27 January 2010
From the
Seattle Post Intelligencer:
Amsterdam and the Bay Area might not have snow in common, but there are many other things that reminded me of San Francisco - small navigable streets, beautiful architecture and a history of tolerance. It made it easy to see why I felt at home so quickly. Alongside traditional Dutch restaurants were those offering the foods of the ethnic communities that contribute to the country's culinary traditions - Indonesian, Surinamese, Turkish and Moroccan. The traditional dishes may be almost medieval in composition, and the use of nutmeg, paprika and curry are reminders of Amsterdam's prominent position in the spice trade.
And, just as in San Francisco, diners in Amsterdam seem drawn to restaurants that are gezellig - cozy and sociable - feelings that are also reflected in their food. One of my favorite Dutch comfort dishes is stampot, a mash of potatoes and another vegetable. It's easy to eat when you're cold and tired, and works well with variations. Stampot is one of those dishes that every family serves and few make the same way. The most popular version uses curly kale, and while it's often eaten with sausage, vegetarian sausages, roasted vegetables or stews would make a fine substitute to keep this dish vegetarian. The Dutch are fond of spicy Dijon-like mustard, so I make my stampot with a heaping spoonful - or two - and top it with a dusting of nutmeg, another favorite Dutch spice.
I arrived in Amsterdam ready to be put off by the food, but I fell in love with the homey dishes and their simplicity. Plus, Amsterdam is stealthily turning into a food mecca, with restaurants that boast chefs who worked at Chez Panisse, and people who are reading Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Eating Animals." It may not be where San Francisco is now, but Holland is definitely buzzing, and not just from the coffee shops.
Read the full article
here (incl. recipes!)
25 January 2010
From
Forbes.com:
After months of plotting strategy to move into social media, MSNBC.com found the right man to help: 20-year-old Michael van Poppel, a Dutch media maven with a newsfeed on Twitter. Michael van Who? The choice isn't as odd as it seems. Three years ago, from an apartment in Tilburg, the Netherlands, Van Poppel launched a Twitter feed called "BreakingNews." Trawling the Web for arcane but reliable news sources, he aggregated them onto his feed, linking to breaking headlines in Europe and around the world. Twitter was but a year old and Van Poppel just 17 at the time, but the novel idea drew an overnight following. BreakingNews' first major scoop, to the astonishment of the European news establishment, was Van Poppel's acquisition of a videotape carrying a statement from Osama bin Laden. How did a Dutch teen with a Twitter feed get hold of a Bin Laden tape? "It came to me from a source within the U.S. government," is all Van Poppel will say. After selling the video to Reuters, Van Poppel was deluged by social media fans in other countries eager to lend a hand tweeting news. This crowdsourcing soon paid off. By August of last year, Van Poppel had amassed 1.5 million followers--and the interest of MSNBC.
"We bumped into his Twitter account and found that he was finding news faster than a lot of traditional sources," says Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC.com Digital Network. Tillinghast's staff sent an IM written in Dutch to the 20-year-old news mogul, asking whether he'd be interested in a deal whereby MSNBC's digital division would manage the feed under MSNBC's moniker. In a package deal, MSNBC.com acquired the rights to manage Van Poppel's Twitter feed indefinitely and is paying him undisclosed fees to carry a separate headline service Van Poppel has launched, BNO News, for three years. Tillinghast now dedicates a full-time staff of three to the BreakingNews feed, aided by MSNBC.com reporters and editors in New York and Redmond, Wash.
Read the full article
here
20 January 2010
From
Times Online:
The Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders was greeted with applause from the public gallery as he faced court for the first day of his landmark trial on charges of inciting racial hatred against Muslims. Mr Wilders, 46, sat impassively as his lawyer argued that the leader of the Freedom Party, which made big gains at last summer's European elections, had made his critical remarks about Islam in his role as an elected Member of Parliament. Bram Moszkowicz said that Mr Wilders had a mandate to speak out against what he saw as the Islamisation of the Netherlands and argued that he had not discriminated against a specific national group, saving his attacks for the ideology of political Islam.
Mr Wilders faces a 70-page charge sheet covering five counts of breaking Dutch law on incitement and discriminiation against Muslims in more than 100 public statements, for example by likenening the Koran to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and calling for an end to the "Islamic invasion." The alleged offences include Mr Wilders' film Fitna, which shows images of 9/11 and beheadings interspersed with verses from the Koran. It ends with a the controverisal Danish cartoon of the prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb as a turban. "Mr Wilders has always made his statements in his capacity as a public representative," Mr Moszkowicz said, arguing that the Amsterdam court was the wrong arena and that the Supreme Court in The Hague was the place to hear allegations of misconduct by an MP. But Birgit van Roessel, for the prosecution, countered that "expressing his opinion in the media or through other channels is not part of an MP's duties." She said that MPs only had immunity for what they said inside parliament. He faces a fine or the possbility of jail if convicted.
