Car crashes into crowd during Queen's visit

30 April 2009 A car just crashed into the crowd in Apeldoorn as the Royal Family drove by. Reports say there are 14 people with serious injuries.

Video of the incident

The festivities in Apeldoorn have been cancelled. The Royal family is now at Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn. Ambulances are on the scene and a helicopter is preparing to land on the site where the accident happened. At this time it's not clear whether the crash was an accident or a deliberate action. The driver of the car is wounded and under arrest.

There are now two confirmed deaths and at least 12 people are seriously injured.

More to follow.

Live news here.

Queen's Day

30 April 2009 News and information about Queen's Day in Amsterdam can be found here (AT5 local Amsterdam news, in Dutch).

Rumours of royal abdication

27 April 2009

From NRC International:

Dutch crown prince Willem-Alexander turns 42 this Monday; the same age his mother Beatrix had when she ascended the throne in 1980. The queen is now 71 and many are asking when she will retire and let her son, his Argentinian wife Máxima and their three daughters move into the Huis ten Bosch palace in The Hague. Rumours about queen Beatrix' abdication typically surface in the month of April, when crown prince Willem-Alexander has his birthday on the 27th and the Dutch celebrate Queen's Day on the 30th. But they have been particularly persistent this year, with many media speculating that a succession is imminent. Unlike some European monarchs, the Dutch royals tend to make room for their successors well ahead of their own death.

"It is the third time in the past four months that there’s been such a hype," a spokesperson for the government information service RVD told reporters. "But there is nothing to announce."

The rumours have also fueled the debate about what kind of king Willem-Alexander will be. The Netherlands has been a monarchy under the house of Orange-Nassau since the French were driven out of the United Netherlands in 1815, but royal powers were limited to a parliamentary constitutional monarchy in the 1848 constitution. Still, queen Beatrix has been deeply involved with the running of government. Constitutionally, she chairs the council of state, the government's most important advisory body that scrutinises legislation before it is proposed to parliament. She also appoints the formateur, the politician whose job it is to form a coalition government after general elections. And she holds weekly meetings with the prime minister - currently Jan Peter Balkenende, the fourth in Beatrix' 29-year reign. When Willem-Alexander ascends the throne, he will inherit all these responsibilities.

In the past decade, Willem-Alexander has succeeded in completely turning around his image. He has made an international name for himself as an expert on water management, and his marriage to the glamorous Máxima Zorreguieta did wonders for the popularity of the Dutch royal family in the eye of the public. After initial controversy about Máxima's father's role in the Jorge Videla junta, where he served as deputy minister of agriculture, the charismatic princess has stolen the hearts of many Dutch people. She is part of the reason why the monarchy can boast a 85 percent approval rating today.

Read the entire article here.

April 30: Queen's Day

25 April 2009

Amsterdam
From iamsterdam.com:
Queen's Day festivities invite locals and 500-800,000 visitors alike to soak up Amsterdam's open-air fun. In the streets, canals, public houses, pleins (squares), parks and any possible space in between, amidst orange-pride, live music, DJs, parties and a citywide open market, it's an electric atmosphere not to be missed. Queen's Day was first celebrated in honour of Princess Wilhelmina's birth on 31 August 1885. After her abdication from Queen in 1949, the day changed to 30 April, daughter Queen Juliana's birthday. Now her daughter, Queen Beatrix officially celebrates her birthday on 30 April even though she was born on 31 January. The prominence of orange references the Dutch Royal family, the House of Orange-Nassau. As a show of pride, tradition and a somewhat over-the-top fashion choice, everyone—and their food, pet and water fountain—is covered head to toe in orange.

As a city built on trade, Amsterdammers love to haggle and bargain. The vrijmarkt (free market) allows hobby-entrepreneurs to deal their wares throughout the streets and parks of Amsterdam. The largest market is reserved for the littlest people as children in Vondelpark set up shop selling toys outgrown and clothes cast off, with proceeds invested back into the business of being a kid. Likewise young, busking musicians bring the already vibrant Vondelpark into song.
Much more information can be found here.

