Dutch Press Review Friday 11 May 2012
Debt and deficits still fill up pages in today’s papers and now there’s a new class emerging - the working poor; Dutch activist in New York hails Obama’s words of gay enlightenment; Big Brother has a new hidey hole; stormy waters for The Pirate Bay and bridges made of pasta.
Dutch debt: the working poor
“For the first time ever, the number of people with jobs who are forced to turn to a debtors’ help organisation is bigger than the number of unemployed people. More than a quarter of the Dutch are defaulting on payments,” reports AD.
The national credit registration organisation BKR - which registers everyone in the Netherlands who takes out a loan, credit card or mortgage – says the situation is critical. “More than 700,000 families have huge financial problems and a further 293,000 are up to their necks in debt. They can’t move.”
The latest victims are working people. “Often it’s people who took on financial obligations in the past which they can no longer meet with their current income. Just one change in your life - like divorce, a sick child or less overtime – means you can get trapped by debt,” says NVVK, a branch organisation for debt management.
“It has spiralled so fast in the past year,” adds NVVK’s Joke de Kock. “Many people we see here would never have believed this is where they’d end up. They walk in with a look of disbelief in their eyes.”
American gays are “no longer alone”
All of today’s papers examine the impact of US President Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage from myriad angles.
AD looks at the repercussions through the eyes of a former Dutch MP and ex-leader of the D66 Democrats party who is now based in New York for rights group Human Rights Watch. Boris Dittrich himself was one of the first openly gay politicians in the Netherlands.
Many Dutch people judge the US by the standards of San Francisco and New York, but there’s a vast country – bigger than Europe – of conservatism in between, says Dittrich.
“Young, homosexual Americans commit suicide regularly. They’re bullied and discriminated against at school, at work and at home. And if the president of the country says equality is for everyone, including marriage, then they’ll think ‘we’re not alone anymore.’”
A brave move, thinks Dittrich, given the political gamble Obama took when he chose to name the elephant in the living room. “It shows true leadership.”
Nrc.next goes to Africa to examine the nub of gay-bashing. It traces the numerous examples of homosexuality in pre-colonial Africa and shows, ironically, that the West helped perpetuate the very same discrimination culture it is now fighting against.
“Homosexuality is supposedly Western and un-African, but most of the anti-gay laws are a legacy from colonial times,” says South African scientist and human rights activist Nomboniso Gasa. And anti-gay sentiment in Africa today is being fuelled further through the back door by “the lobby of conservative American churches.”
KGB-style security on Rotterdam trams
Big Brother is omni-present in daily life. De Telegraaf reveals that he also travels by tram - in Rotterdam. “Passengers’ conversations are being secretly recorded by local public transport company RET. It’s thought this only happens in the newest trams.”
Opposition councillors find it nauseating that passengers “are being sneakily tapped” live, while RET is outraged that its reputation is being smeared. The transport company claims that police can only access the files for a criminal investigation.
“The former Soviet KGB couldn’t have come up with it,” said Arno Bonte, who leads Green Left on Rotterdam’s council. “Recordings are made in secret, passengers aren’t informed and it’s totally unclear what happens to the recordings and how they’re stored.”
Salima Belhaj who represents the D66 Democrats is equally incensed. “We were never exactly in favour of cameras on public transport but this goes too far. This is Big Brother 5.0.”
De Telegraaf has responses from a host of passengers, outraged that the trivia of their tram talk could be amplified by the authorities. “If I have a chat with someone on a tram, no-one, I mean no-one needs to hear it,” says one passenger.
Stormy times for The Pirate Bay
At the beginning of the year, Dutch media reported on a court’s decision to order the popular internet providers Ziggo and Xs4all to block access to The Pirate Bay downloading site in a case brought about by the Brein pro-copyright foundation.
Yesterday, Brein had a double victory when a judge also ordered UPC, KPN, Telfort and Tele2 to do likewise. “Moreover, The Pirate Bay has to remove information from its website which informs the reader about an alternative downloading method,” writes Trouw.
“I know there are ways round blocked access,” admits Tim Kuik, director of Brein. “But we’re going to continue hounding the illegal providers. That’s the only way to stimulate legal downloading. As long as people can get a film for free, they won’t choose to pay for it.”
Playing with pasta paves technological leaps
“At the annual spaghetti bridge-building competition at the Delft University of Technology, the number of grams is crucial,” writes Trouw.
It might sound like a playtime at the crèche, but the competing students and professional engineers take the Civil Technology department’s SpaghettCie annual event very seriously. “You can demonstrate how basic rules of construction also apply for building a spaghetti bridge,” says one participant.
The engineers go on building until breaking point. “The lightest bridge which can carry the heaviest weight is the winner – it only broke when it was carrying 69 times its weight - and its inventor goes home 300 euros heavier.”
You can buy a lot of bridge-building pasta for that.