Portugal

Tens of thousands of Dutch travelers are stuck abroad. More and more countries are banning incoming flights from Europe, and Dutch people already there find it almost impossible to leave. They face closed borders, canceled flights, travel organizations that won't answer the phone, and an embassy that can do little for them, NOS reports.

Customs officers found approximately 1 thousand kilograms of cocaine during a check at the port of Rotterdam on Friday, February 7th. The drugs were hidden in a container loaded with bananas from Ecuador, the Public Prosecution Service said on Wednesday.

The cargo arrived at the port of Rotterdam early last week on a ship from Costa Rica. The bananas were destined for a company in Portugal. The Dutch authorities does not believe the Portuguese company had anything to do with the drug trafficking.

The drugs were confiscated and destroyed.

A controversial penalty in the 90th minute of the Dutch women's national football team match against Japan handed Oranje a 2-1 victory at the Stade de la Route de Lorient in Rennes, France on Tuesday night. The victory in the last Round of 16 match in the 2019 World Cup sends the OranjeLeeuwinnen through to the quarterfinals, where they play Italy on Saturday.

Striker Lieke Martens scored both of the Dutch team's goals. She was named Player of the Match for her efforts in front of a packed stadium that included thousands of orange-clad Dutch fans. 

A new key suspect in the disappearance of British girl Madeleine McCann in Portugal in 2007, was once also a suspect in the murder of Dutch boy Nicky Verstappen in 1998, the Telegraaf reports.

The suspect in question is 48-year-old German pedophile Matin Ney. He was sentenced to life in prison for abducting and murdering three German boys in 1992, 1995 and 2001, and sexually abusing dozens of other children, according to news.com.au. Ney was in Portugal working on a project for homeless people when Maddie McCann disappeared, according to the news site. 

A Transavia pilot decided to make an emergency landing on Monday to get an aggressive passenger off the aircraft. Video taken inside the cabin of Transavia flight HV 6215 shows a struggle between several men near the cockpit, with several punches being thrown.

A yacht carrying 1,400 kilograms of cocaine was intercepted at the Azores, a group of islands that's an autonomous region of Portugal. The three people on board, a Dutch man, a Brit and a Croatian, were arrested, NOS reports.

The ship, sailing under the banner of the British Virgin Islands, was on its way fro the Caribbean to Europe. It was intercepted south of the island of Faial.

The arrests were a joint action by the British and Portuguese authorities.

Dozens of flights to and from the Canary Islands had to land at other airports on Sunday due to severe storms on the islands. Heavy rains an winds over 100 kilometers per hour made it impossible for flights to land on or take off from the islands during the afternoon. Many hundreds of Dutch holiday makers were affected, AD reports.

Flightradar24 shows that many flights had to move to Morocco and Faro in Portugal. These detours affected hundreds of Dutch tourists using airlines TUI and Transavia, according to the newspaper.

Two devastating natural phenomena in Ireland, Spain and Portugal had a beautiful effect on the Netherlands. The effects of Hurricane Ophelia over Ireland and the forest fires in Spain and Portugal, turned the morning sun in the Netherlands into a beautiful fireball red-orange on Tuesday.

A group of 200 Dutch tourists are among thousands stuck on the Portuguese island of Madeira since Saturday. The flight set to bring the Dutch tourists home couldn't take off from Funchal Airport on Saturday due to heavy winds. An airplane sent to pick up the stranded tourists on Monday tried to land three times in vain, a spokesperson for TUI said to the Telegraaf.

Dozens of flights had to be canceled because the planes couldn't land or takeoff due to the weather. A total of around 6 thousand people are stranded on the island. 

A University of Twente student says she has developed an algorithm that can help Twitter and Facebook determine if an account on the social media platforms was hacked. Meike Nauta says her algorithm analyzes six data points  that can determine a hack to a 99-percent certainty, reports Dutch media outlet Computable.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Eurogroup chairman and departing Finance Minister, is facing fire over statements made about southern European countries in an interview with the Frankfurter Allegemeine on Monday.

In the interview he said that he finds the Stability Pact, which contains the EU budget rules, very important. He praised the "northern countries" for showing "solidarity" with "crisis countries", but that comes with "responsibilities", he said. "I can't spend all my money on alcohol and women and then ask you for help", he said.