A first official inventory has identified 57 sites in the Netherlands where pollution by PFAS is so serious that cleanup is needed as soon as possible, according to a new report from the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. The number is expected to grow sharply in the coming years, as most of the country's municipalities and provinces are still mapping out where the substances may have spread.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What are PFAS?

PFAS is short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a family of thousands of chemicals that have been used for decades in everyday products: non-stick pans (the "Teflon" coating), water-resistant clothing such as Gore-Tex, food packaging, firefighting foam, cosmetics and many industrial processes. They are nicknamed "forever chemicals" because they do not (or barely) break down in nature. Once in soil, groundwater or surface water, they stay there for hundreds to thousands of years unless they are actively cleaned up.

PFAS can be harmful to human health. According to the Dutch public health institute RIVM, they can damage the immune system, affect fertility and unborn children, and harm organs such as the liver and thyroid (a gland in the neck that helps control metabolism). They can enter the body through food, drinking water, or even through prolonged contact with polluted water and soil.

The 57 most urgent sites

Out of nearly 4,000 places in the Netherlands suspected of PFAS pollution, the new report identifies 57 as "PFAS-aandachtlocaties," or PFAS sites of concern. That means soil testing has shown the pollution is severe enough that there is an immediate risk to people or the environment, for example because the site is close to a drinking water source or a residential neighbourhood.

The largest single cause is firefighting foam, the kind of foam that has been used at airports, military bases and industrial sites to put out chemical fires. Of the 57 sites, 35 are linked to firefighting foam. Other sources include five PFAS production sites, one carpet and floor-covering company, one zinc-plating factory, and even one location of a so-called "foam party."

Of the 57 sites, four have been cleaned up, eight are currently being cleaned, and 45 are still waiting for cleanup to begin. The ministry has not published a list, and refers anyone interested to their local municipality or province.

"Only the tip of the iceberg"

The 57 are "just the tip of the iceberg," the ministry says, with the number of urgent sites expected to "rise sharply" in the coming years. Many municipalities and provinces are still in the inventory phase, the first stage in which they map out where pollution might exist, before any soil testing or follow-up research takes place.

That work is being held up by several practical problems. Local authorities say they often lack the staff, the specialist knowledge and the funds they need. They also have little legal power to force private companies to allow soil testing on their land. As the NOS reported earlier this year, some businesses are flatly refusing to cooperate, and the ministry, which initially denied this was a problem, is now unable to say what it will do about it. The provinces' joint body, IPO, called the situation "something that has to be solved."

A bill running into the billions

Cleanup, known in Dutch as "saneren," does not come cheap. The ongoing clean-ups alone already amount to at least €68 million, according to the IPO. "That is probably only a fraction of the total cleanup costs of the PFAS sites of concern," a spokesperson said, "not to mention purification costs, healthcare costs and the costs of delays to housing projects." A single site can cost €6 million on its own.

The central government has so far paid out €18.8 million in cleanup grants to local authorities, with another €11.1 million requested for 2026. The aim is to have a complete picture of the country's PFAS pollution by 2030, but officials already acknowledge that the actual cleanup will continue well beyond that year. A European Commission report has estimated that across the EU, PFAS cleanup could ultimately cost hundreds of billions of euros.

Who pays in the end?

A central legal question remains unsettled: who has to pay for cleanup when the company that caused the pollution decades ago is gone or unknown. "In the first instance, the polluter or the owner of the site is responsible," the ministry says, "but there are situations where the government will also have to contribute, or even take the initiative." For now, that uncertainty, combined with limits on forcing testing, is slowing down both the inventory and the actual cleanup of one of the country's most stubborn environmental problems.

The Dutch lower house of parliament, the Tweede Kamer, has passed a long-awaited bill aimed at giving flexible workers more security over their income and hours. The Wet Meer Zekerheid Flexwerkers ("Law on More Certainty for Flex Workers") was approved on Tuesday with a large majority. It will now go to the Senate, the Eerste Kamer, before becoming law.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Why it matters

The Netherlands has, by far, the largest share of workers on flexible contracts in the European Union: around 2.7 million people, or nearly three in every ten workers. The government has long argued that this leaves too many people without the predictability they need to plan their lives, from arranging childcare to taking out a mortgage.

The bill is part of a wider labour market reform that originated with a 2020 report by the Borstlap commission, was kick-started by former CDA labour minister Karien van Gennip in 2023, and was finally pushed through the Tweede Kamer by current social affairs minister Hans Vijlbrief (D66). It has the backing of both the major unions, FNV and CNV, and the main employers' organisations.

End of zero-hour contracts

The most visible change is the end of the zero-hour and on-call contract. These will be replaced by what the bill calls a "bandbreedtecontract" (bandwidth contract): the employer and employee agree on a minimum number of hours that the worker is paid for and scheduled to work each week, while the maximum can be no more than 130 percent of that minimum. Workers can refuse extra calls above the agreed bandwidth, and an employer who structurally calls in more hours must offer a contract with more hours.

Students, school pupils and people who have reached the state pension age (AOW) will still be allowed to work on on-call contracts; the latter exception was added during the parliamentary debate.

Stricter "revolving door" rules

The bill also tightens the so-called ketenregeling, the chain of temporary contracts. After three temporary contracts with the same employer, the employee gets a longer cooling-off period before a new temporary contract can be offered. During the debate, the Tweede Kamer reduced that cooling-off period from the originally proposed five years to three. The intention is that genuinely temporary work remains possible, while long-term "revolving door" structures around a permanent job become harder to maintain.

Equal treatment for temp agency workers

For people working through temp agencies and similar intermediaries, including uitzendkrachten and gedetacheerden, the bill brings several changes. They must be given at least equivalent terms of employment as workers in regular employment at the company they are sent to, not only in pay but across all conditions. Phase A of agency work, in which an employee can be sent home from one day to the next, is shortened from 78 to 52 weeks, and the rules for the subsequent phase B are also tightened. A worker can no longer be kept in temporary-agency contracts for more than three years before being entitled to a permanent contract.

The Tweede Kamer also added a so-called "stop button," giving the social affairs minister the power to intervene if there is structural underpayment in the temp agency sector, for example by limiting the room for collective labour agreements to deviate from the equal-pay rule.

Reactions

Minister Vijlbrief called the vote an important step. "With this bill, people get more certainty about how many hours they work and how much they earn. If you know that, you can make plans for the future. And that certainty also creates space for learning and development, which is good for both employee and employer."

The temp agency industry, represented by ABU and NBBU, said the law went too far on some points, in particular the "stop button" and the equal-pay rules, which they argue overrule existing agreements between unions and employers. The general employers' association AWVN has separately warned that the cumulative effect of the new rules and stricter enforcement against bogus self-employment may make it too difficult for companies to maintain a flexible workforce.

