THE HAGUE – The turnout for the March 15 parliamentary elections was 81.9 percent – the highest in more than twenty years. The Electoral Council announced this on Tuesday when it presented the official election results. The only surprise is that GreenLeft is a little bit larger than the Socialist Party. Both parties hold 14 seats in the new Parliament but GreenLeft won 4,000 votes more. The VVD remains, in spite of a loss of eight seats, the largest party with 33 seats. The PvdA collapsed from 38 to 9 while the PVV became the country’s second largest party by…
Author: The Publisher
Last week’s general election in the Netherlands was one of the most closely watched in years. But the fact that Geert Wilders’ radical right party failed to make major gains does not mean he has not had an impact. While most of the world was focused only on one party, the radical right populist Party for Freedom (PVV) and its leader Geert Wilders, the Dutch cast their votes widely across 13 parties, two of them winning seats for the first time. No party got more than 22 percent of the vote. For the rest of the world, the fact that…
That the Collective Preventive Service recommends the use of toothpaste and mouth water containing fluoride may surprise some readers. After all, fluoride has been at the center of disputes in many countries. Its use is, at least, controversial. Medicalnewstoday.com published the following information about the controversy. A growing number of people are asking why we are being “medicated” in such large numbers without being consulted first. Surely, if fluoride is a medication and is being added to our water supply, shouldn’t this occur with our approval? There is also concern that perhaps it is not possible to accurately control exactly…
Twee days after the fourfold liquidation near Parera on the access road to Punda the police in Willemstad still has no idea whatsoever about what happened last Saturday night. NOS-correspondent Dick Drayer sums up the situation in his personal blog De Aachterkant van Curacao. “Even better: Chief Commissioner Mauricio Sambo complains publicly about the fact that hardly any witnesses have come forward in the first hours after the murder of 32-year-old Reegi Angelista, 39-year-old Elery Cijntje, 48-year-old Harold Francisca and 54-year-old Purcival Brooks. Literally Sambo says: “It cannot be so that in such a crowded area like Parera on Saturday…
Sometimes a sweet little story like the presentation of the Welcome Baby Bag at the hospital brings home the realization that there are plenty of good-willing people in our community. Stories about violent crimes, serious accidents and large-scale fraud investigations tend to dominate the news and push such initiatives into the background. Good news is no news is a well-known maxim in journalism. No matter how true that remains, its effect is that social issues in general receive less coverage. The Welcome Baby Bag story is a topic from the category small news. But it has a huge impact on…
GREAT BAY – Little Kiandra was not aware of what was going on around her yesterday afternoon in the conference room of the St. Maarten Medical Center, but yet, with her mom Juana the 4-days-old baby girl was the center of attention during the presentation of the Welcome Baby Bag initiative. The idea for the welcome baby bag comes from the Rotary Club Mid Isle’s president Veronica Jansen-Webster who received a welcome bag of goodies after giving birth in the Netherlands. The Rotary picked up the initiative and found sponsors to support it: Bebe N Kids, Penny’s, Domino’s Pizza and…
MARIGOT – With 49.2 percent of the vote, Team Daniel Gibbs booked a resounding victory in the first round if the territorial elections on Sunday. A distant second was Louis Mussington’s MJP (13.8 percent) followed by Alain Richardson’s MVP with 11.9 percent. These three parties will go into the second round of voting this upcoming Sunday. Voters wiped out the list of President Aline Hanson who won just 6.6 percent of the vote. If these elections showed anything, it was a deep disinterest in politics by the electorate. Of the 20,276 eligible voters only 8,601 cast a vote (42.4 percent),…
The gap between politics and “the people’ has been a subject for debate in many countries. This weekend we witnessed the size of this gap on the French side of the island where citizens had the opportunity to vote in the territorial elections. With a turnout of 42.4 percent politics sustained a severe black eye, because almost six out of ten eligible voters opted to stay home or do something else than exercising their democratic rights. The winner of the first round of these elections, Team Daniel Gibbs scored a seemingly impressive 49.2 percent of the vote; but that percentage…
As flight connections between the islands of the former Netherlands Antilles become more cumbersome, many are scratching their heads about the next move. With Insel Air in bankruptcy protection chances are that one of the major airlines to serve the connection between St. Maarten and Curacao and Aruba will disappear. And then what? We figure that government departments will have to invest in video conferencing equipment. That will at least give them cheap options to stay in touch. But what about all the other inter-island travel? Without reasonable flight connections – asking for something perfect seems a bit much at…
That the country’s financial management needs improvement is old news. But that the books are altered after the fact is something new. Apparently that happened in 2015 if we go by the letter from the Cft to the finance ministry. There are other violations too and one of them requires immediate attention. Ministries have been exceeding their budgets (in 2015) while there was no approval to do this from Parliament. The question is of course: how would parliamentarians become aware of such violations? They surely do not get a red alert the day after something like this happens. It is…
