutch management style in any case). Better to go with other measures like repeatedly cleaning telephones and doorknobs, using the stairs instead of the elevator, and “limiting social contact” within your company, i.e. letting people work from home, holding teleconferences rather than in-person get-togethers, etc. Even this is not enough to make your firm ready for what Ms. Knegtel forecasts could be 50% employee absence if the new flu outbreak gets serious. (Note that a lot of this will likely be the result, not of sick employees per se, but people needing to go home to take care of children whose schools have closed against the illness.) Way before the flu strikes a firm needs to prepare carefully, designating key activities and key personnel, planning how to keep them going even when people go missing, maybe pre-designating a “crisis manager” (presumably one assumed to be least at risk of getting the flu him/herself) to take charge when the problems start.

Whoa, then: all talk of “Kiss me, you swine!” aside, it looks like experts are taking the prospect of a serious swine/Mexican flu epidemic in the fall quite seriously. This point is reinforced by an article in Le Monde of a couple of days ago, Europe: Authorities prepare to confront the virus, a brief, collective effort by Le Monde’s correspondents in the major European capitals (including Paris, bien sûr) to summarize preparations country-by-country. The common pattern emerges of governments having placed huge orders with the relevant pharmacy companies (Sanofi, GSK, Novartis) for flu vaccines and established plans for prioritized vaccinations for if/when the more serious H1N1 flu comes. That is, as large as the orders have been, there is still not enough vaccine for everyone, so public workers, people already in vulnerable states of health, etc. get it first. (Also interesting is that the French name for this disease seems to be “the flu A(H1N1)”; we may need to compile a lexicon if different countries/languages persist in using their own, idiosyncratic swine-flu names like this.)

Now that the question of reforming the US health care system is high on the agenda of the Congress and the President, it is quite appropriate that people are researching the medical establishments in other countries to gain insights and try to determine “best practice.” But there is one such establishment – built entirely from the ground up, in fact, over the past few years – that seems to have fallen between the analytical cracks, despite its quite unique characteristics. For one thing, it’s run entirely by third parties from outside the country; for another, it’s even financed entirely by outside parties as well.

OK, so on second thought maybe the example of Afghanistan has little to teach the US in the realm of health care after all. Indeed, the Americans (along with the Europeans, and the World Bank) are in fact the country’s medical paymasters. Nonetheless, an inspection may still be in order (to the extent hostile conditions within the country allow) of this nascent health structure that some do regard as “a minor miracle” because of the progress it has made. Reporter Rob Vreeken of the Netherlands’ De Volkskrant has taken on the challenge, in an account he entitles Come now, this isn’t Switzerland. (more…)

. . . Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Hallelujah

Halle . . . oh, STOP already!

That’s also the attitude now of the artist who originally came up with that (admittedly beautiful and profound) ballad, as we read in the Dutch De Volkskrant: Leonard Cohen: Stop covering Hallelujah! “It’s a good song,” as he’s quoted in the article’s first paragraph from last week, “but too many people sing it.”

Cohen goes on: “I read a review of the film Watchmen where Hallelujah is used and the reviewer said ‘Can we please get a ban on the use of Hallelujah in films and TV shows?’ and I think about it a bit the same way.” Then again, he can”t resist adding “The Sony record company didn’t want to issue the album that Hallelujah was on. [That was his Various Positions album, issued instead in 1984 by Passport Records.] They didn’t find it good enough.”

Even if you don’t read Dutch, you might want to click through to this piece anyway for, in good twenty-first century multi-media style, the YouTube videos of five different treatments of “Hallelujah” are embedded at the bottom: Cohen himself (of course), Jeff Buckley, John Cale, k.d. lang – and Lisa Hordijk (known simply as “Lisa”), recent winner of the Dutch “X Factor” and whose own treatment of “Hallelujah” spent eight weeks in the upper reaches of the Dutch pop charts this past spring. But this could also make you stop and ponder: Why did the Volkskrant editors include these? Did they do it without thinking – in effect, unwittingly substantiating Cohen’s complaint – or in defiance of his wishes, or what?

Another thing: You’ll find that the YouTube videos are arranged vertically, with at the very bottom the version of Cohen – The Master – and at the top (i.e. accessible with the least scrolling) . . . yes, Lisa. I guess here in the Netherlands we’re sometimes just . . . well, a bit provincial (we’ve got twelve of ‘em, in fact).

