Cash for Clunkers.....The European way!

Amsterdam police are deeply concerned about a new craze in which vandals toss parked Smart cars into the city’s canals.

The so-called ‘Smart tossing’ takes place mainly during the weekend, when many youths are out for a night on the town.

Dutch media indicate that environmentally-friendly "smart" cars, tiny two-seaters, are being picked up by roving bands of "pranksters" and tossed into the city's canals.

According to the Dutch-language Telegraff, five of the smart cars have been thrown in the water in the past two weeks. Authorities fear the practice will spread to other locations.

Interestingly, the car-chuckers are called pranksters whereas if they set the cars on fire, they would be called unemployed, disenfranchised minority youths protesting their poverty-stricken lives.

Dutch S&M Mag, Tries Spankvertising

Kudos to the Dutch ad-shop New Message for reminding the industry that there's always another way to get your message out.

The tool is a leather paddle, like the kind your boss uses on the interns when it's late, except this one has the words "Massad, the S&M Magazine" cut out of it.

Dutch porn actress Sofia Valentine, who promptly utilized it at S&M fetish parties, on willing guests.

FROM AGENCY SPY

Funny TV commercial of the day...The Heinekin walk-in closet

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.

The latest episode of 24

The Belgian gangster dubbed 'the Eel' for his skill at slipping away from Belgian prison authorities (although I'm using "skill" lightly here) was caught in the Netherlands, with another robbery suspect, nearly three days after his latest escape from a Belgian prison.

Nordin Benallal meet Jack Bauer!
This guy needs his own TV show. Nordin Benallal, facing several convictions for armed robbery and carjacking, escaped from a Belgian jail ... for the fourth time. It seems his buddies hijacked a helicopter and swooped in. Previously, he's escaped by jumping out of a prison van, walking out of jail wearing a wig and sunglasses and using a rope ladder to scale a prison wall.
Even better, this is the second time someone has escaped from a Belgian jail this year via helicopter.Guess it's time for them to remove that helipad from the middle of the prison yard.

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

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