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…)

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…)

It’s coming on Christmas, but it’s also coming on the end of 2008, and so it’s time to look ahead to 2009. Economically, things do not look good. The leading Dutch business newspaper Het Financiële Dagblad has already picked up on remarks from Vice President-elect Joe Biden that will be televised later today on This Week with George Stephanopoulos that the US economy is in danger of “absolutely tanking.” (You can get the run-down in English plus a brief video of their interview here.)

Right, but what about closer to (the €S) home, what about the Netherlands’ economy? Also from Het Financiële Dagblad, we get some good news straight from the Dutch premier Jan Peter Balkenende that he is confident that the strong character of the Dutch will get them through the hard times. (more…)

The website Politico came out yesterday (fittingly, a Sunday) with an article noting that President-elect Obama has yet to attend church – any church – since he won the election. His two predecessors did manage to do that as they waited to take office – George W. even headed to services while the 2000 election results were completely up in the air in recounts and litigation, poor fellow – but Obama has instead chosen to spend his Sunday mornings at the gym.

A Dutch paper this morning picked up on this story, and naturally it was the Nederlands Dagblad, an explicitly Christian newspaper: Obama waits on going to church. (No sign of the story, though, on the website of that other Dutch Christian newspaper, the Reformatorisch Dagblad.) Their coverage (from the “foreign editor”) for the most part repeats that of Politico, although they also obliquely justify why it might be that the Obama’s have not yet found their new church-home, by mentioning that which church they might choose is currently the subject of feverish speculation equal to that which attended the choice of Sidwell Friends as their daughters’ new school. And they quote an unnamed Obama staff-member reassuring us that “The Obama family attaches much worth to religious experience in a church.”

Here’s something you’ll be glad to hear: the Netherlands stands ready to assist with the mooted closure of the prison at Guantánamo Bay that the Obama transition team is reported to be working on. As reported in the Dutch Christian newspaper Nederlands Dagblad (“Help US close cell on Cuba”), Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen stated “I hope that the closing of Guantánamo Bay will be one of Obama’s first deeds. We want to actively support him with that.”

Great! So does that mean, for example, that the Netherlands will be willing to take in some of the 250-or-so prisoners who remain? You know, probably some of them are actually terroristic nasties, but nasties whom US authorities will nonetheless have problems ever prosecuting because of how some of the evidence against them was gained (i.e. by torture). So while it’s conceivable that about the only thing that can eventually be done is to set them free, quite often their native countries don’t really want to have them back.

Well . . . not so fast. The good Foreign Minister will first need to consult with his colleague, the Justice Minister: “I want to take a look with Hirsch Balin [that’s the Dutch Justice Minister] how they can get a trial in accord with our norms and values.”

Much ink has been spilled lately – or, if you like, billions of computer-screen pixels have been illuminated – in the wake of the Russian military incursion into Georgia over the new aggressiveness this signals in Russia’s outlook towards the outside world, particularly in situations enabling that country’s leaders to manufacture a pretext to invade based around “protecting” Russian nationals residing in some neighboring country. Which one of those neighbors is likely as the next candidate for Moscow’s attentions? You can bet that any remaining summer leave has been revoked as officials in both the ministries of foreign affairs and defense scramble to update their position statements and contingency plans in Kiev, Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Baku, Yerevan – and in Chisinau.

Chisinau? You might recall that as the capital of the Republic of Moldova. It may not share any border with Russia, but in fact it is one country that has more to worry about in the face of the new Russian assertiveness than most, as André Tibold of the Nederlands Dagblad reminds us today (Moldova is also worried about provocations). (more…)

I’ve mentioned before in this space the fascinating evangelical outliers to the usual crowd of stolidly-secular European on-line newspapers, the Dutch publications Nederlands Dagblad (“Christianly engaged”) and Reformatorisch Dagblad. Damn (- whoops! Sorry . . .): two of them, even, and in a country of only 16 million souls!

At least these papers definitely provide an alternative take on happenings in the public sphere, both national and international. (more…)

The Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad is somewhat of an outlier in the European media sphere, as it is expressly a Christian newspaper. You can see right there in its logo, written at the top: Christelijk betrokken, or “Engaged in a Christian manner” (“Christianly engaged,” if you like). Surf to the paper’s website on Sunday and you’ll find nothing: that’s the Lord’s day of rest, after all.

It’s not alone, though: the Reformatorisch Dagblad, or “Reformed Daily,” is similar, although that website does stay open on Sundays. People should not confuse the allegedly “anything goes” atmosphere of cosmopolitan cities like Amsterdam (see this weblog’s recent coverage of the famous yearly Gay Pride parade there, for example) with Dutch culture as a whole, which in fact features some enclaves which can easily hold their own in the Christian piety department with any of the American Amish communities.

The Nederlands Dagblad reports today, as the 2008 Olympic Games open in Beijing, that the Chinese church leader Zhang Mingxuan was recently arrested by the authorities in his hometown in the province of Henan, along with his wife and another associate, and brought to an office of the “security services” in that province’s capital, Zhengzhou. This follows Zhang’s being driven out of his Beijing by the authorities at the beginning of last month, and then out of the city itself two weeks ago.