This news deserves more coverage in the US than Google News tells me it is getting; hopefully the fault is merely in the timing, namely around the 4th of July holiday. In any event, as the Dutch Volkskrant reports (in an article credited to Reuters and the AP), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now has a new chairman to succeed Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, who has occupied that post since 1997 (and who together with his organization won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005). The new man is Yukiya Amano, currently Japan’s resident representative at the IAEA and who boasts a long record of service in the Japanese diplomatic corps, who last Tuesday (30 June) needed six rounds of voting among national IAEA representatives to finally (barely) gain the necessary two-thirds vote for selection to the post.

This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.

The Dutch Reformatorisch Dagblad, a Christian newspaper closely tied to the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church, nevertheless features a short piece about the information-spreading ambitions of a certain American religious organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): Free Koran for leaders in US. Inspired by President Obama’s speech in Cairo of last month, the CAIR has begun a program (called “Share the Koran”) designed to distribute a supply of 100,000 copies of the Muslim Holy Book among prominent American leadership personalities, meaning governors and other politicians, judges and other criminal justice officials, educators, and journalists. Naturally, one is reserved for the President himself, and a lottery will be held among those contributing money to support this CAIR effort to choose the lucky person who will get to present it to him. Presumably that Koran will include the bookmark with sayings printed on it about social justice and tolerance included with all the others, although in Obama’s case this will be slightly redundant in that they are his own utterances on those matters.

This effort follows the CAIR’s earlier (and still on-going) campaign, called “Discover the Koran,” whose aim was to distribute a smaller supply (a couple tens of thousands) but to ordinary Americans. Presumably the CAIR calculates that the narrower but higher-status target-group of “Share the Koran,” headlined by the President himself, can attract more contribution-money out of the woodwork to enable it to actually meet its numerical ambitions. In any case, all Korans from the CAIR come with the original Arabic text, an English translation, and supplementary explanatory materials. That itself is a little problematic: Muslims are a bit uncomfortable with any Koranic translations since the real divine book is only supposed to be the original version in classical Arabic. (The prophet Mohammed transcribed that flawlessly from the archangel Gabriel’s dictation, you see, whereas any translation must necessarily be the work of fallible human beings.)

No matter, though, there they are, and if you reside anywhere within the US it’s clear you should be able to get your own free copy of the Holy Koran (Arabic/English/supplementary materials/Obama bookmark) without too much effort. The real question is how many people will really be interested. Most public officials who need votes to gain and keep their jobs won’t be able to turn the offer down (except perhaps, one imagines, in certain regions more red of neck). But it’s likely that what most Americans think they know about Islam, after the September 11 attacks especially, is neither particularly complimentary nor open to being changed by some free “religious book” on offer.

Yay! Today marks the kick-off of this year’s Tour de France, the 96th version, from Monaco, which will ride through there, through France (of course) and through three other countries (Spain, Italy, and Switzerland) before ending up in Paris on July 26. And you know what all that means: yes, doping! In recent years the drama taking place on France’s (Monaco’s, etc.) highways and byways has reliably been overshadowed by the twists and turns in individual riders’ fortunes caused by bad news emanating out of testing-labs about their urine and blood samples (and even by police raids on teams’ hotels), and then by the deliberations by the cycling authorities about how to react.

Sometimes the sort of doping-drama that has become part-and-parcel of the Tour de France experience has taken place far after the (alleged) winner rode over the finish-line in Paris, so that it has taken until months later for the world to learn which race-results were entirely bogus. But it often gets started early as well, and that certainly is the case this year, as we see in an article from Berlin’s Der Tagesspiegel: Quick-Step defends itself against doping accusations. Basically, Matthias Klappenbach’s piece describes how one of the cycling-teams entered in this year’s Tour, by the name of Quick-Step, already finds itself on the hot-seat. Allegations of doping practices come from one of its former riders, a certain Patrik Sinkewitz, who has specifically accused Quick-Step team leader Patrick Lefévère and team doctor Manuel Rodriguez Alonso of doping their riders – but over the period 2003-2005, it turns out, and in a statement that Sinkewitz submitted to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in 2007! As Klappenbach reports, it’s only recently that the WADA passed on Sinkewitz’s statement to the International Cycling Union, and it was also only earlier this week that these allegations were made public (in Germany, at least) in a TV program on the German ZDF network, called “Frontal 21.”

