Showing posts with label Holland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Holland. Show all posts
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Monday, April 29, 2013
BBC: Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has made a farewell national address on the eve of her abdication and investiture of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander.
The queen thanked the Dutch people for their "heart-warming displays of affection" and also paid tribute to her late husband, Prince Claus.
The queen was also attending a sumptuous gala dinner in her honour at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
She has been head of state since 1980, when her mother abdicated.
In her televised address, Queen Beatrix said that the people's devotion had given her the strength to carry on.
"Without your heart-warming and encouraging displays of affection, the burdens, which certainly have existed, would have weighed heavily."
Paying tribute to her late husband, Prince Claus, who died in 2002, she said he had helped modernise the House of Orange.
"Perhaps history will bear out that the choice of my partner was my best decision."
Monday evening's gala dinner was being attended by her family and other invited royals and high-ranking dignitaries. » | Monday, April 29, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Friday, April 12, 2013
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL – OP ED: In a nation of equals, I shudder to hear fellow citizens addressed as 'your royal highness.'
In my country, one family has a monopoly on the position of head of state. No, I'm not from North Korea, but from the Netherlands, where after 30 years on the throne, Queen Beatrix of Orange will abdicate at the end of this month to her son Willem-Alexander.
The ceremony will receive world-wide attention—and since this is royalty we're talking about, expect it to be fawning. Television will present the fairy tale of a happy nation united under its new king.
Well, count me out. I am one of many Dutch citizens who think it is time for us to do what America and most other countries did long ago: take leave of our monarchs.
The United States made me a republican. (With a small R, that is.) Having lived there for 30 years, I can no longer tolerate a system that has just one requirement for the top job: being from the right family. Most republics select their heads of state based on merit, but in Holland no special talents are needed to become king.
Indeed, even monarchists have questioned whether Willem-Alexander is up to the job that he will inherit and from which he cannot be fired. They console themselves with the thought that Maxima, his Argentine wife and our future queen, is smart enough to pick up the slack if needed.
How is it possible that the Dutch continue to set such a low bar for their democracy? I don't want to call my countrymen brainwashed, but I have noticed that geographic distance has given me and many other Dutch émigrés a different perspective on the monarchy. As Americans living abroad know, it becomes easier to question one's national values when you are not constantly exposed to messages reinforcing them. In Holland the queen's face is on euro coins and on postage stamps, the national anthem is an ode to her family, and the Dutch observe the Queen's birthday in the way Americans celebrate Independence Day. Media coverage is by and large reverential if not unctuous. Scandals are quickly forgotten.
In a country known for its outspokenness, the monarchy may well be the last taboo. Unlike the U.K., Holland has no politicians publicly making a case against the monarchy. Ever since the queen announced her decision to abdicate, many aspects of the succession have been debated: May fur be used in the royal robe? Should parliamentarians pledge loyalty to the king? But almost no one has raised the most fundamental and obvious question: Should we call it quits? » | Max Westerman * | Wednesday, April 03, 2013
* Mr. Westerman, a former Newsweek reporter, covered the U.S. for 15 years as a correspondent for Dutch television.
Thursday, April 04, 2013
BIKYA NEWS: DUBAI: A Dutch woman living in Dubai pleaded not guilty in a court on Monday after being charged with insulting Islam and insulting the police after she had called them to report a personal attack. She said that while she had been drinking, she did not insult religion or the police officers.
“I’m not guilty for insulting the policemen and religion, but yes I consumed alcohol,” the 28-year-old Dutch woman told the court.
It is the latest in a string of “crimes” against woman after they had initially called the police.
She could face up to one-year in prison or deportation. » | Sharifa Ghanem | BN | Thursday, April 04, 2013
ARUTZ SHEVA: In shock, Wiesenthal Center wrote Holland's PM after Dutch teens expressed regret on TV that Hitler left some Jews alive. PM response below.
Young Dutch immigrant teenagers expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and his efforts to murder Jews in a video aired last month on Netherland 2 TV. At the time, Arutz Shevareported the shocking event, ignored by most of the Dutch and world media, and that resulted - even more shockingly – in the interviewer who criticized them having to go into hiding and receive police protection.
