Reports on yesterday's student protest and on National Bank chief Nout Wellink's testimony to the credit crisis commission vie for column inches with the "snow causes chaos on the roads" report that has been the lead story in almost every paper for the past few weeks.

It’s nice to see something else on the front pages, although there are the obligatory snow-causes-chaos stories sprinkled liberally through the papers.

Dutch bank chief: credit crisis not my fault
The long-awaited testimony of Nout Wellink, president of the Dutch National Bank DNB, to the commission investigating the credit crisis is covered by most of the Dutch dailies. De Volkskrant writes, "Yes, Wellink did miss something," and says the DNB chief failed to calculate the damage done by the banks’ bonus payment systems.

According to Trouw, Mr Wellink says the national bank did nothing wrong in the run-up to the credit crisis, and AD quotes him saying, "I'm not to blame. I did my best to prevent it." 

NRC Handelsblad writes that Mr Wellink told the commission, "A great deal went wrong but it was not a failure on the part of the National Bank.”

Students protest at possible grant cuts
NRC.next leads with news of student sit-ins at four universities across the Netherlands to protest against the possibility of basic student grants being abolished and replaced with student loans. Dutch university students are given 250 euros a month for four years.

Trouw says the students called on the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) to reverse its earlier decision to support a ministry of education proposal in favour of abolishing grants and instituting a loan system. The VSNU approved the proposal on condition that the savings be invested in tertiary (or higher) education.
 
NRC.next says the economic crisis is behind the education ministry plan; the cabinet must cut expenditure and all government ministries have been ordered to conduct a review with an eye to slashing 20 percent off their individual budgets.

The paper says that basic student grants account for more than one billion euros of the education ministry's annual budget and it is the obvious place to start making cuts.

Labour MPs say it's too cold to campaign!
AD reports that two Labour MPs say it is far too cold to go out campaigning for the local elections, which are almost always held at the beginning of March. The Labour politicians - Pierre Heijnen and Paul Kalma - submitted questions in the lower house, asking the deputy interior minister to consider whether it would be possible to conduct future local elections "in a warmer month".

The populist tabloid says opposition parties have seized on the suggestion gleefully and the Labour MPs have been ridiculed. The Socialist Party has offered Labour colleagues warm woolly hats and the Christian Democrats have offered to supply bowls of hearty pea soup to warm them up.

Other Labour MPs aren't too happy with the suggestion either and the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party says MPs Heijnen and Kalma will be given an extra scarf and sent back out on the campaign trail.

Thousands addicted to computer games
Trouw writes that there are tens of thousands of people in the Netherlands who are addicted to computer games, but the gaming industry does nothing to prevent addiction. According to new research carried out for the public health ministry, between 30,000 and 80,000 people in the Netherlands, about 0.6 percent of the population, are game junkies.

The researchers say there are no warnings on the boxes and gamers are not informed about the risks of "excessive use".

The University of Amsterdam's Jeroen Lemmens, who has been researching gaming addiction among young people for three years, estimates that around 18,000 Dutch teenagers have a gaming problem and says the industry does far too little to prevent addiction. The computer game industry says a printed warning on the package "wouldn't help".

Phobia study: Dutch are afraid of dentists
AD informs us that the Dutch are more terrified of the dentist than of spiders. Floor Oosterink researched phobias in the Netherlands for her PhD thesis and discovered that at least 600,000 Dutch people suffer from dentophobia, or fear of going to the dentist.

According to Ms Oosterink, who will defend her thesis at the University of Amsterdam tomorrow, fear of heights is the second greatest phobia among the Dutch, followed by arachnophobia or fear of spiders.

The PhD candidate says there is a definite difference between being afraid of the dentist and having a real phobia, "People who are afraid of the dentist do eventually go, but people with a phobia make up all sorts of excuses in order not to go".

De Telegraaf devotes almost an entire page to the latest method for curing fear of flying: a virtual reality exposure therapy that claims to cure almost 50 percent of aviophobics in just the few hours. "We expose people to a real flight experience in a virtual world and step by step, we cure their phobia," says the care manager of the company offering the therapy.