Europe's happiest children are in Holland

21 April 2009 From AFP:

The happiest children in Europe are in the Netherlands and Scandinavia but Britain is among the worst places to grow up, according to new British research published Tuesday. A league table of young people's wellbeing places the Netherlands top of 29 European states, followed by Sweden and Norway, while Britain comes in at a lowly 24th. The table, focusing on youngsters aged up to 19, was compiled by researchers at York University in northern England for the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) using data mainly from 2006. The researchers assessed the countries using 43 separate criteria, ranging from infant mortality and obesity to factors such as poverty and housing. The Netherlands scored high in all categories, while the Scandinavians were praised for having a low level of child deaths caused by accidents.

The top 10:
1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Norway
4. Iceland
5. Finland
6. Denmark
7. Slovenia
8. Germany
9. Ireland
10. Luxembourg

Read the entire article here.

The debt we owe the Dutch

19 April 2009 From Newsweek:

The truth is often shocking, and when Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told British Prime Minister Gordon Brown—and the world press—that the financial crisis had been created by "white-skinned people with blue eyes," he spoke the truth. Actually, it's even worse than what Lula said. "White-skinned people with blue eyes" aren't just responsible for the current crisis; the blue-eyed palefaces are responsible for saddling the world with a financial system that has a built-in tendency to crash. The modern financial system grows out of a series of innovations in the 17th-century Netherlands, and the Dutch were, on the whole, as Lula describes them. From the Netherlands, what the English called "Dutch finance" traveled over the English Channel, as the English borrowed Dutch ideas to build a stock market, promote global trade and establish the Bank of England, going on to build a maritime empire of commerce and sea power that dominated the globe until World War II. Dutch finance became "Anglo-Saxon capitalism," but otherwise went on as before. When the British system fell apart, the center of world finance crossed the water again, and New York and Washington replaced London and Amsterdam as the centers of global politics and finance.

This financial and political framework is the operating system on which the world runs: the Dutch introduced version 1.0 in about 1620; the British introduced 2.0 in about 1700; the Americans upgraded to version 3.0 in 1945, and it works pretty well—most of the time. The 400 years of liberal global capitalism have seen an extraordinary explosion in knowledge and human affluence.

But the system has bugs. Ever since the great Dutch tulip bubble of 1637, the economic system has been prey to roller-coaster-style booms and busts. From the South Sea bubble of 1720 to the subprime-loan bubble of our own time, the financial system leads people into irrational behavior and fever dreams of wealth and of eternally rising prices for stocks, houses—and tulips.

At moments like this, even "Anglo-Saxons" have doubts about the system, but much of the world doesn't like Anglo-Saxon capitalism even when it works. Liberal capitalism may have created mass affluence in the Netherlands and America, but things don't look as good in Brazil—or in Haiti.

Read the entire article here.

Dutch museum could lose masterpiece to JPMorgan

19 April 2009

From Reuters:

The Netherlands' largest museum risks losing a 17th-century Dutch masterpiece to an American bank which says it is its rightful owner. The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam bought Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde's "Golden Bend" from Dutch businessman Louis Reijtenbagh last year. Reijtenbagh has financial troubles and JPMorgan Chase & Co, seeking repayment of a loan, has lodged a claim in a New York court to try to obtain the painting. It says the 62-year-old businessman should not have sold it to the museum because he was using it as collateral for a loan. "The bank took possession of Reijtenbagh's art collection earlier this month. This painting was also on the list," Taco Dibbits, director of collections at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, said on Friday.

Reijtenbagh, a former doctor, made a fortune through investing and has been described as one of the wealthiest people in the Netherlands. He has declined comment. The Golden Bend, a light-coloured depiction of an Amsterdam canal and its prized canal houses, is now on display at the National Gallery Museum in Washington. It was insured for 4 million euros ($5.2 million) before it came to the Rijksmuseum.

Read the entire article here.

Dutch to probe cause of credit crisis

15 April 2009 From Associated Press:

The Dutch Parliament agreed on Wednesday to hold a two-fold investigation into the credit crisis to examine its cause and the government's subsequent interventions in the financial sector, Dutch media reported. The Dutch government nationalised the Dutch operations of Fortis and ABN AMRO in October for 16.8 billion euros ($22.2 billion), before providing a 10 billion euro capital injection to ING and 3 billion euros for insurer Aegon. The first part of the investigation will start soon and will examine the period up to September 2008, while the second part will look into the period thereafter when the government intervened in the financial sector, news agency ANP reported. The investigation will look into the cause of the credit crisis, whether it could have been prevented and examine how the various supervisory authorities functioned.

