A car with Dutch license plates was overturned on the A12 highway near the Belgian village of Zandvliet sometime during the night between Thursday and Friday. The two people in the car died in the crash. Sadly, the crashed car was only noticed after daybreak, RTL Nieuws reports.
"We suspect that [the victims] are Dutch, but that remains to be seen", a spokesperson for the local police said to RTL Nieuws. Police are still confirming their identities.
The number of hotels in and around Amsterdam continues to grow. Over the past five years, 7,700 hotel rooms were added within the city, an increase of 25 percent. In the region around the Dutch capital, the number of hotel rooms grew by 40 percent, the Volkskrant reports based on its own analysis of figures from Statistics Netherlands and Amsterdam's stats department IOS.
The Volkskrant's figures exclude rooms rented through platforms like Airbnb.
New Year's in the Netherlands was marred by incidents like arson, vandalism, and violence against police officers and other first responders. There were a total of 9,300 such incidents this past New Year's, 387 more than the year before.
A 10-year-old girl from Eritrea died in a hospital in Maastricht on Thursday after she fell from a window of the asylum center in Heerlen on Saturday, a spokesperson for the central agency for the reception of asylum seekers COA confirmed to De Gelderlander.
The girl fell from a first floor window, and very unluckily landed on her head. She was rushed to the academic hospital in Maastricht with serious injuries.
A car containing items with a potential explosion hazard was found in Didam, Gelderland on Thursday. The police believe the Audi may have been involved in an ATM bombing in Germany earlier in the morning, a police spokesperson said to De Gelderlander.
The ATM bombing happened in the Duisburg area early on Thursday morning. Afterwards, there was a police chase on the A18. During the chase, the Audi hit a police vehicle, before escaping police pursuit.
A 68-year-old man was arrested for leaving a jerry can in an empty train in Leeuwarden on Thursday, prompting the evacuation of the entire train station. He is suspected of arson, the police said.
The police suspect that the man wanted to either start a fire or cause an explosion in the train. He is in custody for questioning.
Henk Naves, the chairman of the Council of Judiciary, called on politicians to stop immediately blame the judge if they find a verdict unpleasant. That is bad for the rule of law, he said in his New Year's speech, NOS reports.
Gay and bisexual young people were more than twice as likely to be bullied, stalked or threatened online than their heterosexual counterparts last year, Statistics Netherlands reports based on a survey among 38 thousand internet users between the ages of 12 and 25 years. Among all young people, regardless of sexual orientation, girls were bothered online almost twice as often as boys.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called his Dutch counterpart Mark Rutte to ask him how he dealt with the MH17 disaster. The call was in response to a Ukraine International Airlines plane crashing in Tehran on Wednesday, possibly after being hit by a rocket. All 176 people on board the Boeing 737-800 were killed, including 64 Canadians, RTL Nieuws reports.
Rutte "offered all the support that the Netherlands can offer" to Trudeau and Canada, a spokesperson for the Dutch Prime Minister told the broadcaster.
An NS bus that collided with seven cars and a woman on a cargo bike in Bussum on Wednesday, may have had a technical defect, according to the police's initial findings in the investigation into the fatal accident. The woman on the cargo bike ended up underneath the bus and did not survive the accident. Her child was not hurt, NU.nl reports.
The moon will fall in the shadow of the earth on Friday night, resulting in an almost complete eclipse that will be visible in the Netherlands. "And it will be clear tomorrow night, so it will be very easy to see," Buineradar meteorologist Maurice Middendorp said to RTL Nieuws.
"92 percent of the moon will end up in the shadow of the earth," Middendorp said. The moon will look darker than usual, with a bright sickle. "That is the 8 percent that's not in the shadow of the earth."
The eclipse will start at 6:06 p.m. on Friday, peak at 8:11 p.m. and be over at 10:15 p.m.
Dutch airline KLM transported a record number of 35.1 million passengers in 2019, an increase of almost 3 percent compared to the year before, according to figures the airline published on Thursday.
The fact that KLM was able to grow despite the fact that Schiphol has been at the limit of its allowed takeoffs and landings for some time, has to do with a higher occupancy rate, among other things. More seats were sold per plane, leading to KLM's planes being nearly 90 percent filled last year, NU.nl reports.
