March 18, 2012

Orphans castrated in Catholic boarding school in the 1950s

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:47 pm

NRC reports that the Roman Catholic church has been castrating minors in the 1950s.

In one case the victim was a boy who had been sexually abused by a priest in a Roman Catholic boarding school. The paper says there are indications that the church castrated dozens of more boys. The church had hoped to ‘cure’ the boys from ‘homosexual behaviour’.

In 2010 the church appointed a committee led by former education minister Wim Deetman to study sexual abuse of minors within the church. In its report, the committee somehow failed to make any mention of the castration cases, even though it knew about it.

The current right-wing government has always blocked a parliamentary enquiry into widespread sexual abuse by the Catholic church. Coalition partners VVD, CDA and PVV claim that this is because an enquiry would be of no use to the victims.

According to the optimistic Deetman report, the rape machine that is the Catholic church made tens of thousands of victims among children in the Netherlands alone between 1945 and 1985.

Last week Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD) cheerfully reported at a congress for fundamentalist Christian youths—it is still anybody’s guess what he was doing there—that for him as a liberal, judeo-christian principles are very important. Somehow I doubt this government will do much to stop the criminal practices of white religions.

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March 17, 2012

Stephen Colbert explains what US presidential candidate really meant with his lies about the Netherlands

Filed under: Shows,Weird by Branko Collin @ 12:50 pm

We suggested last month that politician Rick Santorum may have broken the world record on bald faced lying in his weight class when he talked about the horrors of the Dutch health care system.

If anything Santorum’s statements left Dutch pundits flabbergasted. Yesterday US comedian Stephen Colbert came to the rescue of every confused Dutch person and explained why Santorum says just the darndest things. The part about the Netherlands starts at 2:58.

“Evidently Santorum’s comments about the Netherlands were yanked out of … his nether parts.”

Stephen Colbert is a comedian who pretends to be a right-wing blow-hard pundit styling himself on the likes of Bill O’Reilly.

See also: Dutch beer for America’s Black History Month.

(Illustration: Colbertnation.com)

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March 15, 2012

Judges punish ‘foreign looking’ criminals harder

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 7:26 pm

Dutch judges are five times more likely to send a criminal to jail if the suspect has a foreign appearance, researchers from Leiden University found out.

That likelihood increases to 20 times if the suspect does not speak Dutch.

The researchers checked for expected variables such as the features of the crime, the likelihood of the suspect to commit further crimes, and the location of the court.

Judges not only discriminated against foreigners with a non-Dutch appearance, but also against men. Women are three times less likely to end in jail than men who committed the same crimes. Only lighter crimes, including theft, assault, battery and traffic violations were studied.

A factor that did not influence the weight of the punishment was whether suspects showed they were sorry.

The researchers expressed concern that people receive a prison sentence when community or a fine would have sufficed, because prison sentence are known to kick-start criminal careers.

(Via: NRC. Link: Leiden University)

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March 12, 2012

Littering before the Dutch Supreme Court

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 11:35 am

In a glorious display of bullying, barratry and plain old pettiness, the Dutch justice department has decided to take a littering case to the Supreme Court.

It started in October 2009 when a man was fined 120 euro for dropping an empty can on the Neringweg in Lelystad. Rather than paying the fine, the man decided to wait for the court case, which he lost. His lawyer appealed for two reasons, namely that the offence was too small to warrant such a heavy handed response from the state, and that the justice department failed to actually prove the man had broken the law.

The judge quite rightly ruled that it is the justice department’s prerogative to pick its battles, but then awarded the case to the defendant. The local ordinance of Lelystad stipulates that litter needs to be put into a rubbish bin. The man successfully argued that the justice department had provided no proof that there were bins in the street (which there were, by the way).

Spokeswoman for the justice department Kiki Plugge said that the department wants to create clarity for municipalities: should they amend their ordinances? The question seems moot, as the justice department lost because they messed up, not because the ordinance is unclear. The spokeswoman then continued to say that “we do not want people to litter”, which seems an odd thing to say. Of course the justice department gets to pick its own battles, but one would hope that it does not base its choices on its own, undoubtedly narrow minded tastes and interests.

Quite frankly I hope the justice department is taught a lesson on its obligation to perform due diligence, and on suspects’ rights and due process.

Lelystad is a young city of 70,000 souls, built in a place where in the 1950s, a sailor would only be able to see the sea around him. The Dutch Supreme Court doesn’t perform trials. Instead, it only checks to see if the law has been applied correctly given the facts of the case.

(Link: De Pers. Photo by Jos Faber, some rights reserved)

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March 11, 2012

Vote for the pretty girl behind the anchor

Filed under: Shows,Technology by Branko Collin @ 11:51 am

Three friends from the Eindhoven University of Technology run a website to crowd source the detection of pretty girls behind popular TV anchor Matthijs van Nieuwkerk.

The interface to hetmeisjeachtermatthijs.nl is very simple. It presents you with a screenshot of last night’s episode of talk show De Wereld Draait Door, covered in squares that any visitor can click on. Just click the square that covers the pretty girl, in your opinion, and your vote is recorded.

According to Bright, the site has been up for about 18 months, and drew 10,000 visitors last year.

“Part of the fun”, founder Teun Vinken told the tech site, “is that the girls are blurry. Half the time you cannot even be sure they are really that pretty.”

Screenshot: hetmeisjeachtermatthijs.nl.

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March 10, 2012

Wifi roll-out on Dutch Rail trains progressing as scheduled

Filed under: Technology by Branko Collin @ 4:06 pm

Each month ten Dutch Rail trains are equipped with free wifi, so that all 365 trains should have wifi by the end of 2013, Webwereld reports. This is according to schedule.

