Dutch plan to shift coffeeshops worries Belgium

The marijuana equivalent of out-of-town shopping malls would serve the 1.5 to 2 million people who pour into the MAASTRICHT each year in search of a powerful puff.

Most buyers come at the weekends but even on a weekday morning, there are Belgian cars clustered around coffeeshops. "Slow Motion", near the station, is anything but, with a stream of customers in and out within minutes.

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It may be flights to Charleroi are getting too cheap

Eastern European Gangs Fly to Belgium to Rob Shops

In a secret report by the National Detective Information Service (DNRI) of the Dutch police, it is noted that Polish gangs are regularly flown into Charleroi Airport in Belgium.

There they are given instructions, by SMS, navigation apparatus and even signs on shops, on where they should carry out robberies in the Netherlands. The annual theft amounts to about 220 million Euro. One center of these gangs is the Polish town of Wroclaw; others come from elsewhere in Poland and Lithuania. The gangs often consist of 10 or more people.

The prostitution "crackdown" in Amsterdam

Amsterdam said it would close nearly one-third of the 350 windows that prostitutes use in the city's notorious Red Light District, invoking a 2003 law that allows it to revoke the licenses of brothels when it suspects that they are being used for money laundering or other illegal financial activities. ''We're not knights on a morality crusade, and this is intended to target financial crime, not prostitution per se,'' the city spokesman, Martien Maten, told The Associated Press. The Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, but even before then, the Red Light District was tolerated and had become a tourist attraction.

Read this for a public choice interpretation, and here are some real Dutch facts. The real point is real estate. The red light district is in the oldest, most beautiful area of Amsterdam. In the last 20 years, it has changed from a mixed neighborhood to one almost exclusively peopled by the very well to do. They pay a fortune for those apartments and homes. The talk of cleaning up the neighborhood for the sake of the prostitutes and to lessen criminal behavior is simply a smokescreen. What they wish to do is to create a more up-scale neighborhood - it is gentrification pure and simple.
What is offensive in all this is that anyone who bought a home in that area knew what they were getting into - large crowds every night and all night long. It is to lessen this that the district is being “shrunk”. Less windows for the prostitutes - a more compact area for the tourists - less annoyance for the wealthy.
Prostitutes play the same role as gays and artists elsewhere? They move into a run down area, build it up, and along come the yuppies. It is not about anything more than that.

More Car-B-Ques in Brussels

But Freddy says Brussels can't have a 9/11 peaceful demonstration.
Heavy rioting erupted in Turkish quarters of Brussels Wednesday. Buses and trams were attacked. Several cars were torched and shops destroyed. Police forces were unable to restore law and order in the boroughs of Sint-Joost-ten-Node and Schaarbeek where since last Sunday the animosity among Turks is running high. Turkish flags are omnipresent. In some streets the Turkish crescent and star adorns almost every house.
Wednesday in Freddy Thielemans pro-Islamist Brussels, violence erupted in the evening, with Turks attacking buses, cars, trains and shops. In a re-run of Ottoman bigotry, on Sunday night in the district of Sint-Joost, a bar owned by Armenian Peter Petrossian was attacked. On Monday, a cafe belonging to an Iraqi Kurd was ransacked by Turkish nationalists. On Wednesday, Turkish youths began to attack Kurdish shops in Brussels. Similar demonstrations by Turks took place in Antwerp.
The rioting on Wednesday caused 10 police officers to be injured. The violence followed a demonstration by 800 people against Kurds which turned violent.
Brussels journal has the story

Amsterdam buys out "Emperor of Sex"

Now here's a leveraged buyout I would be interested in. In a deal worth £18m, officials will buy 18 buildings from Charlie Geerts - known as Amsterdam's Emperor of Sex - and close down the 'windows'. The final decision came from the city's mayor, Job Cohen, who argued that the brothels were attracting crime and money-laundering to the area. 'We want to get rid of the underlying criminality,' he told a TV station last week.
The Dutch tradition of tolerance — or gedoogbeleid — allowed prostitution to flourish long before it was legalized. Same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia and use of marijuana also are legal here.
Brothel closures run counter to that tradition, those in the district say. "It will never work," says Ton Van den Brink, 53, who owns a lunch counter near brothels, sex shops and "coffee shops" where marijuana is sold and smoked. The Wallen "is like a supermarket. Everybody needs to go there for things they need."

Now we know where the Exxon Valdez captain ended up!

A 105 metre long ship destroyed a house in Holland after its skipper fell asleep. Dutch newspaper De Stentor has a slideshow of pictures