The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are almost upon us, and it’s safe to say that the overwhelming feeling for outsiders is one of trepidation. That the Winter Games will take place in an area usually designated geographically as “sub-tropical” is but humorous; that they will be located within a region where Russia has been struggling since the fall of the Soviet Union with violent local independence movements is a much more serious proposition. And the violent groups that will want to disrupt the Olympics were clever in sowing such fear by their twin attacks around Christmas in the near-by (by Russian standards) city of Volgograd, which killed a combined total of 34 people.

The Dutch are no slouches when it comes to winter sports, so there will be a sizeable contingent from the Netherlands at the Sochi games, together with an official visit by King Willem Alexander and Queen Máxima, Premier Mark Rutte and other high officials. Will those representatives be safe there? The newspaper Trouw tries to set its readers’ fears at ease today with an article entitled The Netherlands will keep a close eye on Sochi security.

The author (uncredited; from the Dutch press agency ANP) hardly aids his/her own cause with a column-heading that reads “Possible attacks.” Still, what’s notable here is not what the Netherlands is doing, but the listing of some of the security provisions some other nations will be taking.

• The Americans: They have posted two Navy ships just offshore in the Black Sea – the better to start evacuating American citizens should things start to go haywire onshore.
• The French: They are actually sending special anti-terror police along to guard their athletes. And not just one variety, but two: the GIGN, “specialized in ending hostage situations” (OK, that’s a relief), and the RAID*, “an elite corps of the national police.”

Sadly, once you read about those steps the Americans and French are taking, the corresponding Dutch measures cannot help but strike you as rather inadequate. They include an official warning from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that everyone needs to be careful:

. . . it turns out that possible attacks in Russia, above all in city centers and South Russia, must be taken into account. You are advised when traveling in Russia to be extra-vigilant, above all at locations such as bus- and train stations, airfields or when traveling with public transport.

Oh, and if you do get into trouble, the Dutch Embassy will be open 24/7! Of course, that is way off in Moscow; but there will also be a “consular window” available at the Holland Heineken House there in Sochi.

Don’t worry, it goes on, “[c]alamity plans have been coordinated and scenarios worked out.” So if there is violence at the Winter Olympics, the Dutch government will at least be able rather easily to imagine what is happening!

The point? Is it that the Netherlands – and every other country sending substantial numbers of its athletes to the Games, for that matter – should emulate French or American practice and send along, in effect, para-military bodyguards? No, it’s that things have reached the point – resulting from the ill-considered (and almost certainly corrupt) decision to put the 2014 Winter Games here in the first place – that such worries are arising at all.

* A brilliant acronym, you’ll surely agree! It actually stands for Recherche, d’Assistance, d’Intervention et de Dissuasion – Investigation, Assistance, Intervention and Dissuasion.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.)

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.

I wanted to pass along this remarkable photo that I spotted from an on-line article in the Dutch daily Trouw which merely reports that the Israelis are now having national elections, what the weather is like there for them, etc. The scene is apparently in Israel, which of course makes sense for the display of election-billboards for both Kadima candidate (and current Israeli foreign minister, and woman) Tzipi Livni and Likud candidate Binyamin Netanyahu. Furthermore, it’s evident that Netanyahu’s billboard is in Hebrew, which also places the scene somewhere in Israel.

On the other hand, for some reason Livni’s billboard is in French, and reads Tzipi Livni: L’homme de la situation, which means “Tzipi Livni: The man of the situation”! Remarkable, even if the expression is the equivalent to the English “The man for the hour.”

Christian or Jew, Moslim or Shinto, the whole world’s 2008 holiday spirit has taken a severe beaten ever since right after Christmas Day itself by the still-escalating violent tit-for-tat being played out in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. The whole affair seems to be a classic case of escalating rage on both sides spiralling to some ultimate calamity, with little room to try to talk sense to either side to draw them back from the brink. Prospects for any satisfactory resolution are considerably worsened by a political vacuum where the world’s eyes would ordinarily turn for the exercise of some sort of restraint on Israel, namely Washington: at only a little over twenty days to his departure, George W. Bush utterly lacks any more credibility generally, much less on Middle East matters (warning: link leads to rude language!), while President-Elect Obama is sticking with his “one president at a time” mantra.