A parliamentary investigation is considered by many political observers as a watered down version of a parliamentary inquiry, which can involve hearing witnesses under oath. A parliamentary investigation cannot take testimony under oath, newspaper NRC reported. The credit crisis and ensuing global economic slowdown has plunged the Dutch economy, the fifth largest in the euro zone, into recession.

Read the entire article here.

Dutch poised to protect New York from the sea

13 April 2009 From Radio Netherlands:

Four hundred years after the English explorer Henry Hudson discovered 'by chance' what is now known as Manhattan, the Dutch are returning. Henry Hudson was actually trying to find the shortest route to India, but in 2009 the Dutch have a very different mission. They want to protect the island of Manhattan, and the city of New York, from the rising sea water. New York's sea defences need major reconstruction to bring them up to the present-day standards of those in the Netherlands. So Rotterdam City Council, the Arcadis engineering firm and Amsterdam's VU University are going to help improve matters. They have decided on a combination of a dam and a flood barrier already in use in the Netherlands. The plans for the new sea defences in New York's Verrazano Narrows were presented last week and are expected to cost 6.5 billion dollars.

New York's present sea defences allow for major flooding once every 100 years, but defences in the Netherlands allow for such floods only once every 10,000 years. In the few hundred years since New York became a metropolis, it has narrowly escaped disaster a number of times. Rising sea levels make the situation more dangerous, as do the fiercer storms which will result from climate change. If a major storm hits such a big and economically important city, the damage will be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Read the entire article here.

1 dead, 3 wounded in Dutch shooting rampage

11 April 2009 From the Associated Press:

A man pulled a gun in a crowded Dutch cafe after an argument early Saturday and shot a patron inside, then rushed outside where he shot three more people, one fatally, police said. Panic erupted in the cafe when the first shot rang out, but several people chased the gunman when he ran outside, overpowered and disarmed him, and wrestled him to the ground until police arrived, said police spokesman Remco Spaninxs. The man, a 44-year-old Rotterdam resident, had gotten into an argument in the bar earlier in the evening and was asked to leave, said Spaninxs. He returned later with a hand gun and began shooting.

All the casualties were inside the Laurenshof Cafe when the shooting began shortly before 1 a.m., he said. It was unclear if the victims were among those who tried to grapple with the gunman. Television footage shortly after the incident showed medics giving emergency treatment to the wounded and loading them into ambulances. The body of the victim lay under a white sheet inside a cordon of police tape. Spaninxs said people in the cafe were in shock, crying and holding each other. Police said the fatality was a 46-year-old man from Rotterdam but gave no further details. The other victims suffered gunshot wounds in the lower body.

Read the entire article here.

200 Dutch bikes in NYC for 400 years of friendship

08 April 2009

From NY400:

400 wheels representing 400 years of friendship between New York City and the Netherlands. 400 wheels, 200 orange NY400 Batavus bicycles, will be leaving the Netherlands this week and are on their way to New York as a special gift, celebrating 400 years of friendship. Exactly 400 years after Henry Hudson set sail from Amsterdam, the bright orange NY400 bicycles will undertake the same journey across the Atlantic to New York City.

On April 30, Dutch Queen's Day, the bikes make their official arrival on NYC’s soil in a very festive way. Later that day, the bikes will be part of a special NY400 Queens Day bike tour cycling uptown to the Riverside Church, where Lou Reed will be attending a one-hour special “Perfect Day” Queensday concert on the Carillion. Later on this year the bikes will be part of NYC!s Summer Streets event and they will be used in a big bike-sharing event during NY400 week in September.