The Stichting De Ondergrondse Kerk (a Dutch name, of course: “Foundation of the Underground Church”) has issued a call to make these opening days of the Olympic Games days of prayer on behalf of the persecuted Christians in China.

There’s a somewhat strange meme (really mini-meme) slowly starting to make the rounds of the world’s press: Bono (that’s right, U2’s lead singer) as candidate to replace World Bank president James Wolfensohn after his scheduled departure this upcoming May. American readers may be more familiar with this concept than most, since I understand that Treasury Secretary John Snow advanced something like that idea recently on the ABC television network.

The thought didn’t start with Snow, however, as Ruurd Ubels makes clear in coverage of the issue in the Netherlands’ Nederlands Dagblad. (That’s the openly “Christian” – meaning Reformed Protestant – Dutch newspaper.) (more…)

All too often in modern times progress turns out to be a matter of two steps forward accompanied by at least one step back. So we have, for example, that public-health scourge that I can remember hearing about from the 1950s: no, not polio, but chapped lips. At the time, this malady was a source of concern to many leading American news publications, which nonetheless optimistically continued to maintain that “We can lick this problem!” (At least I remember that this was covered back then in Mad Magazine; I guess that shows you the limits to the research I have time to undertake.) As we know, modern technology eventually stepped in via the marketplace, in the form of commercially-sold tubes of lip balm, to bear out those magazines’ optimism. But now the curse of lip balm addiction has reared its ugly head, at least according to yesterday’s report (“Enjoy, But Smear It On with Moderation”) from the Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad. (more…)

There was good, intriguing stuff on Saturday from what is perhaps a suprizing source: the Nederlands Dagblad (“Dutch Newspaper”), which with its slogan Christelijk betrokken (“Involved in Christ”) on the masthead of its Internet edition puts its religious affiliation front-and-center. The ND has taken its time in considering the State of the Union message and fiscal 2005 federal government budget George W. Bush delivered over a week ago, presumably the better to produce a more profound analysis to share with its readers. The main point of that analysis is found in the article’s title: How George W. Bush Threatens the World’s Economy. The US has gone from Bill Clinton’s $127 billion budget surplus to a deficit of $521 billion, and, so writes author Ruurd Ubels, that has earned the President “scorn and derision” in his own country. But troubles like that in the world’s biggest economy cannot help but spill over to others. (more…)

Today is Holland Day at EuroSavant! The good reason for that is that yesterday was Prinsjesdag, or the third Tuesday in September, which is when every year the Dutch Queen Beatrix rides an elaborate, old-fashioned coach to the Binnenhof in the Hague, the Dutch house of parliament, to read out a speech which the current government provides her with, which lays out that government’s program for the year. It probably comes as no surprise to you that this year’s government program has already provoked much wailing and gnashing of teeth: €10 billion to be saved this fiscal year, €7 billion the next, and so cut-backs in all sorts of government programs and services held dear by Dutch society.

Given that good reason to make today “Holland Day,” though, I’m going to ignore it – too boring, and too specific to Dutch conditions. If you don’t live here, why would you want to know about that? In fact, you’ve already discovered everything you would want and need to know in my two sentences above.

No, if it’s to be “Holland Day,” let’s devote our attention to something a bit more interesting, to a phenomenon out of Dutch society that does pique the interest even of those who are not native Hollanders: bordellos. Does it come as a surprise to you that, recently, even the municipal authorities of Rotterdam have gotten themselves in to the business of setting up a bawdy house? (more…)

In what is otherwise a Dutch press mainly preoccupied with the fierce summer heat and the related hazards it brings (forest fires; something called blauwalgen – “blue algae?” – that actually looks like an oil patch on the water and can cause health problems for swimmers; swimmers drowning in those outdoor water-sports areas not actually denied them by the presence of blauwalgen), one subset of Dutch society is busy getting set for more attacks. Indeed, more attacks have been explicitly forecast, resulting in a general alert having been just recently sounded for only the second time this year. (And it looks like it just might be serious this time, folks: apparently no part of recent indications pointing to imminent mayhem originate from British intelligence.) (more…)

It’s Sunday, so let me take break – let me return home from Afghanistan (so-to-say: see yesterday’s entry if you don’t get what I mean) and consider what’s in the Dutch press. Ironically, the Dutch press doesn’t publish on Sunday. While in the US Sunday is the day for the often-massive Sunday newspaper editions (the New York Times tops the scales, probably at several kilograms, but many others are almost as big), and even Germany has its special Sunday papers (e.g. Welt am Sonntag), in Holland there’s still that strong Dutch Reformed Church/Calvinist tradition of no work on Sunday.

So am I pulling your leg? Certainly not! – let’s take a look at the Dutch papers, from yesterday. I promise you there are some interesting articles. (Actually, you’ll probably like best the “Saddam’s Waiter Tells All!” article, that I discuss immediately following. Click off to it now, I don’t mind – just come back here when you’re finished!) When it came to Dutch topics treated in the Dutch press, what particularly struck me this Sunday were reports about the resurgence of that ages-old threat to public order here: that’s right, swearing (i.e. uttering naughty words, in public). (more…)