The Wiesenthal Center sent a strong letter of objection to Holland's prime minister saying "The statements...are deeply dismaying, especially considering that they were made in the country that was the home of Anne Frank..." and adding that "it was even more shocking to hear that during the video the students who spoke claimed that their feelings were shared by native Dutch teenagers, saying 'Nobody in our school likes Jews'." Arutz Sheva has received a copy of Mr. Rutte's hitherto unpublished response: » | Arutz Sheva staff | Thursday, April 04, 2013
Friday, October 12, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
In his sixth report on the costs of European heads of state, Herman Matthijs, professor of administrative science and public finances at Ghent University, notes the Royal Family had cut spending .
Queen Elizabeth II's cost to the taxpayer has fallen as result of austerity measures which have been deeper and faster than reductions to the Dutch monarchy's annual bill at a time when belt-tightening is affecting all of Europe's royal families.
Prof Matthijs's research found that the cost of British monarchy, praised as one of the most open about its finances, had been reduced by 16 per cent, falling from £35.5 million to £29.7m over the last year.
The £30.7 million Dutch bill for Queen Beatrix and her children, including £14m in personal allowances, is four times the cost of keeping the Spanish royal family, a country that is at heart of the eurozone's debt crisis.
Moreover, the burden to taxpayers of the Dutch royal family, Europe's most expensive, is proportionately heavier because the population of the Netherlands is almost a third of the size of Spain's and a mere quarter of Britain's. » | Bruno Waterfield | Thursday, July 19, 2012
Saturday, May 26, 2012
BBC: Dutch-born Nazi war criminal Klaas Carel Faber has died in Germany at the age of 90.
Faber, who served in an SS unit, was second on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre list of most-wanted Nazi criminals.
He was sentenced to death in 1947 for the deaths of 22 Jews at the Westerbork transit camp [D]. His term was later commuted to life.
A hospital official in the southern Bavarian town of Ingolstadt confirmed that he had died on Thursday, according to Associated Press. He reportedly died of kidney failure.
Faber had lived as a free man in Germany despite several attempts to try or extradite him.
Germany refused his extradition on the grounds that he was a German citizen. » | Saturday, May 26, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
AL JAZEERA ENGLISH: Minority government set to prohibit niqabs and burqas and other forms of clothing that cover the face.
The Dutch minority government plans to ban Muslim face veils such as burqas and other forms of clothing that cover the face from next year.
The ban would make the Netherlands, where 1 million out of 17 million people are Muslim, the second EU country to ban the burqa after France, and would apply to face-covering veils if they were worn in public.
"People should be able to look at each other's faces and recognise each other when they meet," the interior affairs ministry said in a statement on Friday.
The ban will also apply to balaclavas and motorcycle helmets when worn in in[f]appropriate places, such as inside a store, Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Verhagen told reporters, denying that this was a ban on religious clothing. » | Friday, January 27, 2012
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
THE SPECTATOR: A week ago, the offices of the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo were burned down. This attack came after it advertised the founder of Islam, Muhammad, as 'editor-in-chief' of the new issue. The move was a light-hearted response to the very serious matter of the election of an Islamist party (the Ennahda party) as the leading party in Tunisia (a result which, incidentally, appears not to have greatly bothered most European media).
As the staff of Charlie Hebdo contemplated the ruins of their magazine, a much grander and richer magazine, Time, ran one of those pieces which have become familiar whenever there is an Islamist assault against free speech. As Nick Cohen has also noted, the Paris correspondent of Time magazine –- the almost too-perfectly named Bruce Crumley –- used the burning of their offices to taunt Charlie Hebdo's journalists[.]
'Do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of 'because we can' was so worthwhile?' he asked before going down a related track by denouncing French politicians who had criticised the firebombing. Mr Crumley is apparently not a fan of free-expression, or even slight jokes, when it comes to Islam. In this respect he is not unique. He follows in a long and ignoble line of useless idiots.
In 2004 when Theo van Gogh was murdered on a street in Amsterdam by a Islamic fundamentalist it was Index on Censorship's turn. You would have thought that with a title like 'Index on Censorship', the reader could expect such a magazine to do what it says on the masthead. Yet in what should have been a pretty straightforward test ('for or against the murder of people who express their opinions') Index on Censorship managed to land it wrong.
They published a piece which claimed that it was not van Gogh's murderer but van Gogh himself who had been a 'fundamentalist'; not Mohammed Bouyeri (the killer), but van Gogh (the killed) who had been on a 'martyrdom operation' by having the temerity to say mean things about Islam. Index on Censorship's author went on to imply that the whole murder was some type of performance art designed to promote van Gogh's new film on the assassination of another critic of Islam, Pim Fortuyn. Read on and comment » | DOUGLAS MURRAY | Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Holland is to become the latest European country to ban the burka, despite the fact that fewer than 100 Dutch women are thought to wear the face-covering Islamic dress.