Could this provide an opening for the EU to try to provide some helpful intervention of its own? Maybe one last hurrah for what has turned out to be an extraordinarily activist six-month EU presidency for France and her president, Nicolas Sarkozy? That is a tempting thought, except that Sarkozy, his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and various other family are currently on holiday in Brazil. (They had to fly there, where it’s warm at this time of year, for an official state visit, you see. It all amounts to little more than the sort of tacking-on-a-vacation-to-the-end-of-a-company-paid-business-trip in which I wager most of the readers of this weblog have indulged at least once.) Nonetheless, Thijs Bermand and Tineke Bennema of the Dutch daily Trouw offer the proposition that the EU does have a role that it can play by virtue of the Assocition Agreement with Israel that is still pending (EU can make a difference in MidEast conflict). (more…)

These are weird times; governments around the world are doing some strange things, generally in response to urgent budgetary pressures. You might have read in the New York Times about how the Australian navy is about to let its sailors go off on a two-month leave – the report was even on the homepage of that newspaper’s website for a time. And now word comes from the Dutch newspaper Trouw: Athens government to free half of its prisoners.

(It’s true that articles of this sort referencing happenings in another European country would usually cause me to go to that other country’s on-line press to seek more first-hand reports there, but in this case all I can do is plead “It’s all Greek to me!”)

That’s around 6,000 convicted criminals that the Greek authorities are planning to release, pending approval by parliament, according to an announcement by Sotiris Hatzigakis, the Greek Justice Minister. But there may be another 1,500 added to that if he also is allowed to institute another measure reducing the allowable duration of what the Trouw report (credited to the ANP press agency) terms “temporary custody,” which I interpret to mean pre-trial detention – so at least many of those added 1,500 may not be actual lawbreakers.

Why do they want to do this? Overcrowding. If 6,000 is the half, then that means that there are around 12,000 inmates in Greek jails, which the article reports have an official capacity of only 7,500. And how can they be sure that the jails won’t just fill up to bursting again? Well, it seems that drugs laws in Greece are somewhat stricter than the EU norm. (Who would have thought it?) “In the long run,” as the Trouw article puts it (op de lange termijn), the parliament is supposed to take up the task of adjusting those laws accordingly.

Yes, the dollar is nowadays considerably stronger versus most other major world currencies than it has been in a long while. Here’s my pet theory about why that is: it’s due to the veritable flood of news correspondents from outside the US who have traveled there – many taking their camera-crews along with them – to try to capture for their readers back home vignettes of American life in the context of the election that reveal some basic essence of where that country is going. I can’t even count by now all the “road trip through America” article-series I have seen sponsored by various foreign publications, for example. (Here’s the one from the Guardian, if you want a taste.)

Pauline Michgelsen is a writer who has been dispatched to the States by the excellent Dutch daily Trouw, and while she doesn’t seem to be road-trippin’ through the highways and by-ways in some caravan, in her recent piece Learning to vote she makes a bolder move: she deliberately infiltrates a gathering held by that band of subversives famously sworn to undermine the functioning of American elections in particular, and the American Way in general. I’m talking here about ACORN, of course, and Michgelsen somehow manages both to learn of the secret handshake required to gain access to a “Know your rights” evening held inside a Lutheran church in Lansing, MI and even make her way out of there at the end intact. (more…)

It looks like the Obama presidential campaign finally sent out its promised and long-awaited SMS message announcing its choice of Joe Biden for vice-presidential nominee at that storied hour of 3:00 AM on Saturday. While that meant that all but the most obsessive American politics-junkies would have to wake up to learn of the news, over here in most of Europe (on Central European Time) it was already 9:00 in the morning and we were getting impatient over our coffee and breakfast for the Word. (Admittedly, a couple of hours previously outlets like the BBC World Service were already passing along the likelihood that it would be Biden, based upon key clues – such as the departure of an Obama campaign jet from Chicago’s Midway Airport headed for Delaware – tracked down by the American press.)

Now that Word has come, together with a presentation to the public of the combined ticket at a gala event in Obama’s political hometown, Springfield, Illinois. And while the McCain has already come forward with its response, so have commentators in the European press. (more…)

How about that Michael Phelps, hey? And the rest of his teammates on the American swim-team, too: not only is gold raining down on them, but an incredible number of swimming world-records are being broken at these Beijing Olympics as well. It’s phenomenal! The Olympic Games have not seen anything like this since . . . well, perhaps since the Winter Games of 1998 in Nagano, Japan, which occurred in the period when clap skates were coming into widespread use for the first time, and as a result “long track” speed-skating records were broken wholesale. (more…)

OK, let’s talk about the Olympics, then. But not the 2008 Beijing Olympics – rather, the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics! Yes, we pride ourselves here at EuroSavant on our solipsism, but the immediate motive for this nostalgic look 80 years backward is the excellent recent article in the Dutch newspaper Trouw by Haro Hielkema, Amsterdam: Example for the Rest, which is itself largely derived from the book Model voor de toekomst – Amsterdam, Olympische Spelen 1928 by Ruud Paauw and Jaap Visser (which was itself only published a few weeks ago, that is, just before the opening of the Beijing Games – which I bet will not surprise you at all). (more…)

Whatever happened to the Zuiderzee?

