Many of the papers have printed photos of cute-looking white goats on their front pages in response to the decision to slaughter tens of thousands of pregnant goats on farms with Q-fever infections. It’s hoped the measure will bring down the number of human cases with the disease reports AD. At a press conference on Wednesday, the Dutch ministers for health and agriculture (Ab Klink and Gerda Verburg) announced a raft of measures to reduce the number of human cases.

Fifty-five Dutch farms are infected with the coxiella burnetti bacteria, most of them in the southern province of Brabant. Altogether 2,300 people have contracted the disease and six have died.

Q-fever causes spontaneous abortions in pregnant goats, by which billions of bacteria are released into the air. Milk, urine and faeces also carry the bacteria which can survive for years in the ground.

The government has been accused of putting the interests of farmers before that of public health in the “world’s biggest outbreak of the disease”. A television documentary programme revealed on Sunday that the government had failed to act to prevent the spread of the disease among humans.

Up to now the names of the infected farms have been withheld for privacy reasons, but Minister Verburg has promised to publish the locations of infected farms. Nrc.next pinpoints one contaminated farm responsible for 11 percent of the human cases.

In De Telegraaf, Minister Verburg dismisses rumours that the health minister was unable to get hold of her on Monday to announce the measures earlier.

No heads roll after damning report
Trouw makes no effort to hide its distain at the reaction of the Rotterdam authorities to yesterday’s damning 160-page report on their failure to prevent a beach party turning into a riot last August.

In spite of a catalogue of failures on the part of the authorities, both the police chief Aad Meijboom and Mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb preferred to stress the role of the hooligans on that fatal night which culminated in the death of a 19-year-old man.

Mayor Aboutaleb asks “Why do large groups of hooligans under the influence of drugs and alcohol use violence against the police and emergency services?” The fatal shooting by police of a young man is especially embarrassing for Rotterdam as the city declared itself the European Youth Capital this year.

According to the Institute for Security and Crisis Management (COT) report, in spite of information that hooligans planned to disrupt the Sunset Grooves beach party, the information was not passed on to police superiors, young, inexperienced officers were deployed, no riot police were put on alert and the response to developments on the scene was inadequate. The 45 police officers at the event “had to fight for their lives” and “were on their own” against a couple of hundred hooligans. In AD both the mayor and the police chief  say they are not planning to resign. Whether they survive the affair remains to be seen next week as the report will be debated by Rotterdam council.

Underage asylum seekers to be sent back
Mass-circulation paper De Telegraaf informs its readers that underage asylum seekers are to be sent straight back to their own countries in the future. The deputy Justice Minister Nebahat Albayrak is expected to present her new stricter policies on Thursday.

At present, underage asylum seekers are given shelter until they reach the age of 18, then they are expected to leave the country of their own accord reports the paper. However, dozens of them end up on the streets or in the hands of people traffickers. For this reason, the minister wants to send them back and if necessary they will be kept in detention to stop them from vanishing before they are deported.

Many of the children say they have no family, but these claims are contradicted by data from the International Organisation for Migration. The paper reports that two shelters built in Congo and Angola to look after orphaned minors who have been sent back remain practically empty after relatives arrive to pick them up “without batting an eyelid”.
 
Princess Máxima attends money lessons
While the Dutch Crown Prince Willem-Alexander is fast running up a reputation as a member of the jet-set. His wife Princess Máxima is limiting the damage by sitting in on a lesson teaching children about debt at a secondary school near the eastern city of Arnhem. De Volkskrant prints a photo of the popular princess talking to girls during a lesson on the computer called "Enough money?" When the girls work out how much interest they have to pay on a debt, the princess tells them, “See what I mean? Every year it goes up.”

Recent research has revealed that little attention is paid to financial education at schools, but children often display risky behaviour in this area. They spend a lot, save little and even bet money. Computer lessons have been developed to teach the children to recognise misleading advertising, and give them an insight into financial risks.

The teacher says, “In the old days when your pocket money ran out, you couldn’t buy anything, but nowadays parents, who have grown up with the same affluence, don’t teach their children to be cautious.”

Perhaps it’s a lesson the princess wants her husband to heed.

World’s oldest playgirl presents photo shoot
In AD, the oldest model to appear in Playboy says “There is nothing wrong with my bust.” Sixty-year-old Dutch singer Patricia Paay proudly presented her nude photo shoot in the famous men’s glossy yesterday.

According to the paper, the controversy surrounding the mature model generated more publicity than many a picture by the famous young Dutch-Croatian centrefold Tatjana Simić, no doubt helped by a notorious divorce and numerous vicious reactions. The event was even attended by Berlusconi’s TV channel Rai Uno.

The singer admits she was most nervous about showing her backside, but insists her pictures were not Photoshopped. While a number of Dutch television personalities call the pictures “daring and good”. De Telegraaf reports that in a chat show, comedian Theo Maassen called Ms Paay “a pitiful attention-seeker.”