Quick-Step is naturally “shocked” at the “false and slanderous” allegations and has signalled its intention to go to court against them. But it needs to be careful, because it’s clear that that team is not really pure as the new-fallen snow: as the Dutch paper Algemeen Dagblad reports (Quick-Step team-leader relieved), Quick-Step team-member Tom Boonen was only allowed yesterday to participate after all in this year’s Tour de France, despite having tested positive for cocaine-use, due to a ruling from the French Olympic Committee’s arbitration panel. He had already been forced to miss last year’s Tour due to being caught for the same thing at a previous point. (Photo credit: Wladislaw Sojka)

The Iranian national football (i.e. soccer) team caused some comment during their World Cup qualification game against South Korea last Wednesday when a couple of them wore green wristbands, apparently as a gesture of support to the opposition movement behind Mir Hussein Mousavi. They wore them at least during the first half of the match, which ended in a 1-1 tie that took Iran out of World Cup qualification; the wristbands were gone as the players emerged on the field for the second half.

Now there is a report in the Dutch newspaper Trouw that some form of punishment is headed the team’s way. No less than the Iranian parliament today demanded an explanation from the Iranian football association and threatened the team with sanctions of some kind.

On the other hand, this news report, while somewhat short, nonetheless manages to mention twice that the Iranians were playing against Japan, when it was really the South Korean team. Should we therefore believe anything else it says? I recommend “Yes,” as Trouw is really usually among the better of the Dutch dailies. For what it’s worth, this piece is sourced to the Dutch national news agency ANP, anyway.

UPDATE: Yes, you better believe: via Andrew Sullivan’s weblog, word comes from the Guardian that four of the six players who dared to wear the green wristbands have been “retired” from football.

The Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad brings us the news today that, at a meeting of the EU Social Affairs Council, both German and Austria have chosen to continue to keep their labor markets closed to citizens from eight fellow EU countries which happen to be in “Eastern Europe”.*

This is disappointing for all true EU-believers, since “Freedom of Movement,” including that for the purpose of going to another member-state to work, is supposed to be one fundamental principle of the EU, fully accessible to all new citizens upon their country’s joining. Still, things used to be worse. Almost all the 15 member-states already in the Union at the time of the 10-nation expansion of 1 May 2004 imposed restrictions on the ability of the new EU citizens (except those from Malta and Cyprus) to come take jobs in their countries; Sweden, the UK, and Ireland were the only exceptions who truly lived up to their EU principles fully. (more…)

So reads this report from the Dutch daily De Volkskrant: the South Korean armed forces, starting in 2010, will take delivery of GBU-28 laser-guided bombs specifically designed to penetrate solid earth and/or concrete with their explosions. They have particular reason to find munitions like this useful – no, not to destroy hardened North Korean nuclear weapons sites (at least nothing like that is being publicly discussed) but rather to deal with the very many underground tunnels, most near the North-South Armistice Line, in which the North Koreans are known to be storing weapons and ammunition in support of any invasion of the South.

This development was recently revealed by an official at the South Korean Ministry of Defense. Of course, because of the recent North Korean nuclear explosion and rocket test-flights, and the accompanying heightened bellicose rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang, tensions are currently very high along that Armistice Line.

While Benjamin Netanyahu heads to the White House later today for his first official meeting with President Obama, is anyone listening to the Israeli Armed Forces Radio? At least the ANP, the Netherlands national press agency, is listening, and it provides the information that enables the Algemeen Dagblad to report on what is going on under the radar back in the Middle East while the American and Israeli heads of government have their discussions.

Whether the Israeli Armed Forces Radio broadcast in question is an explicit advertisement or not is unclear, but its point is to announce the opening of registration to purchase one of twenty new houses in Maskiot, a Jewish settler colony in the occupied West Bank. In fact, as we learn from its very own Wikipedia article, Maskiot is so deep into the West Bank – it’s way over on the other side from Israel, right on the Jordan river, for Heaven’s sake – that past attempts to expand it have drawn the publicly-expressed ire of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the British government, and even George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Where is the public anger now? Clearly this sort of thing, in addition to being a direct slap in the face to the Palestinian Authority, is tremendously counter-productive to the sort of two-state solution and peace negotiations which are the main elements of the desired American approach to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Does Netanyahu really remain unaware of this as he heads to meet with President Obama over precisely such measures, or is he just breathtakingly cynical?