What happens next

The bill now goes to the Senate, where the social affairs and employment committee will discuss procedure on 19 May. Minister Vijlbrief has asked the senators to handle the proposal before the summer recess of 2026, in part because the bill is being used to replace a milestone in the Dutch Recovery and Resilience Plan (HVP). To avoid a possible loss of EU funding worth several hundreds of millions of euros, the law must be published in the official gazette by 31 August 2026, and the section on equal terms for temp agency workers must come into effect by 31 December 2026. The rest of the changes, including the bandwidth contracts and tightened chain rules, are scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2028.

For many of the 2.7 million Dutch workers with a flexible contract, the practical difference will be felt long before then: parts of the new rules, including shorter phases for temp agency work and equal pay, are already in the collective labour agreements of 2026.

Every Hondius passenger flown back to the Netherlands so far has tested negative for the hantavirus, public health institute RIVM announced on Thursday. The latest 26 people, who arrived overnight from Monday into Tuesday at the military airport in Eindhoven, all returned negative results, joining 26 passengers from a first flight on Sunday who had also tested negative.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Three flights, all clear so far

The Hondius, a Dutch-flagged polar cruise ship operated by Oceanwide Expeditions, was at the centre of an Andes virus outbreak that left three people dead, including a Dutch couple from Friesland and a German woman. After the ship docked off Tenerife last weekend, passengers were transported in stages to several countries for monitoring.

In the Netherlands, that involved three repatriation flights to Eindhoven. The first plane, with 26 people on board including eight Dutch nationals, arrived on Sunday and was followed by the second and third flights overnight on Monday. Blood samples taken from all arrivals were analysed by the RIVM and Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. On Thursday, the RIVM reported that all 26 people from the second and third flights had also tested negative, bringing the total of evacuees in the Netherlands with negative results to 52. The RIVM does not disclose individual results or nationalities.

A separate group of 26 people who were monitored in France has also tested negative, according to ANP. In total, 122 passengers and crew have now been repatriated from the ship to more than 20 countries.

Six-week home quarantine continues

Despite the negative test results, all repatriated passengers must complete a six-week home quarantine, in line with guidance from the European Centre for Disease Control. The quarantine began on 6 May, and the people in it will be retested every week. Each is in daily contact with their local public health service, the GGD, which is reachable 24 hours a day for any change in their condition.

The Andes virus has a relatively long incubation period and, unlike most hantaviruses, can in rare cases be passed between people. That is why testing on arrival is only an early-warning measure and not a "free pass" out of quarantine. The RIVM stresses that the risk to the wider public in the Netherlands remains "very low," and the World Health Organization has said the Andes virus is very unlikely to trigger a Covid-style pandemic.

Where the patients are

Earlier in the outbreak, three people who became ill on board were evacuated separately on medical flights and admitted to specialised hospitals in Europe. A 41-year-old Dutch man is being treated at Radboudumc in Nijmegen, where he has tested positive for the Andes virus. A 56-year-old British crew member is at the LUMC in Leiden, also positive. A 65-year-old German woman was admitted to the UKD hospital in Düsseldorf as a precaution and has tested negative.

Twelve Radboudumc staff also in quarantine

A separate complication has emerged at Radboudumc itself. Twelve hospital staff there have been placed in a six-week precautionary home quarantine after standard procedures around the handling of the patient's blood and urine were not followed strictly enough. According to the hospital, blood taken from the patient should have been processed under a stricter protocol given the type of virus, and the handling of urine on the Saturday after admission did not match the latest international guidance.

Radboudumc says the chance of any of the twelve staff being infected is small. None were considered contagious to others between the moment of possible exposure and going into quarantine. The hospital's executive board has expressed regret that the protocols broke down and says it will investigate "carefully" to prevent it from happening again. The LUMC in Leiden has stated that protocols were followed correctly there and none of its staff need to enter quarantine.

A careful next few weeks

For now, the picture for the Netherlands is reassuring: of more than 50 evacuees tested on arrival, none has been found to carry the virus. The next weeks of repeat tests during quarantine will give the clearest picture of whether the strict approach has worked. The Andes variant of the hantavirus has, in the meantime, been added to "group A2" of the Dutch list of notifiable infectious diseases, which obliges doctors and laboratories to report suspected cases to the GGD.

The Dutch food industry has warned that groceries in the Netherlands will keep getting more expensive over the coming months unless the government steps in. The Federation of the Dutch Food Industry (FNLI), which represents food and drink producers, says rising international costs combined with new national taxes and levies are squeezing producers from both sides and will inevitably show up in supermarket prices.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Prices already rising

The warning comes just after fresh inflation figures from the Dutch statistics agency CBS showed that groceries became 2.8 percent more expensive in April, a sharper rise than in the previous month. Economists expect those costs to keep feeding through to consumers, with the impact becoming more visible later this year.

According to a survey of FNLI members, more than three-quarters of Dutch food producers say the ongoing war in the Middle East is having a "large to very large" impact on their business. Energy, logistics, packaging and raw material costs are all becoming more volatile and more expensive, and the entire chain is affected, from farms and factories to truckers and shops.

A "stacking" of national levies

What worries the industry most, on top of international pressures, is what the FNLI calls a "stacking" of national taxes. A planned sugar tax, a higher excise duty on alcoholic drinks and a new levy on packaging are all in the pipeline, on top of an existing consumption tax on non-alcoholic drinks. "Together with growing regulatory pressure, this increases the burden on businesses and can feed through to higher prices in the shop," the federation says.

The FNLI is asking the cabinet to dampen costs rather than add to them: to ensure stable and competitive energy prices, to refrain from extra national levies on electricity, gas and packaging, and to assess any new measures carefully on effectiveness, feasibility and affordability. The industry body also warns that companies could move production out of the Netherlands to countries with lower costs.

"For consumers, this is about affordability," said FNLI director Cees-Jan Adema. "Food producers are doing everything they can to limit price rises as much as possible, but affordability is a shared task. We call on the cabinet for targeted measures that dampen costs and strengthen stability in the chain, and to refrain from extra national levies that put further upward pressure on grocery prices."

A European echo

The Dutch call comes shortly after FoodDrinkEurope, the European federation for the food and drinks industry, made a similar appeal to the EU and member states. Its argument is that without action to keep companies' access to energy and essential raw materials affordable and competitive, persistent cost increases will keep filtering through to higher food prices, hitting vulnerable households the hardest. The FNLI is endorsing that appeal at national level.

A familiar warning

This is not the first such alarm. Last month, Dutch bank ABN Amro warned that food prices in the Netherlands were likely to keep rising into 2027, as the fixed energy contracts most food companies had signed after the 2022 energy crisis begin to expire. The Dutch food and drinks industry remains around 70 percent reliant on natural gas, and the new warnings from the FNLI suggest that, far from easing, those underlying pressures are now being compounded by new geopolitical and domestic risks.

