Refugees drowned: all quiet on the Mediterranean front
“After the silence for the Lampedusa victims, the EU has to act.” It’s not the silence in the Dutch press that Trouw is talking about in its editorial, but a minute’s silence in the European parliament for the hundreds of African would-be migrants who drown trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

 

But the Dutch dailies are pretty quiet about the latest migrant shipwreck. More than 150 people drowned, depending on whose version of the story you go by. Popular daily De Telegraaf doesn’t bother to give it a mention. There’s a modest few inches in de Volkskrant. Popular AD provides the biggest splash.

 

It’s a familiar story. So it’s time the European Union did something about it, says Protestant daily Trouw’s editorial. “It would be naïve to think you could prevent all the refugee tragedies with development aid. But it’s also shameful not to see what’s possible via this route.”

 

Self-immolation in Amsterdam
The gruesome North African trend for setting yourself on fire in public places seems to have reached the Netherlands. De Telegraaf features pictures of what looks like a bonfire on Amsterdam’s main Dam Square, right next to the national war memorial. In fact it’s a man on fire.

 

“He poured liquid over himself and put a lighter to it,” a witness told De Telegraaf. He first warned a group of tourists to move out of the way, de Volkskrant adds. Passers-by frantically tried to put out the flames with coats and bottles of water. The man apparently survived and was whisked off in an ambulance.

 

Some witnesses say the man had an “Arab appearance” and “spoke Dutch with a foreign accent”. But what prompted his desperate act remains a mystery. It doesn’t seem to have sparked any revolutions.

 

Potato price hike shock
“Price explosion in the supermarkets!” screams De Telegraaf’s front page. Rising food prices are finally set to reach the Netherlands.

 

Old-fashioned Dutch staples like potatoes and meat will be going up by five percent, NRC Handelsblad reports on Wednesday afternoon. Inflation really must be soaring, because by the time de Telegraaf gets its hands on the news on Thursday morning, the expected hike has apparently risen to 10 percent.

 

To make matters worse, de Telegraaf moans, fuel prices went over a “magic limit” on Wednesday. “For each litre of petrol in his tank the motorist now pays a w-h-o-l-e euro to the treasury.”

 

The fuel prices are certainly biting. But a quick round of the Radio Netherlands Worldwide office reveals that in our affluent land, hardly anyone knows what potatoes cost in the first place.

 

Amsterdam parents scramble for the right school
“Under the spell of the ring.” It’s not Tolkien de Volkskrant is talking about in its editorial, but the Amsterdam schools lottery. Within the ring – the motorway encircling the capital – lie the city’s elite secondary schools. Beyond it in the poorer suburbs, are the less popular schools, often with many pupils from immigrant backgrounds.

 

There’ll be floods of tears for hundreds of primary school leavers in the capital in the coming days, as they find they haven’t got a place at their chosen secondary school, says de Volkskrant. The top schools are oversubscribed. Each year a number of hopefuls get pulled out of the hat and fail to get a place.

 

Dutch schools are state funded, and there are no catchment areas in Amsterdam, so for middle class parents desperate to secure the best education for their offspring, neither money nor a strategic relocation will help.

 

The angry parents wonder why more places can’t be created to meet the shortfall, says de Volkskrant. The reason is simple, the paper points out. There are plenty of places in Amsterdam’s secondary schools. Just not at the nice, white schools the parents dream of.

 

Dreaming of Big Brother speed cameras
Tailgating, unfastened seatbelts, a child in the front seat, a motorist talking on the phone or changing a CD – none of these traffic offences will be invisible to the new speed cameras unveiled on AD’s front page. The “Big Brother” 3D cameras will automatically keep an eye on motorists. And they could be lining Dutch roads by 2016.

 

In AD’s other front page news, Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten is widening police powers to carry out body searches on the street. Police will be able to stop and search anyone, anywhere, during special events like football matches, with hooligans on the warpath.

 

The 3D cameras are only in a test phase and may never be manufactured. And as yet the stop-and-search proposal is no more than a bill. But that doesn’t hold AD back from devoting its editorial to praising the two law-and-order initiatives while sagely stressing the need for public support. If you’re going to lead with speculation, you may as well do it properly.