Ah yes: Miss World! Miss Universe! Miss What-Have-You! They all raise loads of money and attract widespread media-interest. And did you know that they even have a beauty pageant for young misses in Saudi Arabia? Indeed they do, in the capital Riyadh; the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad is kind enough to report on this today (Miss Pageant in a niqab).

That reference to the niqab – namely the veil over the face worn by Muslim women – and for that matter to Saudi Arabia should warn you, though, that what is going on here is somewhat different from the normal template. Take “beauty”; in Saudi Arabia, it’s all about inner beauty, you see, which is good since naturally no sort of evening gown – much less bikini – competition could ever be allowed.

So how do they judge that? Apparently the whole evaluation-process takes ten weeks, and is conducted by a panel of all-female judges – and that last bit alone tells you quite a lot. What is examined is things like respect for elders and how contestants respond when asked about how they “discover their inner force.” There’s even a “bring-your-Mom-to-the-contest” day, during which contestants are evaluated as to their respectful interaction with their own and everyone else’s mother. At bottom as a fundamental consideration, as you might expect, is any given candidate’s fealty to “Islamic values.”

Not likely to be a top-ten television hit, then, either in the rest of the world or, I dare say, within the Kingdom itself. On the other hand, there’s some serious money involved: the woman with the “most beautiful soul,” as the AD puts it, walks away with a prize of $2,600. And that prospect has attracted this year a field of some 200 contestants.

UPDATE: What do you know: It looks like even the Saudi beauty pageant has fallen victim to scandal! Yes, topless photos have been discovered of the winner – you can even see her entire forehead.

[Cymbal crash] I wish I could take credit for that one. But no, it’s from Jay Leno.

For too many people – for far, far too many, in fact, but not for any of you readers of this weblog, I would wager – the only fact filed in their brains under “Netherlands” or “Holland” is “it’s that place where you can go smoke weed and it’s legal, man!” And that’s true: you can smoke weed here, and it’s legal, as long as you follow some trifling rules regarding time and place.

But Dutch culture also stems from a rather Calvinist historical background (think “Thou Shalt Not!”), which cannot but give rise to various paradoxes – if you’d rather not call them “hypocrisies” – such as that, while it’s legal to buy hash and marijuana in small amounts, it’s strictly-speaking illegal to supply the stuff in any commercially-meaningful amounts. And the public authorities take a particularly dim view of marijuana “farms” or “plantations.”

Combine all that with Dutch technical ingenuity, and what you can come up with as a result is what (fittingly) the Dutch religious newspaper Nederlands Dagblad is now reporting: Unmanned helicopter tracks down marijuana-cultivation. (more…)

Even as the remaining Somali pirate involved in last week’s dramatic hostage stand-off with the US Navy has arrived in New York to be put on trial there, further developments in the Indian Ocean have put the differences between the US and European approaches to the problem in stark relief. For last weekend the Dutch military and then the Canadians each captured a number of Somali pirates and then concluded that there was nothing they could do with them but let them go. As the leading Dutch daily the NRC Handelsblad reported in its coverage of the Dutch foreign minister’s visit to Washington at about the same point in time, these episodes contributed to some awkwardness in that encounter with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who noted that such actions were “not a good signal.”

Now according to a further NRC article, it looks like NATO has actually taken notice of Clinton’s remarks and realized that it needs to come up with something to fix this situation. (more…)

This year of 2009 marks a couple of anniversaries calling for celebration, like NATO’s 60th birthday that President Obama traveled to Europe earlier this month in part to commemorate, or likewise the 60th birthday of the Federal Republic of Germany coming up next month. There will be the 220th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which set off the French Revolution, on July 14th – and then of course, a bit more fresh in the mind, the twentieth anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination that that symbolized, coming up in November.

As we approach that latter celebration, a tiny but interesting detail has emerged concerning the exact sequence of events behind that “Fall of the Wall” on the evening (Central European Time) of 9 November, 1989. What that was basically all about was a massive swarm of citizens of East Berlin flooding to the Wall crossing-points – and then, indeed, over the border into West Berlin as they desired – motivated by the widespread belief that, in a drastic break from previous policy, the East German authorities would henceforth actually allow them to cross rather than shooting or at least arresting them, as would have previously been the case ever since the Wall’s erection starting on 13 August 1961. That understanding stemmed from a statement at a news conference just earlier that evening by Günter Schabowski, a member of the East German Politburo, to the effect that the full Politburo had decided to introduce a new travel policy allowing free movement by East German citizens to the West – whose coming-into-effect was said to be “immediate.” (more…)