For Dutch consumers, the practical question is straightforward: how much of all this will end up at the checkout. The food industry's message to the government is, in essence, that the answer is up to The Hague.

The European Central Bank has called on banks across the eurozone to urgently strengthen their defences against cyberattacks carried out with the help of advanced artificial intelligence tools, in particular Anthropic's new Mythos model. The warning came on Wednesday from Dutch ECB executive board member Frank Elderson, who oversees European banking supervision.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What Mythos is

Mythos was officially revealed by US AI company Anthropic in April 2026 as a frontier-level, general-purpose model with what the company calls "highly advanced cybersecurity capabilities." Anthropic describes it as a "new class of intelligence" sitting above its existing Claude Opus models.

Independent reports say Mythos has been able to detect and exploit vulnerabilities in software, including bugs that have remained undiscovered for decades. During testing, the model reportedly produced working exploits on its first attempt more than 83 percent of the time, often outperforming human cybersecurity specialists. It has also been able to identify "zero-day" vulnerabilities, previously unknown flaws in operating systems and browsers.

Because of those capabilities, Anthropic has so far not made Mythos publicly available. Access is restricted to a handful of vetted partners under a programme called Project Glasswing, including Microsoft, Apple, Amazon Web Services, Google and Nvidia, alongside several major US banks who have early access.

The ECB's warning

In an interview in the ECB's Supervision Newsletter, Elderson said European banks could not afford to wait until they themselves had access to such tools. "Lack of access is not an excuse for inaction. On the contrary, it makes it even more critical that banks step up and act now," he said.

Mythos is, he said, capable of "rapidly combining seemingly minor vulnerabilities into serious attacks that previously could only be carried out by teams of experts working for several days. This is an urgent situation; we are not dealing with a long-term scenario. It is uncertain how long it will take before these capabilities become more widely available."

Elderson urged banks, and the contractors they rely on, to fix even small security flaws straight away rather than waiting for the next routine software update cycle. He also warned that whatever comes after Mythos is likely to be still more powerful: "We need to be able to deal with ever more capable future models that could be released in relatively quick succession."

ECB president Christine Lagarde said earlier this month that the central bank itself is studying defences against Mythos-guided cyberattacks, while acknowledging Europe's disadvantage in not having direct access to the model. According to Reuters, ECB supervisors have already begun asking individual banks about their preparedness. The gap could widen further: Japan's three largest banks are reportedly set to be granted access to Mythos in about two weeks.

A European alternative, with Dutch backing

In a separate move that may give some European banks an option closer to home, French AI start-up Mistral, in which Dutch chip-machine maker ASML holds a major stake, is in talks with European banks about deploying its own alternative to Mythos, Bloomberg reported this week. Mistral already works with banks such as Britain's HSBC and France's BNP Paribas on AI-driven detection of security vulnerabilities, and is reportedly preparing to launch a standard version of the technology for broader sales.

Mistral has declined to comment in detail, but CEO Arthur Mensch told French parliamentarians this week that he sees technological autonomy as a strategic priority. "It is impossible to have the source code of the French army checked by Mythos. That creates such an irreversible dependency that we absolutely must find solutions," he said, while suggesting that some of the alarm around Mythos amounts to "scaremongering" given what other AI models can already do.

Is the threat as new as it seems?

Some cybersecurity researchers have echoed Mensch's note of caution. Speaking to CNBC, watchTowr CEO Ben Harris said that many of the vulnerabilities Mythos has found can also be uncovered with "clever orchestration of public models" already on the market, including earlier Anthropic and OpenAI systems. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has likewise warned that, in the short term, AI tools are making banks "more vulnerable" before they can be used effectively to defend.

Either way, the message from the ECB is that European banks should not stand still. Whether or not Mythos itself ever reaches their own servers, the underlying threat, of AI models that find weak spots faster than humans can patch them, is already here.

The Dutch state is missing out on around €170 million in student loan repayments because some 21,000 former students have effectively disappeared abroad, the cabinet says in a reporting by NOS. A new draft bill from education minister Rianne Letschert proposes to make it harder for graduates to lose contact with the student finance agency DUO, with the goal of recovering more of those debts.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Why the bill is coming now

Of the roughly one million people in the Netherlands with an outstanding student debt at DUO, about 21,000 are now living somewhere abroad without a verifiable address, roughly one in fifty. Their combined unpaid debt comes to about €170 million. The figure has more than doubled since the end of 2018, when around 20,000 missing debtors accounted for €76 million. The cabinet expects it to keep rising.

Under current Dutch rules, if DUO has had no contact with a debtor for five years, the part of the debt that should have been repaid in that period (plus any late-payment penalties) expires. People who stay out of reach long enough therefore end up paying only a fraction of what they owe.

Not everyone, the cabinet stresses, is deliberately running off. Many simply forget to update their address with DUO when they move abroad, or assume that registering with a new local authority is enough. Others appear to disappear on purpose. As The Hague has long known, even tracking down the willing is difficult: previous estimates suggested that around 80 percent of unreachable debtors held Dutch nationality, and most were living in nearby countries such as Belgium, Germany or the United Kingdom.

A "reachability obligation"

The most striking change in the draft bill is a new "bereikbaarheidsplicht," a reachability obligation. Students, former students and pupils receiving Dutch student finance would be required to keep DUO supplied with up-to-date contact details, by email, phone and post. Inside the Netherlands, this is already largely automatic thanks to municipal registration. Abroad, however, it is not.

Under the proposal, people who travel a lot, live in unstable conditions, or move between countries would be allowed to nominate a contact person instead, for example a friend or family member. Responsibility for keeping the data current would, however, remain with the borrower.

From five years to ten

The bill would also double the statute of limitations for student debts owed by people who cannot be reached: from five to ten years. Without that change, the cabinet says, "a debtor would simply repay a small part of their student debt simply because they are abroad and unreachable for DUO."

More data exchange with other countries

The third major change would give DUO new powers to ask other governments for the contact details of Dutch student-debt holders. At present, the agency cannot freely approach, say, Belgian or German authorities for a former student's address. The cabinet says it expects the number of countries the Netherlands exchanges such data with to grow. As a side effect, the new rules should make it easier to detect cases where international students collect student finance from two countries at the same time, which is already forbidden but is currently hard to check.

According to the cabinet, exchanging data is also less heavy-handed than the only real instrument DUO has today: so-called "paspoortsignalering," whereby a debtor's Dutch travel document can be refused or invalidated if their unpaid student debt is large enough. That measure, the cabinet writes, "can sometimes be disproportionate."

