Goats and hooligans continue to dominate the pages of the Dutch press. The goat stories come in the wake of Wednesday’s government announcement of a mass slaughter of goats and sheep to combat the world’s most serious outbreak of Q-fever. With 2300 human infections and six deaths from the disease so far, all the papers report Animal Rights party leader Marianne Thieme’s damning verdict that the government is guilty of “culpable homicide” for failing to act and putting lives at risk.

Broadsheet de Volkskrant agrees with Ms Thieme that the government has been dragging its feet on Q-fever. The paper points out that while the A(H1N1) flu virus has been grabbing the headlines, the obscure goat disease has been left in the shade. Yet now the dreaded flu epidemic seems not to be as bad as expected, Q-fever is proving to be a serious threat to public health. Trouw agrees that the government has not had its eye on the right ball, pointing out that Q-fever is usually more serious than A(H1N1) flu, causing high fever and health problems that drag on for months.

However, there is general disapproval of Marianne Thieme’s “culpable homicide” accusations. De Volkskrant calls her remark a “distraction” from the real issues, while Trouw describes it as “crass”. Not surprisingly, the populist Telegraaf doesn’t pull its punches, fuming that the Animal Rights leader is “lashing out wildly” due to her “limited style of politics”, and “seems to have blown a fuse”.

In an interview in tabloid AD, Ms Thieme stands by her accusation. She puts the blame squarely on the Christian Democrat party, the senior coalition partner. “The Christian Democrats support factory farming, and that’s a dead end,” she says, hammering home her view that “our kind of intensive livestock farming in a highly populated country is asking for trouble.” She even puts forward her own conspiracy theory about A(H1N1) flu. She points out that the disease is known by what she calls the “veiled” term ‘Mexican flu’ in the Netherlands while elsewhere the popular name is ‘swine flu’. Her analysis: “Yet another animal disease that sows death and destruction.”

Heads should roll for hooligans on the rampage
So much for the goats, now to the hooligans. According to the editorial in both NRC Handelsblad and its younger sister nrc.next, “hooliganism has left the stadium and looking for confrontation with the police elsewhere”. The comments come in yet more response to Wednesday’s report on this summer’s Hook of Holland beach riots, where drugged and drunken hooligans attacked police chanting “Rotterdam hooligans” and “gas the Jews”. The “Jews” in this case is a curious piece of Dutch football slang referring to supporters of Amsterdam team Ajax. At the infamous beach party, the casually racist slogan was equally applied to the police, as Wednesday’s Amsterdam-based Parool points out.

The question is whether heads should roll following the damning report on a night of bungled policing. Should Rotterdam Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb take the rap, or the city’s police chief Aad Meijboom? NRC says the report reveals “a deeply rooted problem which betrays a lack of professional knowledge, maturity in the job, self-reliance and insight”. A “hopelessly badly functioning policing system” is De Telegraaf’s verdict. “Rampaging hooligans threaten to take over the streets,” the paper observes with its usual restraint.

Both newspapers arrive at the same conclusion on who should take the blame. Mr Aboutaleb has been mayor for barely a year, while Police Chief Meijboom has had since 2001 to get to grips with the job, so it’s he who should resign.

Thieves steal deadly drug collection
AD reports on the theft of a curious private collection. In a village in the province of Gelderland, burglars got away with 2,400 tablets of the drug ecstasy. The haul has a street value of between 10,000 and 12,000 euros. But strangely enough, the owner Jan – he didn’t want his surname in the paper – wasn’t planning either to sell the pills or take them himself. He collected them like stamps. “I’m mad about the different colours, shapes and logos on the pills,” he said. “I’m really fed up, because I’ve been collecting them for 20 years”.

Even though his pill collection was strictly illegal, Jan reported the theft to the police himself. He says 40 of the stolen tablets could be lethal, and he was worried that someone could be killed if someone swallowed them unsuspectingly. Police issued a text message to hundreds of people in the region warning against the deadly tablets.

Pill collector Jan says he doesn’t use the drug himself. He told De Telegraaf, “I’ve tried it but I didn’t like it.”

Museum director leaves with still no museum to direct
The director of Amsterdam’s modern art museum, the Stedelijk Museum, says he doubts the it will open its doors again in December 2010 as planned, de Volkskrant reports. The museum has been closed for a major refit since 2004. For a while it had a temporary location in an old post office building, but it ran out of time there with no end to the renovation in sight. The Stedelijk’s present director Gijs van Tuyl is now leaving. And in the four years he’s been in the job, he’s been the director of a closed museum.

There has now been yet another delay in constructing the futuristic new wing of the museum, known as ‘the bathtub’. This time the steel that had been delivered for the building turned out not to be up to scratch and had to be sent back. Mr Van Tuyl told de Volkskrant he was annoyed by the constant delays. He was expecting the prestigious museum to be open again last year. “If I’d known about it before, I would have thought hard before taking the job,” he adds.

Burkini swimmers want same rights as naked men
De Telegraaf gleefully reaches for another ‘burkini’ story. The paper says a group of Muslim women have demanded that men should be “banned” from an Amsterdam swimming pool while they swim. Even though they wear so-called ‘burkinis’, which virtually cover the entire body, they still want a women-only swimming session. “The Muslim women feel uneasy if men in the swimming pool see their hands and feet,” the Telegraaf explains understandingly.

Conservative VVD MP Paul de Krom told the paper the women’s demands were “totally bizarre”, adding “If they want to swim in a burkini and on top of that demand that all the men should leave, they should do it in Casablanca.”

However, local councillor Egbert de Vries points out that the pool also has a one-hour naked swimming session once a week. And that’s for men only.