Read the full article
here
18 January 2010
From the
Washington Post:
Dutch adoption agencies and the government have sent a chartered plane to Haiti to airlift out around 100 children who were in the process of being adopted by parents here before an earthquake shattered the country last week. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ozlem Canel says the plane has set off from Amsterdam's airport with relief workers and supplies as well as adoption agency staff, immigration and consular officials. Canel says the children all were already very close to moving to their new parents in the Netherlands when the quake struck. They are staying in several Haitian children's homes.
Full article
here
15 January 2010
From the
Washington Post:
The Dutch government accepted with hindsight that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 required a more adequate legal mandate, the prime minister wrote in a letter to parliament on Wednesday. He was responding to a report challenging the legal grounds for the invasion. In the report the Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said the Dutch government had supported an invasion of Iraq that had no legal backing and did not fully inform parliament about its plans in the run-up to the conflict.
"Based on what we know now, the cabinet accepts that a more adequate legal mandate would have been necessary for such an action," Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende wrote in the letter to parliament. Balkenende had initially dismissed the committee's most critical conclusions on Tuesday, saying there were different opinions about the legal mandate for the invasion and that parliament could not be informed about some issues.
Read the full article
here
12 January 2010
From the
Washington Post:
Miep Gies, the last survivor of those who risked death to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis, died Jan. 11 in the Netherlands. Ms. Gies had suffered a fall on Christmas, and her Web site said she died after a brief illness. She was 100. Anne Frank was a teenager who died in a concentration camp after her family was betrayed to the Nazis. The diary she kept while in hiding in Amsterdam is among the best known literary works of the World War II period and is widely read around the world. Although controversy surrounds some aspects of the diary, Ms. Gies has been credited with preserving it and turning it over to Anne's father, Otto, after the war.
In an interview published online, Ms. Gies said she thought it was "perfectly natural" to have aided the Franks and several others who were hiding with them at Prinsengracht 263. We did our duty as human beings," she said. "Helping people in need."
From July 1942 until the August 1944 betrayal, the Franks and the others were hidden in sealed-off rooms of Otto Frank's company. In addition to working for the company, Opekta, Ms. Gies became a close friend of the family. Several people played a part in protecting the group. Ms. Gies bicycled all over Amsterdam to get vegetables and meat without raising suspicion. She was also credited with giving Anne books and newspapers. Miep Gies was born into a working-class family in Vienna in 1909. As a child, her name was Hermine Santruschitz. During the first World War, food was scarce, and it was later feared that she might die. At the age of 11, a Dutch workers' union helped bring her to the Netherlands to restore her health, and she made her home there. After completing high school, she began working as an office assistant. In her early 20s, she was hired by Otto Frank and put in charge of a complaint desk.
After the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands, she recognized the danger to people to whom she was close. "We felt deep anxiety for our Jewish friends," she wrote, and told of "special pangs of regret for the Franks, with their two young children." She was summoned to the German consulate, where she was asked about her refusal to join a Nazi girls' group. A German official said she would have to return to Vienna unless she married a Dutch citizen. She and Jan Gies had been close since 1930, and in 1941, they married. She became a Dutch citizen. Miep was a nickname. Jan Gies, who was in the Dutch resistance, died in 1993. Ms. Gies is survived by a son and three grandchildren.
Read the full article
here
05 January 2010
From local TV channel
AT5:
Glad in de Stad (Slippery in the City. It adds that so far there have been no serious casualties)
03 January 2010
From the
New York Times:
With AIDS, malaria and other diseases costing millions of lives every year, worrying about the vision of people in the developing world may seem like an indulgence. But supplying glasses for the world’s poor may be one of the most valuable investments around. [...] Efforts are under way to find a means of distributing inexpensive glasses on a wide scale. One promising technology is self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reducing the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. Though these adjustable glasses cannot yet help with conditions like astigmatism, at least 80 percent of refractive errors can be fixed. At least three organizations are now offering their own versions of low-cost adjustable spectacles. Two are relatively new groups based in the Netherlands that have received little international recognition. The third, based in England and championing a British invention called AdSpecs, has been attracting widespread media attention for more than a decade.
One of the Dutch groups, the Focus on Vision Foundation, says it can produce its Focusspec glasses for about $4 a pair. The group’s founders say the price will drop substantially once the glasses are being made in large volume. They plan to distribute about 30,000 pairs in early 2010, initially in Afghanistan, Ghana and Tanzania. The other Dutch offering, called U-Specs (universal spectacles), is being promoted by the VU University Medical Center and a charity called the D.O.B. Foundation. Both Dutch models are based on a design pioneered in the 1960s by Luis W. Alvarez, an American who won a Nobel Prize in physics. The design uses two lenses that slide across each other to alter their focus. U-Specs were initially developed in 2003 by Rob van der Heijde, a physicist at the VU University Amsterdam.