What happens next

For now, the bill is not yet before parliament. It has been published online in an "internet consultation," a phase in which members of the public, organisations and experts can submit comments before the proposal is formally introduced into the Tweede Kamer.

If adopted, the new rules would change a long-standing reality for Dutch graduates: that moving abroad and going quiet has, until now, been a fairly effective way to outrun part of a student loan.

Three people have been arrested after rioters attempted to set fire to a temporary asylum reception centre in the former town hall of Wijdemeren, in the village of Loosdrecht, on Tuesday evening. Around 300 to 400 people had gathered outside the building, where the first 15 asylum seekers had moved in earlier in the day.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What happened

The demonstration began peacefully, with people waving flags and chanting slogans. Around 8:30 pm, the situation escalated when protesters started throwing fireworks and torches towards the building, setting alight the bushes against the wall. The 15 asylum seekers and their supervisors who were inside at the time were not injured.

When the fire brigade arrived to put out the fire, rioters initially blocked their way. Police escorted them through, and the fire was quickly extinguished. The mobile police unit (ME) was deployed to restore order, and the surrounding area was cleared. Damage to the building itself appears limited.

Acting mayor of Wijdemeren Mark Verheijen issued an emergency ordinance forbidding anyone from being near the building until 9 am the next day. He called it a "targeted action against vulnerable people. With that, a boundary has been crossed."

Three arrests

On Wednesday, the police announced that three people had been arrested in connection with the riot. The main suspect is a 28-year-old man from Huizen, who is suspected of arson. The other two are minors, one from Kortenhoef and one from Amersfoort, who are suspected of disturbing public order.

Months of unrest at the location

The temporary reception in the former town hall has been the subject of tensions since 17 April, when the municipality of Wijdemeren announced that up to 70 asylum seekers would be housed in the empty part of the building until 1 November. Previous protests had already turned violent, with fireworks and eggs thrown at police. Because of those riots, the local authority chose not to announce in advance when the asylum seekers themselves would arrive.

The same evening, a comparable protest in Apeldoorn also got out of hand, with multiple people detained, the fifth consecutive night of demonstrations there.

Sharp political reactions

The arson attempt drew strong condemnation from across government. Speaking from a visit to Aruba, prime minister Rob Jetten called the event "outright scandalous." "Expressing your concerns is always allowed. But using violence is never allowed," he wrote on X, adding that the perpetrators should "be tracked down and punished quickly."

Asylum and migration minister Bart van den Brink (CDA) said the events "have nothing to do with demonstrating. This is destruction and violence and totally unacceptable." Justice minister David van Weel called endangering others with heavy fireworks and torches "unacceptable." Vice-prime minister and defence minister Dilan Yesilgöz (VVD) described the actions as "inadmissible," and CDA party leader Henri Bontenbal spoke of "idiotic and criminal behaviour."

AIVD investigates the protests

The Loosdrecht events come on the same day that minister Van den Brink confirmed in parliament that the Dutch intelligence service AIVD is investigating the organisation of the anti-asylum protests across the Netherlands, looking at "what patterns there are and what is behind them." The minister did not say whether the investigation also includes possible foreign involvement, but observers have suggested that some of the recent protests, including those in Apeldoorn and Loosdrecht, are not driven solely by local residents but may also involve (far-right) organisations.

In a parliamentary debate, Denk MP El Abassi spoke of a "pattern of hate and violence" being stoked by MPs "on the right" of parliament, and called the violence "anti-azc terrorism." Van den Brink rejected the terrorism label, saying that terrorism is about motives and "the cabinet is not the institution to pronounce on that." PVV leader Geert Wilders, by contrast, called for the spreidingswet (which obliges municipalities to take in their share of asylum seekers) to be repealed, while condemning the violence and stressing that "99 percent" of demonstrators are peaceful.

For Loosdrecht itself, the immediate question is what happens next as the remaining asylum seekers move in. According to mayor Verheijen, the arson and surrounding events have had a "deep impact" on both the residents of the reception and the local neighbourhood, with both groups left feeling unsafe in their own area.

Booking a cross-border train journey in Europe is becoming a little less of a puzzle. German national rail operator Deutsche Bahn (DB) has begun integrating the booking systems of other European railways into its own website bahn.de and the DB Navigator app, using a new EU-backed data standard called OSDM (Open Sales and Distribution Model). The next operator to join is NS, the Dutch national railway, which is expected to be connected later this year.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What is changing

Tickets from Austria's ÖBB, Switzerland's SBB, France's SNCF, the high-speed operator Eurostar, Italy's Trenitalia and Sweden's SJ are now directly available in DB's digital sales channels. According to DB, that opens up more than 8,000 additional European destinations, ranging from high-speed and night-train connections to regional services and local public transport stops. Travellers can now book journeys such as Rome-Naples, Toulouse-London or even Barcelona-northern Sweden in a single booking.

The key change for passengers is that the booking process for an international trip should now resemble booking a national one: a clear price overview, the option to use discount fares from foreign railways, and the ability to view and manage all tickets, including those from other carriers, in a single DB customer account.

Why "platform" is a slight overstatement

Despite the headlines, this is not a brand new single European booking platform run by the EU, nor a "one ticket for all" system. As rail expert Jon Worth has put it, OSDM is a technical standard that lets operators "stitch together" tickets from each other more easily. It does not, on its own, force railways to sell genuinely unified tickets, nor does it guarantee uniform passenger rights if something goes wrong on a journey involving multiple operators.

A full European Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation, which would impose binding rules on data sharing, ticket re-sale and rights for passengers travelling with several operators, is still being prepared by the European Commission as part of its "Single Ticketing Package." Pro-rail campaigners such as Transport & Environment and Back-on-Track have urged the Commission to deliver an ambitious proposal in 2026.

Demand for international rail keeps climbing

The technical upgrade is happening as cross-border train travel itself is booming. According to DB, nearly a third more passengers chose the train for their European journey in 2025 than in 2019, an increase of more than 25 million people. Between Stuttgart and Paris, ICE and TGV services have now replaced direct flights, with a journey time of under 3.5 hours.

DB now runs more than 300 international connections daily to over 200 cities in 14 countries. The strongest growth in 2025 was on routes such as Munich-Zürich (up 27 percent), Frankfurt-Paris (up 22 percent) and Cologne-Brussels (up 16 percent). The company says it will expand its offer further this summer.

What it means for travellers in the Netherlands

For now, NS International remains the most familiar way for Dutch travellers to book international train trips, mainly to Belgium, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Once NS is fully integrated into the OSDM-based system later this year, however, travellers will also be able to book combined journeys including NS connections directly through bahn.de and the DB Navigator app, alongside services from other major European railways.

Real single-click European train travel is still some way off. But for Dutch passengers, the practical difference between booking a domestic and an international train ticket is, step by step, getting smaller.