You likely missed it in the thick series of happenings and photo-ops that have flooded the world’s front pages since Barack Obama first took flight last Tuesday for London, but there was a bit of a mini-crisis brewing at the NATO summit (his next stop after the G20 meeting in London) even as he addressed all those German and French students in Strasbourg at that “town hall” meeting on Friday. It wasn’t very complicated: the current Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was lined up to succeed Jaap de Hoop Scheffer as NATO Secretary-General at the summit, but there was a serious monkey-wrench in the works: the top Turkish leaders did not want Rasmussen in that post, and they were ready to insist that he not get it and so exercise the effective veto they and every other one of NATO’s 28 members have on such a top position. (The Turkish complaints against him related to the late 2005/early 2006 Danish cartoons affair, plus a Kurdish-language TV station – “Roj TV” – that broadcasts in Denmark.) Things even reached the point that – horrors! – the news conference scheduled for 1:00 PM on Saturday afternoon did not happen until a good two-and-a-half hours later, which is when De Hoop Scheffer could finally appear on the stage shaking hands with his Danish successor.

As befitting its status as one of Denmark’s best-regarded daily newspapers, Berlingske Tidende has some good coverage of this affair (NATO’s declaration-of-confidence in Denmark), written by Ole Bang Nielsen. First off, Nielsen makes it clear just what this appointment means to the Danes themselves, namely a recognition that Denmark is no longer just a “footnote-nation and hesitant member of NATO,” as well as a personal vote of support to Rasmussen himself. To get there past the Turkish opposition, though, truly took a tremendous diplomatic full-court press – “the large European NATO lands finally threw in all their political ballast against Turkey,” as Nielsen writes. Breaking up that NATO meeting without having Rasmussen in place as the Secretary-General would have been a humiliation – especially for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who basically had announced the day before that Rasmussen would be named – so those European countries did indeed throw in everything, including Turkey’s prospective EU membership. Yes, EU matters generally do not belong being linked to NATO issues (the memberships of the two organizations don’t match very exactly, anyway), but Nielsen writes that certain threats were made nonetheless against Turkey’s EU membership process should it continue to hold out against the Dane. It seems even that the EU enlargement commissioner (Olli Rehn, a Finn) was on-hand personally to utter authoritative remarks toward the Turks such as “This does not look good from a European perspective, if Turkey does not give way.” There you have it: ordinarily Rehn did not even belong there at the NATO meeting at all, since he is an EU official, and because Finland is not a member of NATO anyway. (more…)

One distinct Amsterdam “happening” that we’ve been glad to cover previously in these pages is the “Gay Pride” festival, occurring each year the first weekend of August and with a crowded, often rather bawdy boat-parade along the outermost of the city’s famous set of concentric canals, the Prinsengracht, as its centerpiece. It’s always a blast for those who can hitch a ride along with one of the boats, or even get the funds together for one’s organization to sponsor its own such boat – as long as your organization does not mind the affiliation with the homosexual cause. These days, though, when it comes to Amsterdam it’s hard to think of many organizations that would mind, other than the Muslim ones.

Then again, up to now the Dutch military has also not been too happy with any sign of its presence at the Gay Pride parade – like soldiers floating along on the boats while in uniform, something that happened last year and led to some sort of uproar (presumably including sanctions against those military personnel). But now that has changed; the Volkskrant reports today (but in a story credited to the Dutch news agency ANP) that permanent Defense Ministry undersecretary (Staatssecretaris) Jack de Vries has announced, through a spokesman, that participating in Gay Pride in your uniform is OK – but that that should still in no way be interpreted as official Defense Ministry participation in, or endorsement of, the festival.

Perhaps the really interesting thing here is that this is not just some spontaneous decision from the Ministry, but rather is in reaction to encouragement from the Dutch lower house of Parliament (the Tweede Kamer) to make such a policy change. That, it seems, was ultimately among the more significant follow-on effects of last year’s controversy.

Here in the Netherlands we also have a prominent financial sector, dominated by a handfull of internationally-operating banks (e.g. ABN Amro, ING, even Rabobank) for which the value of the assets of any single one alone exceeds the national GDP. It follows that developments here over the past six months or so have more-or-less echoed the more-prominent financial travails in, say, the US or Great Britain: overindulgence in promising new asset-classes – often involving American real estate – which then turn out to be “toxic,” concerns over solvency, government injections of capital through one means or another, and in general some rather poor performance on the part of financial executives when it comes to sober risk analysis and maintaining their institutions’ very financial viability.