Literally the “South Sea,” this was a characteristic geographic feature of Holland that many of you may have caught mention of when reading about Rembrandt, say, or about the Dutch East India Company (or, for that matter, the Dutch West India Company), whose ships generally set sail from Amsterdam through the Zuiderzee on their way to found/supply/exploit the various Dutch colonies in the world.

But you don’t hear about the Zuiderzee nowadays, and that’s for a good reason: it was eliminated back in 1933. No, that big body of water lying in the middle of the Netherlands did not just dry up, but in that year it was rather cut off from the North Sea and turned into basically a big lake by a modern and uniquely Dutch engineering marvel, the Afsluitdijk, or “Closure Dike,” spanning 32 km/20 miles from the provinces of North Holland in the West to Friesland in the East. The Zuiderzee was at that point renamed the IJsselmeer (after the IJssel, the main river to run into it) and slowly but surely turned into a fresh-water lake. (more…)

(Footnote out of the way first: * As opposed to doin’ the Foggy Mountain Breakdown, by Earl Scruggs – and folks, that link there actually takes you to a webpage showing the guitar fingerings for playing this timeless bluegrass classic!)

Prospects for a “Yes” vote on the proposed EU Constitutional Treaty are under pressure these days not only in France but also here in the Netherlands. Well, at least “Yes” is currently ahead of “No” by only about ten percentage points in the polls, which is taken to be a worrying sign. So cabinet ministers are swinging into action to tout the Constitution, including Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner who, as reported in the newspaper Trouw (registration required) has warned against the danger of war if the Constitution is not adopted.

War? Yes, war: Because without the more authoritative and more effective EU institutions that the Constitution will supposedly bring into being, Europe’s inherent “irritation, suspicion, and distrust” threatens to escalate out of control. Just like happened in the mid-1990s in the Balkans: “Yugoslavia was more integrated than the [European] Union is now, but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war.” (more…)

Last Wednesday evening (1 December) Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands died in hospital at Utrecht, at the age of 93. He had been the husband, or “prince-consort,” of Queen Juliana (mother of the present Queen Beatrix), who herself died earlier this year, on March 20. The highlight of the service to his adopted country that this German-born prince performed was no doubt his role during Holland’s occupation in World War II, when he commanded the Dutch resistance from his post in London. The day after his death, as you would expect the Dutch press was filled with remembrance and tribute articles, even the financial press (free registration required). These included, from the Algemeen Dagblad, A Fighter to the End (free registration required), which is perhaps a strange title since, shortly after being admitted to the hospital for the last time, the Prince instructed his doctors not to intervene anymore. Plus, he had reportedly communicated to friends the loss of his will to live after the death of his wife in the spring. Also from the AD: the tribute They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore, by Marc Kruyswijk. Make them how? Namely “difficult, but full of character, headstrong, but colorful. Convinced that he is right – whether he was right or not.” Well, we’ll see how “right” Prince Bernhard was.

It only took one day later for the dirty laundry to start being laid out in public. And for all his wartime record, the Prince had quite a load of dirty laundry indeed that he had accumulated through his life. (more…)

The new European Commission started work today – finally. They were supposed to start work on November 1, but got held up by one Rocco Buttiglioni, the Italian Commission candidate who was supposed to get the Justice and Home Affairs portfolio. In nomination hearings before a European Parliament committee, Buttiglione was not shy in setting forth his personal value-system in which homosexuals are sinners and women encouraged to stay home and care for the children. Those sorts of sentiments just won’t do for the EU of the 21st century, to the extent that if the Parliament had no other choice but to reject the entire new Commission proposed by Commission President Jose Manual Barroso in order to keep Buttiglione from taking his place within it – and, the way the EU’s rules now stand, it didn’t – then fine, they were willing to reject the entire new Commission. Barroso pulled back from this brink and managed to get rid of Buttiglioni and find another Italian much more to everyone’s liking.

The new token Italian – but Italians, don’t get offended: every one of the 25 member-states gets a “token” of its own on the Commission – turned out to be a very safe choice, namely Franco Frattini, or the Italian government official who is supposed to be most congenial to foreigners, that is, the foreign minister. (more…)