The Dutch ice rink Thialf in Heerenveen has taken a major step toward hosting the long-track speed skating at the 2030 Winter Olympics, after the French organising committee announced it will continue formal talks only with the Netherlands. Italy's Turin, the other candidate, has effectively been dropped, Dutch sport umbrella body NOC*NSF said on Monday

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Why France is looking abroad

The 2030 Winter Olympics were awarded to the French Alps in July 2024. France, however, does not have a speed skating rink that meets Olympic requirements, and the organising committee has consistently ruled out building a new one or putting up a temporary track. The committee is therefore searching for an existing venue abroad.

Like the recent Milano-Cortina Games, the 2030 edition will be spread across more than one region. Some sports, including ice hockey, figure skating and short track, will be held in Nice on the Mediterranean coast. Long-track speed skating is the missing piece.

Why Thialf, and why not Turin

The two main alternatives have long been Turin's Oval Lingotto, used during the 2006 Winter Games, and Thialf in Heerenveen, the home of much of the Dutch national skating programme. According to Italian media, Turin would need around €12 million in refurbishment work to meet Olympic standards. Thialf, by contrast, has been described by Dutch officials as "ready to go," after major rebuilding work in recent years. The rink is widely considered the fastest and most sustainable lowland ice surface in the world.

That fits a wider trend. Under the IOC's "Olympic Agenda 2020+5" strategy, organisers are increasingly being asked to use existing venues rather than build new ones for one-off use. According to Niels Dokkuma, sustainability manager at NOC*NSF, climate change and rising costs mean there are simply fewer places that can host the Winter Games on their own, so spreading events across countries is becoming standard.

What the negotiating phase means

The official talks now starting are about working out the details. The Dutch working group, made up of Thialf, NOC*NSF, the Dutch skating union KNSB, the ministry of health, welfare and sport, the province of Fryslân and the municipality of Heerenveen, will discuss financial, logistical and technical questions with the French committee. Exactly which adjustments Thialf would need to host an Olympic tournament, and where related facilities such as an athletes' village would be located, has not yet been decided.

If those talks go well, definitive approval is expected at the end of June, when the IOC plans to present all the venues for the 2030 Games. The Dutch side stresses that the French choice is not yet final.

Reactions from Heerenveen

Both regional and national stakeholders have been preparing for years. Thialf director Minne Dolstra has called the prospect of hosting the 2030 speed skating "the ultimate crown" on the venue's 175-year history. Mayor of Heerenveen Avine Fokkens-Kelder has said the city will "dress the centre in Olympic and French colours" to recreate a village-style atmosphere, given that the actual Olympic village will be elsewhere in France. KNSB director Herman de Haan called the idea of hosting the Olympic skating "fantastic," noting that "speed skating is in the DNA of the Netherlands."

If the deal is confirmed, it would be the first time in 102 years, since the 1928 Summer Games in Amsterdam, that the Netherlands plays a host role in an Olympic event.

Dutch national rail operator NS is launching a temporary trial in the city of Amersfoort, in which 1,000 residents on a low income will receive a special pass that lets them travel by train for free for six months. The trial, called the Vooruitpas Amersfoort, is the first of its kind for NS, and is intended to help shape a permanent low-income travel pass in cooperation with local, regional and national authorities.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

How the pass works

The Vooruitpas Amersfoort will run from 1 July to 31 December 2026, after which the trial automatically ends. During those six months, participants can travel anywhere on the NS network without paying. The city of Amersfoort will contact families who qualify based on their income. If more than 1,000 households apply, the municipality will hold a lottery.

Why it matters

According to NS, the goal of the pilot is twofold: to give participants real access to the train, and to learn more about what people on a low income actually need from public transport. The company says it wants to use those findings to develop a permanent travel pass for low-income residents, in partnership with municipalities, provinces, and the national government.

"Travelling is freedom," said Daan Schut, a member of the NS board. "If you don't have enough money to travel by train, you are restricted by that. You constantly have to weigh up whether you can go somewhere, and what you'd have to skip to make that possible. That's why many municipalities and provinces want to offer cheaper public transport. As NS, we want the train to be available to everyone."

Part of a wider Dutch trend

The Vooruitpas adds to a growing list of Dutch initiatives offering cheaper or free public transport to people on lower incomes. The province of Utrecht, which includes Amersfoort, has already been running its own scheme of free local public transport for low-income residents since April 2026. Similar schemes also exist in other regions.

What happens next

NS expects the first results of the Amersfoort trial in early 2027. If successful, the company plans to use the insights to roll out passes in other municipalities, although a national low-income train pass would still require co-financing from various levels of government.

The Dutch economic affairs ministry has called on businesses across the country to draw up emergency plans for major disruptions such as electricity blackouts, cyberattacks and loss of cloud services. According to a new survey, more than half of Dutch companies have made no such plans, and ministers warn that this leaves the country dangerously exposed.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Low resilience, high dependence

A survey carried out by research firm Motivaction for the ministry found that only 29 percent of Dutch companies feel capable of dealing with espionage. Just 19 percent believe they are resilient enough to handle the economic consequences of a war, and only 15 percent say they could cope with the loss of internet or cloud services.

Economic affairs minister Heleen Herbert said the risk of disruption to supply chains and communications networks has increased sharply in recent years as a result of geopolitical tensions, including the war in the Middle East. "Research shows that the resilience of Dutch businesses is too low and their dependence is too great. We need to do better," she said. "If your business can keep going, you are helping not just yourself but your customers, your suppliers and your environment."

A matter of time

The warning is echoed by Marianne Schuurmans-Wijdeven, mayor of Haarlemmermeer and head of the national safety council (Veiligheidsberaad). In an interview with Het Parool, she said it was "only a matter of time" before the Dutch electricity network suffered a large-scale blackout, pointing to the constant pressure on energy infrastructure from cyberattacks.

She said she had recently visited a power station on the Maasvlakte in Rotterdam harbour that supplies around 8 percent of the electricity used in the Randstad. "When I hear how much work they have every day repelling attacks on their systems, there is a very big chance that one of those attacks will succeed," she told the newspaper. "Loss of electricity is the worst thing that can happen. We're so dependent on it. If you want to cause chaos, that's the best way to do it."

The first 72 hours

The government wants businesses to prepare specifically for the first 72 hours of any crisis. The advice is to map out which processes are critical and how to keep them running if power, internet, mobile networks or cloud services go down. Practical examples include making sure people can still get in and out of buildings if electronic security systems fail, and keeping paper backups of key records.

Part of a wider campaign

The new business push is an extension of the government's broader "Denk Vooruit" ("Think Ahead") campaign, which launched in November 2025. That campaign initially focused on households, urging them to put together a 72-hour emergency kit and an emergency plan in case of long-term loss of electricity, water or internet.

