News below sea level

Another 58 percent of Dutch people said their government should cease giving financial aid to Greece because the country would never pay back the debt. Dutch Finance Minister, Jan Kees de Jager, said Greece must work harder and ’take more steps’ to resurrect its credit rating following the its recent debt crisis. De Jager also likened Greece to a Communist country, because so many companies are owned by the state. Meanwhile, on a side note, last week De Jager publicly announced that he was in fact gay and in a long-term relationship. Elsewhere, Dutch Deputy Foreign Minister Ben Knapen said Bulgaria should not be allowed to join the 25 European-country Schengen Zone, which allows for passport-free travel with the EU. European Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, was in Den Haag this week and said during a speech that ‘Europe needs the Netherlands and its innovative spirit’, before going on to praise the Netherlands for its historic culture of openness. 

Elsewhere, Dutch Education Minister Marja van Bijsterveldt was in Amsterdam to award Dutch politician and MP Ahmed Marcouch with the Aanmoedigingsprijs voor homo-emancipatie (homosexual emancipation prize) in honor of Marcouch’s valiant efforts to create tolerance for homosexuality within the Dutch Muslim community. 500 Dutch vacationers stuck on a stricken ship in the Baltic Sea for two days have been rescued. The cruise ship, which had 2000 passengers onboard, suffered engine failure shortly after departing from St. Petersburg. US rapper Snoop Dogg was in Amsterdam shooting a music video for his latest single ‘I Drink I Smoke’.  Snoop said he was a big fan of Amsterdam’s liberal drug laws. Elsewhere, the 20-year old son of Dutch footballing great Ruud Gullit was arrested in the Italian town of Lecco for dealing marijuana. Ruud Gullit, the former European and World Footballer of the Year in 1987, is currently in Chechnya coaching Terek Grozny, a team in Russia’s Premier League. Online technology magazine, Webwereld, has accused Dutch telecom company KPN of tapping its subscribers’ phones. KPN has admitted to using  ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) technology, which allows KPN to see everything a subscriber does online. KPN is the first mobile phone operator in the world to use DPI. Recently KPN announced that it planned to increase mobile internet charges for people who used Skype, with commentators wondering how the company knew which of it clients used Skype. DPI meanwhile probably violates Holland’s data protection laws. 

German police shut a stem cell clinic run by a Dutch pharmacologist, Kees Kleinbloesem, after a Romanian baby died there after having stem cells injected into its brain, and a young boy for Azerbaijan also became critically ill after undergoing a similar procedure. The biggest fraud trial in Dutch history opened last week with the former head of the Bouwfonds, a major construction company, on trial for money laundering, bribery and insider trading. And finally, a recent study by Ad Bergsma, a researcher at Erasmus University Rotterdam, found that 89 percent of the Dutch people said they ‘often’ or ‘always’ feel happy, which is both a good and bad thing, Bergsma says: “People who say they are completely happy have less successful careers and even die earlier.”

Je promotie verdedigen is een zweterige aangelegenheid, zeker op de tweede dag van de zomer. Doctor ingenieur Richard Lakerveld (links) wist dinsdagochtend niet hoe snel hij uit zijn rokkostuum moest komen. Op de parkeerplaats achter de aula verdween het ding snel weer in een koffer. Lakerveld promoveerde op kristallisatietechnieken om stoffen te scheiden.