Last Sunday the Utrecht police caught a 37-year-old thief who had stolen two car radios.
Witnesses had spotted the man breaking into a car and called the police, who had no trouble whatsoever taking over the thief’s low-speed microcar to stop and arrest him, reports Telegraaf (Dutch). The article doesn’t tell whether the man was actually disabled or whether he merely used an invalid car as a decoy. Still, I am sure there is a lesson in there somewhere.
Those with reduced mobility often use a microcar to get around in the Netherlands. These cars are typically rated as mopeds, and cannot go faster than 40 kilometres an hour. A popular brand is the Canta.
(Image based on a public domain icon from the US FHWA Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.)
A gang robbed two Belgians of 70 kilos of gold last week after one of them had stopped the transport dressed as a policeman. The Belgians, driving an inconspicuous BMW, had just left Schiphol and were on their way to their country when a policeman on a motor cycle signaled them to leave the highway towards a tunnel near De Meern (Utrecht). There his accomplices waited with a van and another car. The two Belgians were forced to leave their car at gunpoint. The robbers took all 70 slices of gold, totalling about 1 million euros in value.
A Flemish study which showed that the Dutch talk faster than their Southern neighbours was shot down rapidly by Dutch experts when it was first published in 2004. But four years later linguist Hugo Quené from the University of Utrecht has proved his Flemish colleagues right. Quené used new methods to pick apart the 38-hour speech corpus and used a recently developed statistical method, multi-level analysis. As it turns out long “phrases” (bits of speech separated by pauses) take relatively less time to pronounce than short ones. Even so, the Dutch tend to use shorter phrases than the Flemish. Also when phrases of the same length were compared, the Dutch proved to be the fast talkers.
Two Dutch companies have recently introduced new E Ink based e-book readers. Irex, the Philips spin-off from Eindhoven, already has a remarkable device in its Iliad. Bigger and better than any other e-reader on the market, it is also twice as expensive. For the 650 euro that the Iliad costs you get an A5 screen, 16 greyscales, and Wifi though, making it an ideal device for students and businesses. For comparison: all other e-book readers have a screen half that size (A6), which makes reading A4 illustrated PDFs rather cumbersome. 