The campaign is part of the National Security Strategy for the Kingdom of the Netherlands and is coordinated by the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV). The new business-focused phase, "Start je eigen draaiboek" ("Start your own playbook"), provides checklists and a conversation tool aimed at smaller organisations, neighbourhood centres and sports clubs as well as departments of larger companies.

According to recent NCTV research, six out of ten people in the Netherlands believe the chance of a major emergency has increased over the past year, and most experts agree the question is no longer "if" but "when."

All Dutch passengers and crew members of the cruise ship MV Hondius will spend six weeks in home quarantine after returning to the Netherlands, health minister Sophie Hermans and foreign minister Tom Berendsen wrote to parliament on Friday. The measure follows the suspected hantavirus outbreak on board, which has so far killed three people, including a Dutch couple.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Why six weeks

The six-week period reflects the long incubation time of the Andes variant of the hantavirus, which has now been confirmed in several patients linked to the ship. The Dutch public health institute RIVM has advised the government to follow the guidelines of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC), which recommend a six-week quarantine starting from the last "risky contact."

According to the RIVM, the Andes virus has a mortality rate of between 20 and 35 percent in those who develop the disease. It is also, as far as is known, the only hantavirus that can spread directly between humans, and infection can happen before symptoms appear.

People in quarantine will be monitored and supported by their local public health service, the GGD. If they develop symptoms, they will be referred to an academic hospital for further care.

A new entry on the A-list

To make the home quarantine legally enforceable, the government has added the Andes variant of the hantavirus to "group A2" on the Dutch list of infectious diseases, which obliges doctors and laboratories to report suspected cases to the GGD. The disease has not been placed in the most serious category, A1, where Covid-19 sat for much of the pandemic. According to the RIVM, the Andes virus is unlikely to cause a pandemic, since it does not normally spread easily between people.

Speaking at her weekly press conference, Hermans, who is the new VVD health minister, stressed that "the chance of catching hantavirus is very small." The virus mostly spreads through contact with the droppings, urine or saliva of rats and mice. Person-to-person spread is only possible after prolonged, close contact, she said. "It is a very different virus from coronavirus, which is many times more contagious."

The ship arrives in Tenerife on Sunday

The MV Hondius is currently sailing from Cape Verde to the Spanish island of Tenerife and is expected to dock at the Granadilla harbour around midday on Sunday, 10 May. According to the Dutch foreign ministry, around 147 passengers and crew are still on board, none of them currently showing symptoms. About 13 of those on board are Dutch nationals; in total, 16 Dutch citizens, 11 passengers and 5 crew members, originally boarded the ship. The body of the German woman who died on 2 May is also still on board.

Spanish authorities have agreed to take the ship in. They will examine passengers and crew on board, working with the doctors and epidemiologists already accompanying the vessel. The Dutch defence ministry has sent a military doctor as part of that team.

Foreign passengers without symptoms will be flown back to their home countries from Tenerife. Spanish passengers will be transferred to a military hospital in Madrid for around 45 days of quarantine. Spanish health minister Mónica García said that all foreign nationals will be repatriated, even those with symptoms, unless they need urgent hospital care.

The president of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, has said the ship will not actually moor at the harbour but will instead anchor offshore. Passengers will be transferred to land by another vessel and taken directly to the airport, to keep their time on the islands as short as possible.

Possibly some non-Dutch nationals to the Netherlands

Because the Hondius sails under a Dutch flag, the Dutch ministers said it is possible that some passengers and crew of other nationalities will also be brought to the Netherlands for the time being. They too would go into the same six-week home quarantine, with the same support from the GGD. The RIVM has advised that this kind of arrangement "is feasible."

Where the patients are now

The home quarantine is the next chapter in a story that has stretched across continents over the past two weeks. The Dutch passenger evacuated this week is being treated at Radboudumc in Nijmegen and the British crew member at the LUMC in Leiden, both having tested positive for the Andes variant. The 65-year-old German woman who was evacuated to the UKD hospital in Düsseldorf is a separate patient from the German woman who died on board, whose body remains on the Hondius. A Swiss man who left the cruise earlier is being treated in Zurich, also confirmed positive.

According to the WHO's update on Friday, six cases of the Andes variant have now been laboratory-confirmed, including the three who died, and two more cases are still suspected. The KLM flight attendant from Haarlem who had been admitted to Amsterdam UMC for monitoring has tested negative for hantavirus, the WHO confirmed on Friday evening. Two other people from the same KLM flight from Johannesburg who had developed symptoms have also tested negative.

For now, the focus shifts to Tenerife and the next stage: getting the remaining passengers safely off the ship, into a clear medical pathway, and, in the case of the Dutch nationals, into six quiet weeks at home.

A firework bomb was thrown through the letterbox of the D66 party office in The Hague on Thursday evening, while around 30 young members of the party's youth wing were inside. No one was injured, but the explosion caused significant damage and prompted strong reactions across the political spectrum, including from the prime minister, who is also D66's leader. A 37-year-old suspect was arrested within an hour.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What happened

The explosion took place at the party office on the Lange Houtstraat in central The Hague shortly after 9 pm. According to a D66 spokesperson, a firework bomb was thrown through the letterbox, going off inside the building. At the time, the youth wing of the party, the Jonge Democraten, was holding a speakers' evening, with around 30 mostly young attendees. The group sought safety in the garden behind the building.

About an hour after the attack, the police announced they had detained a suspect, a 37-year-old man with no fixed address. He remains in custody, and the motive is so far unknown. The area around the office was cordoned off for forensic investigation.

A targeted attack

Speaking before the start of Friday's cabinet meeting, prime minister Rob Jetten said the attack appeared to be deliberately aimed at D66. "There are very many buildings in The Hague city centre. I do think this perpetrator walked very deliberately to our party office to carry out this action with a prepared firework bomb," he said. Earlier, on social media, he had described the attack as "a cowardly act of intimidation," adding: "For those who think they can spread fear, I have a message: in democratic Netherlands, we will never be silenced by violence."

D66 parliamentary leader Jan Paternotte described it as "an idiotic action that could have ended much worse," and stressed that those inside escaping unhurt was "a small miracle, because the explosion has caused devastation." Sjoerd Sjoerdsma, the D66 minister for foreign trade and development, said in a TV interview that he was "furious" and called the perpetrators "scum of the earth."

A young, shaken audience

Rachelle Smook, chair of the Jonge Democraten, said the impact on those present was "enormous." In a statement, the youth organisation said it was "shocked, furious and sad," describing the explosion as "an attack." "That young people who come together to speak freely, debate and commit themselves to democracy should be confronted with violence and intimidation is completely unacceptable," the group said. "This incident does not stand on its own, and that is what makes it all the more worrying. Young people must be able to participate in the democracy they help shape, freely and without fear."