Currently wifi is free. Dutch Rail still has to decide if it will start charging money for usage after 2012. The national government gave Dutch Rail a 15 million euro subsidy for putting wifi on its trains.

In 2011 the number of trains featuring free wifi doubled, but usage quadrupled. Data rate and session length have stayed the same, 9MB and 40 minutes respectively.

Webwereld, a computer news site, asked some of its users about their experiences with the service. The consensus seems to be that it is as good as one can expect from ‘free’, but not better. Complaints centre on bad connections and slow speeds. One odd complaint is that the operator, T-Mobile, seems to be using German IP numbers. Users get to see the German Google when they want to search, and Facebook warns them that somebody is trying to log into their account from Germany.

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March 8, 2012

24 Oranges goes mobile

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 10:38 am

Starting today 24oranges.nl has a mobile version of its website.

You can access this version using the same address as always. The mobile version is much leaner and is optimised for small screens. We use the very popular WP Touch plug-in for this.

If you are reading this on a mobile device and still see the old design, tell us which device you are using in the comments and we’ll see what we can do. The desktop version of this site should work well on tablet-sized screens and bigger, while the mobile version is intended for phone-sized devices.

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March 5, 2012

BodaBoda produces pillow seats for bicycle luggage carriers

Filed under: Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 2:50 pm

It certainly surprised one American tourist when he noticed several women giving their male friends a ride on their bicycle’s luggage rack on a sunny afternoon in 2006. Why wasn’t the man doing the work? Lack of courtesy? Emancipation? The reason is much more prosaic, I am afraid. Luggage racks are pretty hard on one’s behind. And the unspoken rule in the Netherlands is that the owner of the bike gets to decide who gets to sit where.

Three Utrecht students are now selling seats for the luggage rack. According to De Pers they noticed bicycles in Kenya kitted out with such seats:

Crossing the border between Kenya and Uganda in a motorised vehicle costs a lot of money. That is why people get off the bus and walk the two miles to the other side. Cyclists saw a gap in the market and started carrying people across the border. They would advertise their services asking “Border? Border?” That is how the bodaboda was born.

Quax [one of the Dutch students] would ride one of those bikes, and being white, people would stare at him, especially the time he offered to give his landlord a lift to the station. “The people who saw us did not believe their own eyes. This should not be. This should be the other way around. A white person should be on the back”, Quax said.

The seats cost between 20 and 27,50 euro, or 35 euro if you want your own design printed on them. You can also buy a complete bodaboda bike for 300 euro (shown above).

The students from Utrecht are happy when they spot the occasional bodaboda rider in their home town. In Kenia in the meantime the bodaboda has really taken off, and more and more often bodaboda riders use motorcycles. The Star publishes articles on boda etiquette (“place your hands on the rider’s hips around the waist”), and a local government has set aside 2.5 million Kenian shillings to train 500 bodaboda riders, also according to The Star.

Just remember, next time you hear Gers Pardoel sing “why don’t you hop on the back of my bike”, he’s not necessarily being a gentleman, unless he owns a bodaboda seat.

Illustration: bodaboda.nl.

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March 4, 2012

Internet lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet says “Limit copyright on images”

Filed under: Photography,Technology by Branko Collin @ 3:19 pm

Engelfriet writes on his blog:

An [Internet trend] I had not seen before, Pinterest, is a service that lets you publicly bookmark images, a sort of virtual notice board. […] Is this legal, can anybody just make a collection of images from everywhere without the rights holders’ permission?

No, this is not legal. […] If I were older and more cynical, I would now announce the bankruptcy of copyright law for images. Everybody, and I mean everybody, thinks it is normal that you take images off Google for your mood boards, blogs, and Facebook accounts. And this is happening on a grand scale. The uploaders are difficult to track, middlemen are not accountable, and notice-and-take-downs are a lost battle.

[…] If half of the country breaks the law, it is time to start wondering if the law should not be changed.

In the comments Engelfriet (who incidentally has helped us in the past and who regularly comments here too) gives several examples of road rules that have been adapted following civil disobedience: on one hand, cyclists can now turn right on a red light in certain situations, but on the other, they are still obliged to use bike lights when it’s dark outside. Compliance with the latter rule has, however, been increased with safety campaigns and stricter policing.

(Illustration: pinterest.com)

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March 3, 2012

Frost sinks popsicle stick boat

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:12 pm

Ship yard Aquaverium in Grou, Friesland has told former American stunt man Rob McDonald to remove his sail boat The Thor from its premises after the boat sank, Algemeen Dagblad reports.

McDonald built his boat from 15 million ice cream sticks in five years time and with the help of 5,000 school children. He was planning to cross the Atlantic Ocean with it, using his trip to raise funds for the Sea Heart Foundation charity. Its sea-worthiness had already been proven with a trip to London.

Unfortunately cancer grounded its captain. McDonald told Algemeen Dagblad that a group of business people had promised to take care of the boat, but ended up leaving Aquaverium themselves: “I am in shock. I wanted to do something fun for sick children with the boat, and I am especially sorry for them and for those who have helped me.”

The frost that got the nation so excited has destroyed the hull of the boat, and now the yard wants McDonald to remove its wreck. “We feel sorry for him, but nobody ever paid for his spot. […] We have tried to bail out the boat, but it is not working well because of the boat’s remarkable construction.”

In 2010 De Pers wrote that Aquaverium and McDonald had closed a long term lease agreement for a mooring spot. At the time, McDonald had put the boat up for sale at Marktplaats.nl.

McDonald is looking for a new spot to moor his boat.

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