EU probes Dutch aid to Fortis Nederland

08 April 2009 From the Wall Street Journal:

The Dutch government may have offered too much help to an arm of Fortis Bank when it nationalized the financial-services company last year, the European Union's competition regulator said, announcing that it was opening a formal investigation into the bailout. EU rules meant to ensure that foreign companies can compete with domestic ones in the common market restrict how governments can provide aid to businesses. It has been a challenge to apply those rules in the financial crisis, which has led to a torrent of bank bailouts and deposit-guarantee schemes. The EU has generally remained on the sidelines, though it has opened formal investigations into bailouts of German lender WestLB, U.K. bank Northern Rock PLC and Franco-Belgian bank Dexia SA.

In October, the Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgeois governments stepped in and split up the company. The Dutch paid €16.8 billion ($22.29 billion) for their part of Fortis, and shortly thereafter extended tens of billions of euros in loans. In a statement, the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, said the loans may not meet EU guidelines for government aid. The commission "has doubts that the interest charged by the state is sufficient to avoid distortions of competition and does not merely provide cheap funding" to the Dutch Fortis unit, it said. In December 2008, the Dutch government transferred the ABN AMRO assets that came with the Fortis unit to direct government ownership, putting €6.5 billion into the Fortis unit as compensation. The commission said it was concerned that the maneuver amounted to a capital injection, and that the Dutch valued the ABN AMRO assets too highly.

Read the entire article here.

Dutch museum shows New York's 'birth certificate'

05 April 2009

From the Associated Press:

To see some of the most important documents in the early history of New York, you need to go to Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands' national museum, put those documents on display Friday, including early maps and the only report of the purchase of Manhattan by Europeans. The exhibit marks the 400th anniversary of the departure of Henry Hudson in April 1609 on the expedition that would lead to colonization of the New York area.
Hudson sailed up the river that would one day bear his name that September, working for the Netherlands' Far East Indies Company. Hudson was looking for a new route to Asia, which he never found. But news of his other discoveries set off a spate of further expeditions by the Dutch, who were eager to capitalize on trading fur with indigenous tribes.

The exhibition shows the first map of Manhattan as an island, dating from 1614. The only record of the Dutch purchase, which is usually stored in the Netherlands national archives, is also on display. It is the so-called "Schaghen Letter," sometimes referred to as New York's "birth certificate." It is a 1626 report by Dutch bureaucrat Pieter Schaghen, who interviewed a ship captain returning from the colony for government records. The captain told Schaghen colonists had purchased an island called "Manna Hatta" for 60 guilders worth of goods. Curator Martine Gosselink said native Americans would have viewed the trade as more of a rental contract — but the rest is history.

A detailed 1665 painting by Johannes Vingboons is also on display, portraying the early city like a small Dutch village of the period. A windmill stands out in the background, and the town's gallows are prominently on the coast in plain view of arriving ships. The documents are on display through June. They will move to New York's South Street Seaport Museum as part of a larger exhibition in September.

Read the entire article here.

For more information about the exhibition, click here.

Netherlands 4 - 0 Macedonia

02 April 2009 From ESPN:

Dirk Kuyt scored twice as Holland maintained their 100% record in 2010 World Cup qualifying with a comfortable win over FYR Macedonia. The Oranje all but secured their place in South Africa as they stayed well clear at the top of Group Nine after five games thanks to first-half goals from Kuyt either side of Klaas-Jan Huntelaar's strike. Rafael van der Vaart added some gloss to the scoreline in the 88th minute. The Dutch were again in irrepressible form following Saturday's 3-0 defeat of Scotland, and victories over Norway, Iceland and tonight's opposition last year.

In the 16th minute the lively Arjen Robben crossed for Kuyt to slot home and eight minutes later Huntelaar fired into the top corner from the left side of the box. There was no let-up for the visitors after the break with Sneijder shooting wide from the edge of the box and Andre Ooijer heading over within five minutes of the restart. Winger Ryan Babel was brought on for Robben at half-time and the Liverpool man was quickly into the action, forcing a fine stop from Tome Pacovski with a fierce shot from the right in the 68th minute. Macedonia finally mustered their first chance of the second half in the 76th minute when Ilco Naumoski headed over the bar and, at the other end, Mark van Bommel shot straight into the arms of Pacovski from 20 yards. Substitute Van der Vaart completed the rout with a low finish two minutes from time.

Read the entire article here.