Arcadis signed a 11.6 million dollar deal with the American city of Norfolk to help protect the city from flooding, the consulting and engineering firm announced. Part of the water management knowledge will be provided by Arcadis Nederland, ANP reports. 

The deal involves coming up with a plan to help the city, located in the state of Virginia, be better protected against and prepared for flooding. Dutch knowledge institutes and the Dutch embassy in Washington are also participating in the project. 

American president Donald Trump nominated American-Dutch former congressman Pete Hoekstra to be the new United States Ambassador to the Netherlands, NU.nl reports.

Hoekstra, 63, is one of Trump's advisors. He was previously nominated as a possible new director for U.S. intelligence service CIA.

Two Rotterdam students planned to vacation in the United States, but they got no further than JFK Airport in New York. There the American authorities decided to deny them access to the country. "Because we are Muslim", Othmane Charib and Ismail Aghzanay said in a video they made from London after being deported. 

"We were treated like criminals. We had to sit back to back with each other and weren't allowed to make eye contact." Charib tells in the video. "They took our pictures and fingerprints. Our tickets were torn to pieces. Dogs are treated better."

The Netherlands is doubling its contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to 100 thousand euros to help compensate for the United States' withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement, Environment State Secretary Sharon Dijksma said to the Volkskrant. She called on other European countries to do the same and thereby fill the financial hole the Americans left. 

The Dutch economy will grow by 2.5 percent this year - the highest growth in a decade, Dutch central bank DNB expects. The economy is doing better in all aspects, but wages are still lagging behind, the bank said in its latest estimate on Monday, NOS reports.

DNB's expectations are rosier than the central planning office CPB's estimates in March. The CPB then predicted economic growth of 2.1 percent. The office is releasing its latest estimates on Wednesday. The Dutch government uses CPB estimates to make its policy.

The United States is pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, president Donald Trump announced in a statement at the White House on Thursday afternoon, local time. The Netherlands deplores this decision, Prime Minister Mark Rutte said in response. Our country and the rest of the world remains committed to battling climate change, he stressed. Foreign Affairs Minister Bert Koenders called Trump's decision a "cardinal error", Environment State Secretary Sharon Dijksma called it a "historic mistake".

The number of child pornography reports in the Netherlands is increasing enormously, AD reports based on the police's National Trend Report that will be published this week. The police expect to receive around 20 thousand child porn reports with a Dutch link this year, compared to 12 thousand last year. The report speaks of a "threat to Dutch society", according to the newspaper. 

American companies will face detrimental consequences if U.S. president Donald Trump decides to withdraw his country from the Paris climate agreement, Shell CEO Ben van Beurden warned in an interview with British newspaper Financial Times. Van Beurden is one of the first to criticize Trump's decisions from the business community, which is set to benefit from Trump's promises of tax cuts and relaxed rules, RTL Nieuws reports.

National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security in the Netherlands, Dick Schoof, is in Brussels for a EU meeting on the United States plans to ban laptops and tablets in hand luggage on flights between Europe and America. It is expected that he will speak out against this measure, RTL Nieuws reports.

The United States already banned electronics larger than a cellphone in the cabins of planes flying from eight Middle Eastern countries to the States. According to the Americans, terrorists have plans to smuggle explosives on board in such devices.

The United States' plan to ban laptops and tablets on flights to America is unsafe, according Dutch pilots association VNV. If the U.S. has its way, laptops and tablets will only be allowed in the cargo area of a plane. But according to the VNV, this forms a great danger of lithium batteries catching fire. "That has happened in the past. Such a fire can not be extinguished, because the crew can't reach the cargo area during a flight", Joost van Doesburg of the VNV said to NOS.

The number of cross-border child abductions in the Netherlands showed a significant increase in 2016. Last year a total of 251 children were reported kidnapped to the Dutch center of international child abductions IKO, 14 more than in 2015, the center announced according to RTL Nieuws. 

Most of these abductions involved a parent taking a child abroad following a divorce or separation. Most of the abducted children were below the age of 6, the youngest one was two months old at the time of abduction. In 70 percent of the cases, the perpetrator is female.