Paris needs love
Between where I stepped off a train from Rotterdam at Gare du Nord and the end of the platform I counted some forty French police officers. Cool, I thought, I …
Read MoreMonth: September 2016
September 11 in Holland’s largest Muslim city
It’s fifteen years today since four terrorist teams composed of mainly Saudi citizens under orders from Al Qaeda attacked America with her own planes. I decided to spend this day …
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Vote 1 Pirate!
After getting humiliated in the Macklenburg-Vorprommen state elections on Sunday, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats face another challenge in the local poll in Berlin in a week’s time. Though at least …
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FU Marx and Engels: the capitalist vs the communist Berlin
Berlin is a mutilated city. So much of it has been destroyed, so much of it has been rebuilt, so much of it has not been rebuilt, so much of …
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Happy 40 years of rotting in hell, Mao
Time flies when you’re not causing deaths of tens of millions of your compatriots. China’s “Global Times†reports from Shaoshan where thousands of people have gathered to remember the village’s …
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From the Berlin Wall to the Checkpoint Charlie
I have on my desk a little piece of the Berlin Wall that a friend brought back for me from a visit some years ago. It’s a flat chunk, about …
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Berlin at night
When you jump on a plane in Brisbane and fly for over an hour, you get to Canberra. When you jump on a plane in Rotterdam and fly for over …
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Atlantis of climate change alarmism
It’s this time of the year; another Pacific Island Forum annual conference opens, this time in Pohnpei. The Forum is a regional talking shop of Melanesian, Micronesian and Polynesian island …
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How we stopped worrying about the financial apocalypse and started to enjoy life (beyond our means)
Malcolm Farr asks the question this afternoon, “How does the Coalition sell its budget cuts when our economy continues to grow?†The short answer is: not very well. As Farr …
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Who discovered Australia?
Who discovered Australia? Depends what you mean by “discoverâ€. The Indigenous people got there first, of course, though without having a sense of inhabiting a continent or the knowledge of …
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Can you run the Dutch oven on renewables?
News from Holland to warm one’s heart and the atmosphere: Dutch greenhouse gas emissions rose by 5 per cent in 2015 from a year earlier, Statistics Netherlands says, again highlighting …
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Polygamy – the next big thing
The titillating chatter about the new internet “dating†site Polygamy.com hides some bigger truths. The site is a brainchild of Azad Chaiwala, 33-year-old entrepreneur of Pakistani ancestry, living in Manchester. …
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Sisters of Mercy and the sisterhood of no mercy
For a tiny Albanian woman who devoted her life to ministering to the poor, Mother Teresa of Calcutta has proven to be a controversial new saint, though not so much …
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The 7 most important discoveries I made about Holland in the first 24 hours
1.There is an abundance of very attractive blonde women. No offence to any Dutch readers but Holland does not have any particular international reputation for hot women the way some …
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Russia criminalises history – again
People often ask me why I pick on Russia. OK, no one actually asks me that, and in any case in the ranking of all the things I pick on …
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There is terrorism in Europe – should I turn around and come back home?
It’s just after 11pm and I’m sitting at the Cathay Pacific Lounge at the Hong Kong airport, waiting for my quarter-past-midnight flight to Amsterdam, and reflecting whether I should turn …
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1 September 1939
The peace was shattered with no warning, in the darkness before the dawn. In a space of minutes, just after 4:40 AM, bombs destroyed three quarters of a little town …
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