A new law designed to make child maintenance less of a lottery. A scientific spat about milk. Dutch drivers stoned at the wheel. Curtains for a Dutch blues legend. And a tearful farewell for a hooker’s best pal. Welcome to today’s Dutch dailies.

Breaking up is - slightly less - hard to do
All today’s papers report on new moves to make child maintenance payments in the Netherlands simpler and fairer. Everyone seems to agree that there’s plenty of room for improvement. AD reckons “parents are desperate for child maintenance rules” while de Volkskrant describes the current system as “a kind of jackpot that can generate all kinds of figures and that leads to incomprehension”.

NRC.next reports that the current system leads to differences of opinion between ex-partners in 71 percent of cases and, in order to decide what level of child maintenance is reasonable, judges have to wade their way through 49 pages of bureaucratic guidelines. Under the new proposal “parents themselves will be able to calculate the level of child maintenance using four simple tables.”

De Telegraaf describes this as “a good initiative … that will hopefully temper the exaggerated role played by legal experts, lawyers and mediators” but not everyone is quite so sure. De Volkskrant speaks to a divorced mother of eight whose ex has not paid her anything in 12 years. “What am I supposed to do? Put a gun to his head? […] The problem is not the fairness of the system but the mindset of those involved. […] As long as there are no penalties for those who don’t pay, people like my ex will never pay a penny.”

Dutch university accused of milking results
Researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have been taken to task by a Harvard professor. De Volkskrant reports that leading nutrition expert Walter Willett has accused the Dutch university of “twisting the facts” in a press release that links drinking milk to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. Professor Willett, one of the co-authors of the scientific article on which the press release was based, is demanding a public retraction from Wageningen. The Dutch university is standing by its take on the results but Willett insists that the wording of the press release damages Wageningen’s reputation “and in doing so the reputation of science as a whole.”

NRC.next focuses on how Professor Willett’s work tends to undermine the Netherlands’ seemingly unshakeable faith in dairy products, reinforced by decades of high-profile ad campaigns promoting the health benefits of drinking vast quantities of milk. Referring to Willett’s statements, the paper argues that three glasses of milk a day “are only good for the dairy industry” and may even entail certain risks. Or as Willett himself put it during a recent lecture in Rotterdam, if you want to prevent broken bones “you’re better off taking your cow for a walk than milking it”.

Stoned at the wheel
De Telegraaf’s front page alerts us to a hitherto unknown danger on the Dutch roads: “thousands of drivers are stoned at the wheel every day!” The paper quotes an international study which states that the number of people who drive after using soft drugs in the Netherlands is 25 percent higher than the European average, while the figures for people who drive after taking amphetamines are double those in the rest of the EU.

Under the headline “drugs are silent killers on our roads” the paper reveals that drugs alone or in combination with alcohol are probably responsible for around 80 fatal accidents a year. One minor consolation is that the drivers are mainly a danger to themselves rather than others. It describes most of the fatalities as “typical Saturday night accidents in which a car hits a tree with no one else in sight.”

Strangely enough in the drug-conscious Netherlands, there still isn’t a general drugs test for drivers. One expert notes “In practice drugged-up drivers are only caught if their car smells like the inside of a coffeeshop or if their pupils are extremely dilated after they’ve been pulled over for swerving all over the road.”

Dutch sing the blues for Cuby
Cuby and the Blizzards: the name may not ring a bell, but in the Netherlands the band acquired legendary status in the Sixties and Seventies and all today’s papers mourn the passing of frontman and founder Harry Muskee, who has died of cancer at the age of 70. Trouw describes Cuby and the Blizzards as “the band that introduced the Netherlands to the blues” and notes that during the band’s heyday Muskee’s farm in the east of the country even attracted the likes of John Mayall and Van Morrison.

De Telegraaf dubs him “king of the blues” and reckons that “the Netherlands has lost a unique legend”. The paper quotes him as saying that “the blues is a bad habit” which kept him going strong well past retirement age. De Volkskrant says simply “Harry not only sang the blues, he was the blues … for him there was no automatic pilot, it came from somewhere deep within”.

Tearful farewell for red-light ladies
Another sad farewell took place in the red-light district of the city of Groningen, where the prostitutes said their last goodbyes to Nico Leeuwe, a former sailor who AD reports dedicated much of his time to helping the girls on the job: everything from running errands to arranging loans for them.

“They could always count on him. Nico was everything to these girls,” is how the paper sums him up. The circumstances of his death were also upsetting: he was found murdered, motive as yet unknown. One of the tearful ladies pays a moving tribute: “He was a man who looked you in the eye instead of just eyeing you up. That means a lot in this world.”