When it comes to choosing sides, many of the charitable groups involved say they are open to whatever glasses do the job. J. Kevin White, a former Marine who runs Global Vision 2020, a foundation that distributes adjustable glasses, said fluid-filled lenses generally offer better optical quality and correct a greater range of refractive error. The Alvarez designs, by contrast, are cheaper, smaller, better-looking and less likely to break.
Read the full article
here
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Shop Only in Holland
» McDonald's in a pickle over cheese slice firing
A Dutch branch of McDonald's was wrong to fire a worker for giving a colleague an extra piece of cheese on a hamburger, a court ruled on Tuesday. "The dismissal was too severe a measure," the district court in Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands said in a written judgment. "It is just a slice of cheese." A written warning would have been a more appropriate punishment, said the court, which ordered McDonald's to pay the worker the salary for the remaining five months of her contract - a total of 4,265.47 euros (6,006.69 dollars). The worker was fired at a McDonald's branch in the northern town of Lemmer in March last year for giving a colleague on a break a more expensive cheese burger instead of the hamburger she had paid for.
Read the full article at
AFP
» GM to keep Saab alive via Spyker
General Motors on Tuesday reached a deal to sell its Saab operations to supercar maker Spyker Cars, keeping the Swedish brand alive. Under the binding deal, GM gets $74 million in cash and $326 million in preferred shares of Saab, which will represent less than 1% of the voting rights, according to Netherlands-based Spyker. "We are very much looking forward to being part of the next chapter in Saab's illustrious history. Saab is an iconic brand that we are honored to shepherd," Spyker CEO Victor Muller said in a statement. Saab has about 3,400 employees worldwide and has 218 U.S. Saab dealerships. Saab will continue to honor warranties in the U.S. Spyker plans to change its name to Saab Spyker Automobiles. The acquisition will mean more than a name change for Spyker, which isn't profitable and only made 21 of its cars that sell for more than $200,000 during the first half of 2009.
Read the full article at the
Detroit Free Press
» Dutch billionaire could save Saab
Dutch billionaire businessman Marcel Boekhoorn has upped his investment in Saab suitor Spyker Cars of the Netherlands, trade union newspaper Dagens Arbete reports. The 50-year-old investment mogul is reported to have replaced the Antonovs, a Russian father and son banking duo whose major stake in Spyker represented a stumbling block to the deal for Saab owner General Motors. Negotiations between Spyker and Saab owner General Motors (GM) are now in their final stages, with the Dutch company having offered about $500 million for Saab, its third bid for the Swedish automaker.
Read the full article at
The Local
» Amsterdam councillor seeks stricter brothel rules
Amsterdam's deputy mayor proposed new measures Tuesday to help tackle forced prostitution, including restricting opening hours for brothels and raising the minimum age for prostitutes to 23 from 18. Lodewijk Asscher, who faces re-election in March, said prostitution should be banned between 4 and 8 a.m. to complement existing efforts to fight crime, exploitation and human trafficking in Amsterdam's 800-year-old red light district. "Only the biggest creeps and boozers are walking around at those hours," he said on Dutch radio. "Women really dread working then and sometimes the most vulnerable are used." But the local union for prostitutes said it was against Asscher's proposal because the early morning hours are among the most lucrative for many women. "This is not a good idea, this is the time when the prostitutes can make the most money," said Metje Blaak, a spokeswoman for the Rode Draad union for prostitutes. She said that raising the minimum legal age would lead more girls into underground, illegal brothels.
Full article at the
New York Times
» Heineken, Dos Equis brew a $7.6 billion deal
Heineken announced plans Monday to buy the beer operations of Mexico's Fomento Económico Mexicano (Femsa) for about $7.6 billion, as the Dutch brewer moves to expand its operations in the Western Hemisphere. The deal will give Heineken, which brews Amstel and other beers, control of Femsa's key export brands, including Dos Equis, Tecate and Sol. "The acquisition strengthens considerably our position within the global beer market," Jean-François van Boxmeer, chairman and chief executive of Heineken, said in a statement. "[It] expands our portfolio of leading international brands and enhances our leading position in the U.S. import market." Under the terms of the deal, Femsa will gain a 20% economic interest in the Heineken Group, and will have the right to appoint two non-executive representatives to Heineken's board.
Full article at
CNN
» Dutch say failed plane bomber acted alone
The Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas acted alone and probably smuggled the explosives from Nigeria, the Dutch public prosecutor said on Tuesday. The prosecutor's office said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab did not have an accomplice at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, as some other passengers on the flight had alleged. Abdulmutallab, 23, the son of a prominent banker, flew from Lagos to Amsterdam on a KLM flight, arriving on Christmas Day. Prosecutors said the seats from that plane are still being examined for traces of explosives. In Amsterdam, Abdulmutallab went through a profile interview and a security check before waiting at the gate for his flight. Some of the passengers on the plane had said they saw him accompanied at the gate in Amsterdam by an older, well-dressed Indian or Pakistani man. But the review of more than 200 hours of video showed no one with him, the officials said.
Read the full article at
Reuters
