A Dutch minister has been tipped as the country's new "Vice President". A journalist interviews would-be suicide bombers. An IT magazine reveals weaknesses in internet security. The squatting ban celebrates its first anniversary. And, finally, record-breaking temperatures make up for a soggy summer.

“Vice President” Donner?
Trouw opens with the news that Interior Minister Piet Hein Donnner will most likely become the new deputy chairman of the Netherlands' highest advisory organ: the Council of State. Because Queen Beatrix acts as president of the council, the position is nicknamed the “Vice President”.

“Donner’s been named, so it will probably be him” says the headline. Though there’s been no official word yet, Christian Democrat party chairperson Ruth Peetoom has put on the pressure simply by saying he would be a “good candidate” on public radio programmes during the weekend.

But it would be a bit of a surprising choice. As interior minister, it is Mr Donner himself who formally appoints the deputy chairman, though this function has now been handed to Security Minister Ivo Opstelten. Perhaps more importantly, if Mr Donner does get the position, he will be advising on legislation that he himself was responsible for as an MP.

Another potential problem – according to Trouw – is that he broke the rules during the government formation. A year ago, he made CDA MPs sign a document promising to accept a party congress decision on the formation of a minority government with the support of the Freedom Party. The paper says he shouldn’t have done so as MPs are meant to vote totally independently.

The current deputy chairman of the Council of State Tjeenk Willink is due to stand down on 1 February, but the official procedure to select his replacement has not yet begun. Critics fear that things have deliberately been left to the last minute so a decision will have to be rushed through.

Dutch journalist interviews would-be teenage suicide bombers
They look like insecure teenagers, but the Afghan police say they are “bloodthirsty Taliban fighters”. A journalist from de Volkskrant got access to a juvenile prison in the Afghan province of Kunduz where the Dutch are taking part in a NATO police training mission. Natalie Righton interviewed some of the inmates on their reasons for wanting to blow up foreigners.

Their stories are very similar and almost cliché. They were sent to Koran school in Pakistan as children, where they became radicalised. Taliban members visited the schools to teach the children about jihad. Their teachers told them daily about paradise and virgins – the heavenly rewards for suicide attacks. 

Nader Shah, one of the teens interviewed for the article, is just 16. He went to Kunduz to blow up as many foreigners as he could, but began to change his mind about the “bad people”in Kunduz after hearing a sermon by a mullah in the mosque saying suicide bombers went to hell. He was arrested after escaping his Taliban supervisors.

There is no programme to deradicalise prisoners. In practice, long sentences are halved and there is no telling what many of these young men will do when they are released. Their message is chilling: “We don’t want your democracy. We have Sharia law.”

Web magazine announces: it’s “Leaktober”
“Leaktober” is the way Trouw titles a story about an online magazine that has promised to expose one internet security leak a day this month.

IT journalist Brenno de Winter of Webwereld.nl (Webworld.nl), the man behind the leaks, says organisations will be warned in advance so they can plug the leak before it goes public. He says civil servants suffer from “techno-optimism”.

Leaks have already been exposed from such high-profile organisations as the provincial authority of North Holland, The Hague’s local council, the police, and, this weekend, DigID – the tax office’s personal identification number for Dutch citizens.

Mr de Winter says he’s disappointed by the reaction of local authorities to the revelations: rather than improving internet security, they prefer to shoot the messenger, filing charges with the police. In America, the organisations could be sued for criminal negligence, he says, noting that some highly sensitive documents are secured with nothing more than the generic password “Welkom01”.

So how do you know whether someone is “looking over your shoulder” when you are using internet services? Mr de Winter says if you see all kinds of funny codes under the browser bar, alarm bells should be ringing.

Was there any point to banning squatting?
Seventeen squatters were arrested at the weekend while demonstrating against the introduction of a ban on squatting a year ago. Nrc.next asks whether there was any point in introducing the ban.

Squatters in the Netherlands used to be entitled to occupy buildings that had remained empty for an entire year. But the current cabinet says squatting infringes on the rights of owners, so changed the rules. As a result of the new legislation, property owners can take squatters to court. But owners seldom report that their buildings have been squatted and the Public Prosecution Office has difficulty prosecuting the cases.

Back in 1981 there were more than 1000 squats in Amsterdam alone. Now there are less than 300 in the whole country. The squatters’ movement, which once enjoyed broad support among the general population because of the huge housing shortage, is no longer popular. The strict approach was said to be necessary because the movement had become hardened, but researchers at the University of Amsterdam discovered that it had actually become “pacified”.

Enforcing the ban has been left to local councils which generally do not give priority to evicting squatters; if the building is not going to be used straight away, the squatters just move right back in. Utrecht council actually sees the squatters as a useful tool against derelict buildings. At least owners are forced to make sure buildings are not left empty.

Record-breaking temperatures at the weekend
There was plenty of glorious sunshine this weekend. So you would expect to see lots of different photos of beach babes and kids playing in the sand. But, while there are photos in the papers, De Telegraaf and AD appear to have exactly the same ones. Obviously Dutch photographers were too busy flipping burgers to get the camera out.

Trouw reports that it was a record-breaking weekend. Meteorological organisation Weeronline (weather online) announced that Saturday was the hottest 1 October ever recorded at 26 degrees Celsius. The last record, which was 24.1 degrees, dates from 1908. And the last time there were two consecutive summery days in October (over 25 degrees) was in 1921.

The hottest place in the country on Saturday was Westdorpe in the south-western province of Zeeland where temperatures soared to 27.1 degrees. As a result, there were 18-kilometre traffic jams to the province’s beaches.

Ironically, reports De Telegraaf, many of the country’s skating rinks opened their doors this weekend. AD warns that if you want to get a tan, you had better hurry, temperatures will start dropping tomorrow.