What is also not missing from the Dutch experience is the phenomenon that has gotten much of the American and British public exercised in recent weeks, namely that of financial executives walking away with huge monetary bonuses in the face of what is commonly understood as the meaning of “bonus” (“paid over and above base salary to reward extraordinary performance”) and the glaring absence of any merit that would justify them. (more…)

In the market for a new automobile? Didn’t think so, even though it’s the “world’s cheapest car” that I’m talking about here, reported on by the Dutch De Volkskrant. But the Nano, manufactured in India by Tata Motors and finally ready to be offered for sale starting today, is not really targeted at the vast majority of this weblog’s readers in any event: only a 625cc engine, hand-cranked windows like in the days of yore, not even any power-steering option. The price is $2,000 apiece (that’s presumably US dollars), and the whole idea is naturally to position the Nano as an “entry-level” vehicle for those parts of the world where vehicle-ownership levels still lag behind Western standards.

Reading the Volkskrant article, it’s hard to escape the impression that this whole project has been a bit star-crossed from the beginning – quite apart from the larger, and highly-debatable, question of whether the world in the year 2009 really needs a new variety of mass-produced, internal-combustion-engine-powered vehicle. Sales were supposed to start back last October; no, it wasn’t the storm of international financial chaos raging back then that held up the Nano’s unveiling, but rather the unexpected closing of a factory in East India that was supposed to assemble the things, as local farmers protested against the loss of agricultural land its existence entailed.

As things stand, the replacement factory – over in the west of India now – is still gearing up, so the supply of new Nanos is going to be limited for a while. Industry analysts quoted in the article estimate that it will take five to seven years before this new line will be profitable for its parent company. While even the presumed sales by that point will still account for only a small part of Tata Motors’ turnover, you have to admire the audacity of Ratan Tata, the Indian industrialist behind the Tata Group conglomerate: again, neither the short-run (in view of the world’s current economic condition) nor the long-run (environmental concerns over the burning of fossil fuels) would seem to favor this initiative.

In the ongoing chronicle of winners and losers from the current economic difficulties, while there is an overwhelming preponderance of the latter, it is interesting to see McDonalds among the former, actually reporting increased sales over the past year. As the nutrition-professor’s quotation in that linked article says, “It’s cheap and full of calories, and you know what you are getting.”

The same thing is happening over here in the Netherlands, it seems – although not necessarily with McDonalds. As an article by Wouter Keuning now appearing in De Volkskrant puts it in the headline, Dutchman fights through the crisis with bitterbal and kroket. Not familiar with them? To cook up these two quintessentially-Dutch delicacies (found nowhere else) you essentially take blobs of animal fat (usually from beef) – and fry them! The basic difference is that the bitterbal is small – of 3-5 cm diameter – and the kroket is somewhat larger and more cylindrical in shape. The most notable manufacturer of these is the Amsterdam firm Van Dobben (which Keuning identifies as currently reporting particularly improved sales-figures, just like McDonalds), and you can check out their website if you still need help in visualizing what we’re talking about here. (That’s a kroket in a bun in the center there, and the bitterballen are those round things on the plate to the right. But watch out, because if you click to go further into the site you’ll find that everything is in Dutch.)

It has long been shown in opinion surveys that it is these two delicacies which Dutch people living outside Holland’s (or Flanders’) borders most miss from their lives back home, where in most cities you can usually quickly satiate any craving for them at a near-by fast-food-in-the-window-type outlet (such as pictured; photo credit Kees Jonker, from Flickr). But now it is also apparent that this is the sort of food that Dutch people still back home are down-shifting to financially, now that money for many has become somewhat too tight for a visit to a restaurant. And for the sheer comfort of it as well (perhaps recalling Mama’s bitterballen?): the financial director of Royaan, a firm which works with Van Dobben to distribute such concoctions, is quoted that “I think that people in these times are looking for a bit of solace in this sort of product.”

That’s one theory, but I can think of another. Obviously, these chunks of deep-fried pieces of fat are tremendously unhealthy to eat on any regular basis over the long- and even medium-term. Could their sudden increased popularity rather bear witness to a sort of widespread death-wish among the Dutch population, to some drastic loss of confidence in the utility of a long, healthy life? (And I pose the same question when it comes to McDonalds’ improved sales, for that matter.)