The Dutch government will agree to introduce a ban on Friday making the Netherlands the third country in Europe to prohibit the burka, behind France and Belgium.
Women caught wearing a burka in public, on the streets, public transport and in schools or hospitals will be fined £330.
There will be exemptions for mosques, or other religious buildings and for foreign women travelling through the transit lounges of international Dutch airports. » | Bruno Waterfield | Thursday, September 15, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
EURONEWS: In Holland, a proposal to ban Kosher and Halal slaughter methods has moved a step closer to reality, with a majority of the country’s MPs now supporting the ban.
In order to reduce stress, in the EU animals slaughtered for meat are normally stunned before they are killed. But Kosher and Halal butchery requires the animals to be fully conscious when their throats are cut. » | © Euronews | Friday, April 08, 2011
Sunday, July 25, 2010
EXPATICA: The party of Dutch anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders on Saturday reemerged as a possible government coalition partner.
The Christian Democrats agreed to exploratory talks with Wilders' PVV and the centre-right VVD.
Following June 9 elections won by the VVD, the Christian Democratic Action refused coalition talks involving Wilders' far-right Party for Freedom, but a party conference decided Saturday to take part in a new round of talks.
CDA leader Maxime Verhagen said the CDA would set no conditions for the discussions. But if this were to lead to real coalition negotiations, "there will be conditions", he said on national television.
These would involve "how we relate to each other as a society, the principles of the constitutional state, basic human rights that each individual should enjoy in the Netherlands.
"The CDA will not be part of a government that may put these issues up for discussion."
Wilders, who calls Islam fascist and campaigns for the banning of the Koran and the burqa, described CDA's move as a "good decision," according to news agency ANP.
On Tuesday, two weeks of coalition talks between the VVD, the labour PvdA, the centrist D66 and green GroenLinks broke down on issues of financial policy. >>> AFP | Saturday, July 24, 2010
Monday, July 05, 2010
RADIO NETHERLANDS WORLDWIDE: Special agents have succeeded in smuggling a firearm into the heavily-guarded offices of Geert Wilders' Freedom Party in the parliament buildings in The Hague. A source confirmed the operation, which took place several weeks ago, in Monday's edition of the Dutch daily De Telegraaf.
The newspaper report says the operation was carried out by the Special Security Assignments Brigade (BSB), a special unit of the Military Police. The test was carried out following a complaint from Mr Wilders that his security was inadequate.
A total of four attempts were made. Two were successful, two failed. Security at the parliament buildings has reportedly been tightened up since. >>> © Radio Netherlands Worldwide | Monday, July 05, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: Dutch police are to use "decoy Jews", by dressing law enforcers in Jewish religious dress such as skullcaps, in an effort to catch anti-Semitic attackers.
Lodewijk Asscher, Amsterdam's mayor, has ordered the new decoy strategy to cut the number of verbal and physical attacks on Jews, amid fears that anti-Semitic "hate crime" is on the rise.
"Jews in at least six Amsterdam neighbourhoods often cannot cross the street wearing a skullcap without being insulted, spat at or even attacked," according to local reports.
Amsterdam police already disguise officers as "decoy prostitutes, decoy gays and decoy grannies" in operations to deter street muggings and attacks on homosexuals or the city's red light district.
Police in the Dutch city of Gouda have claimed the use of officers disguised as apparently frail old age pensioners has helped cut street crime. >>> Bruno Waterfield | Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Thursday, June 17, 2010
FINANCIAL TIMES: The chances of Geert Wilders, the controversial anti-Islam politician, becoming a minister in the next Dutch government receded on Thursday after the Christian Democrat party declined to enter talks with either Mr Wilders or the Liberal party that won last week’s general election.
Mark Rutte, leader of the Liberals, was seeking to form a rightwing coalition of his party, Mr Wilders’ Freedom party, the PVV, and the Christian Democrats, CDA, in order to command a 76-seat parliamentary majority.
“It’s very disappointing, the CDA is pulling the plug on this,” Mr Wilders, who wants to end immigration from Muslim countries, told reporters. “The PVV would like nothing more than to govern. We want to be in the cabinet to change the Netherlands.” >>> Michael Steen in Amsterdam | Thursday, June 17, 2010
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