Not the first time

The attack was the second targeted at the same D66 office in the past nine months. In September last year, rioters smashed windows and tried to push a burning container into the building, after an anti-immigration protest on the nearby Malieveld got out of hand. That incident caused around €34,000 in damage. In October, unknown perpetrators also tried to hang a so-called Prinsenvlag, a flag historically used by the Nazi-era NSB and today associated with the far right, on the building.

After those earlier incidents, additional security measures were taken at the building. Asked whether security would now be tightened further, the mayor of The Hague Jan van Zanen would not commit, but said he was in contact with both Jetten and Paternotte.

Cross-party condemnation

The attack drew condemnation from across the political spectrum. Coalition partners VVD and CDA spoke out alongside D66. VVD leader Dilan Yeşilgöz wrote on X: "How does it even cross your mind. What a cowardly action. Threatening and intimidating a political party (or anyone else) is absolutely unacceptable." CDA leader Henri Bontenbal said: "In a democracy, debate belongs, not violence." Pieter Heerma, the CDA minister of the interior, called the attack a "cowardly act."

Opposition parties responded in similar terms. Jesse Klaver, leader of GroenLinks-PvdA, called the explosion "a direct attack on our democracy and the rule of law." ChristenUnie leader Mirjam Bikker called the perpetrators "louts," while SGP MP Diederik van Dijk described the attack as "scandalous and completely unacceptable." Even right-wing PVV breakaway MP Gidi Markuszower called it likely "a targeted attack, not just on that specific party but on our rule of law and democracy" and wished D66 strength.

Justice and security minister David van Weel called the attack "scandalous" and warned that the temperature in Dutch political debate is "extremely high." "This is the axe at the root of democracy," he said.

A wider pattern

In his remarks, Jetten placed the attack in a broader context, pointing out that intimidation of public officials in the Netherlands has become almost routine. "Every week, attempts are made to intimidate municipal councillors, mayors, police or ambulance personnel," he said. "But fortunately, you also saw last night that most Dutch people make very clear that we absolutely do not accept this in our country, and that this is not a land where you can get your way through violence."

For now, the police investigation into the motive of the 37-year-old suspect continues, and the D66 office on the Lange Houtstraat remains cordoned off as forensic teams assess the damage.

The cybercriminal group ShinyHunters has carried out a second, far more visible attack on the education platform Canvas, briefly seizing login pages at universities around the world on Thursday evening and forcing the platform's American parent company, Instructure, to pull Canvas offline globally. The defacement reached schools and universities in the Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom, and has prompted Dutch institutions, including the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, to disconnect their systems from Canvas as a precaution.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

A worldwide blackout

Around the middle of Thursday, students and staff trying to log in to Canvas were instead met by a red warning page from ShinyHunters. The message was visible at universities in the Netherlands and abroad for around half an hour before Instructure pulled the platform offline, replacing the login portal with a "Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance" notice. By late Thursday night, the company said the platform was again available "for most users."

The text on the defaced page mocked Instructure's response. "ShinyHunters has hacked Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it, they ignored us and did some 'security patches'," it read in part, while threatening to make the stolen data public.

According to security journalist Brian Krebs, Thursday's defacement effectively serves as public proof that Instructure's claim earlier this week, that the original breach had been "contained" by 2 May, was premature.

Top universities pulled into the dark

Canvas is used by around 41 percent of higher education institutions in North America, and on Thursday a roll call of the world's most prominent universities found themselves on the same defaced page. Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, Georgetown, Duke, UC Berkeley, Cambridge and Oxford were all affected.

UC Berkeley's bCourses platform, used by all 43,000 of its students, was taken offline; ShinyHunters claim to have more than 600,000 records from the Berkeley campus alone. Harvard students lost access to Canvas at around 3:30 pm local time, before the site was switched to a maintenance message. The disruption hit at a particularly bad time for many US students, who are in the middle of finals week. Several universities have already extended deadlines or shuffled exam schedules.

The Dutch picture

In the Netherlands, the Canvas pages of both the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam displayed the ransom message during the same window, according to BNR Nieuwsradio.

The VU then went a step further, announcing late on Thursday night that, as a precaution, it had disconnected all systems linked to Canvas. Anyone trying to visit the Canvas site is currently redirected to a VU update page. The university has warned that this could "potentially affect teaching and attendance" on Friday. The VU is still waiting for confirmation from Instructure on whether and which of its data was affected.

The UvA, which sits on the same Canvas infrastructure, has confirmed that data of its students and staff was caught up in the original breach. The university says it does not yet know exactly what has been taken, with Instructure still investigating. The UvA stresses that Canvas itself remains "safe to use" and has urged its community to be alert to phishing emails.

According to Universiteiten van Nederland (UNL), the umbrella body for Dutch research universities, the Erasmus University Rotterdam, Tilburg University, Eindhoven University of Technology, Maastricht University and the University of Twente have also been affected.

Deadline extended, pressure increased

The original ransom deadline set by ShinyHunters expired on 6 May. The group has now extended it to 12 May, saying that some institutions have entered into ransom negotiations. On its dark web leak site, ShinyHunters now lists around 8,809 schools, universities and online education platforms as victims, with stolen data ranging from tens of thousands to several million records per institution.

The group has previously been linked to attacks on the University of Pennsylvania in late 2025, in which Penn refused a $1 million ransom demand and saw 461 megabytes of internal data ultimately published online. The same group is also blamed for the cyberattack on Dutch telecom provider Odido earlier this year.

A vendor problem, not just a school problem

Cybersecurity experts say the Canvas incident reflects a broader pattern in which attackers target the third-party vendors that sit beneath thousands of institutions, rather than individual campuses. According to Doug Thompson of cybersecurity firm Tanium, this is "a clear pattern we've been watching for the last 18 months." Charles Carmakal of Google-owned Mandiant Consulting added that "there are multiple concurrent and discreet ShinyHunters intrusion and extortion campaigns happening right now."

That structural issue has also been on the radar in the Netherlands. SURF, the IT cooperative for Dutch education and research, carried out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) on Canvas last year, looking specifically at security risks. Whether any of those findings relate to the current breach is not yet clear.

For now, students and staff at affected Dutch institutions are being asked to be alert to phishing emails using Canvas branding, to change their passwords, and to expect possible disruption to lectures and assignments in the coming days.

A week after the suspected hantavirus outbreak on the Dutch polar cruise ship MV Hondius first came to light, the situation has evolved quickly. Several patients have been flown to Europe, the strain has been identified as the rarer human-to-human transmissible Andes variant, and the ship itself has now left Cape Verde and is sailing for the Canary Islands. Three passengers, a Dutch couple and a German national, have died in the outbreak, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has counted eight suspected cases in total.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

The patients evacuated to Europe

After the Dutch government agreed to lead the repatriation effort, two medical evacuation flights were arranged from the Cape Verdean capital Praia. They were carrying three people: a 41-year-old Dutch national, a 56-year-old British crew member, and a 65-year-old German woman closely related to one of the deceased passengers.

The first flight landed at Schiphol around 8 pm on Wednesday. The British crew member, identified by Sky News as Martin Anstee, was transferred to the Leiden University Medical Centre (LUMC), where he is in isolation. He has told reporters he feels "okay" but is still being tested. The German woman was taken on to the academic hospital UKD in Düsseldorf, where her condition is described as stable and where, according to local emergency services, she shows no signs of an infection.

The second flight, carrying the Dutch national, ran into trouble en route. After a technical fault on board, it had to make an unscheduled landing on Gran Canaria, where the aircraft remained connected to the airport's electrical supply while a replacement plane was arranged. The flight eventually landed at Schiphol on Thursday morning.

A KLM flight attendant in isolation

In a development closer to home, a KLM flight attendant from Haarlem has been hospitalised in isolation at Amsterdam UMC after showing mild symptoms of hantavirus. The Dutch ministry of health has confirmed that she came into contact with the 69-year-old Dutch woman who later died of the virus in Johannesburg.

The contact happened on KLM flight KL592 from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on 25 April. The Dutch woman, whose husband had already died on board the Hondius, had boarded the plane to fly home but was deemed too ill to travel and was removed before take-off. The flight then continued to Amsterdam without her. The flight attendant who is now being tested worked on that flight. Dutch health authorities are also contacting other passengers from KL592 as a precaution.

Confirmed: the Andes variant

A central question in the past few days has been which strain of hantavirus is involved. The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has now confirmed the Andes variant in two patients linked to the Hondius: the Dutch woman who died and the British crew member now in Leiden.

The Andes variant is the only known hantavirus strain that can spread directly from person to person, although the South African health authorities and the WHO stress that this kind of transmission is "very rare" and only happens with very close contact. Most hantavirus infections still occur through contact with rodents or their droppings, urine or saliva.

The variant is mostly found in South America, including Argentina, where the Hondius cruise began in March in the southern port of Ushuaia. The Argentine health ministry has now announced rodent trapping and analysis in Ushuaia and will supply hantavirus tests to the European authorities. According to Argentine officials, the Dutch couple travelled in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay before boarding the ship, and their full route is now being reconstructed; it has not yet been confirmed where they were infected.

Ship sails to Tenerife

With the three symptomatic patients off the ship, the operator, Oceanwide Expeditions, said on Thursday morning that "no symptomatic individuals are present on board." The Hondius then departed from the Cape Verde coast on Wednesday evening and is now sailing to the Spanish island of Tenerife, where it is expected to dock on Saturday.

About 150 people are still on board, including ten Dutch nationals, according to Dutch foreign affairs minister Tom Berendsen. On the recommendation of the Dutch public health institute RIVM, two infectious disease specialists from the Netherlands are travelling with the ship from Cape Verde to Tenerife.

The arrival in Tenerife is politically delicate. The regional Canary Islands government has objected to the central Spanish government's decision to allow the ship to dock, saying it is "not based on technical criteria." The Spanish health minister has confirmed that the 14 Spanish passengers on the ship will be flown to a military hospital in Madrid and quarantined for around 45 days, given the long incubation period of hantavirus. The Irish health ministry is also drawing up plans for two Irish passengers, who are likely to be assessed at the National Isolation Unit at Mater University Hospital in Dublin.

Wider European cases

Beyond the Hondius itself, isolated cases have surfaced in other European countries. A Swiss national who had been on the ship tested positive for the Andes variant in Zurich and is being treated at the city's university hospital. His partner is in self-isolation as a precaution. The Swiss federal health office said it considers further cases in Switzerland unlikely.

The UK Health Security Agency has said that no British nationals currently on the Hondius, or who were on board and have since returned to the UK, have so far reported symptoms. Around 30 passengers disembarked the Hondius on Saint Helena on 24 April, including the body of the first deceased passenger. The first laboratory-confirmed case of hantavirus, however, was only reported on 4 May, leaving health authorities to retrace the movements of those who left the ship more than a week before.

For now, attention in the Netherlands is on the patients in Leiden and Amsterdam, the unfolding contact tracing around the KLM flight, and what awaits the ship and its remaining passengers when it reaches Tenerife at the weekend.

A 500-pound aircraft bomb from the Second World War was found near the railway in the town of Weesp, just southeast of Amsterdam, on Wednesday afternoon, briefly halting train traffic at one of the busiest rail junctions in the central Netherlands. The bomb was uncovered around 2:50 pm during excavation works on the Lange Muiderweg, a street that runs along the river Vecht and the Weesp railway.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

A major emergency response

Within an hour of the discovery, the emergency services had scaled up to GRIP 1, a level of coordinated emergency response used when multiple services need to work together. A 250-metre radius around the find was cordoned off, with police, the fire service and ambulances all on the scene. Residents of nearby houseboats were temporarily evacuated.

The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service of the Dutch defence ministry, known as the EOD, was called in. After examining the device, EOD experts identified it as a 500-pounder, a type of aircraft bomb dropped from planes during the Second World War. The fire service confirmed that the bomb was stable.

It is not yet clear how the bomb came to be at that exact location, the fire service said. Weesp and the surrounding area were bombed several times during the Second World War, particularly because of their strategic position along the railway line and the Vecht.

Trains halted at a key junction

Because the bomb was found close to the tracks and to Weesp railway station, train traffic was halted from 15:47 as a precaution. The disruption hit hard because Weesp is one of the most important railway nodes in the central Netherlands. Trains running between Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport, Amersfoort, Hilversum, Almere and the rest of Flevoland all pass through or near the station.

The timing made the impact worse: the find came shortly before the evening rush hour, with thousands of commuters either already on the move or about to start their journey home. National railway operator NS advised passengers travelling between Amsterdam and Hilversum or Amersfoort to reroute via Utrecht, and said the same alternative route would also work for travellers heading to Almere.

The cordon was lifted around 17:15, and trains began running again about half an hour later. By around 17:45, services were back on schedule, NS said.

What happens to the bomb

According to a spokesperson for the EOD, the 500-pounder can be safely transported and will be taken to another location to be detonated under controlled conditions. A specialised lorry was sent to collect it.

Far from a one-off

For the EOD, finding leftover explosives is everyday work. The service is the only organisation in the Netherlands authorised to clear unexploded munitions from the Second World War, and it is called out around 2,500 times a year, the vast majority of those calls related to wartime explosives.

In its 2025 annual figures, the EOD reported handling 2,931 cases of unexploded bombs or grenades, most of them dating back to 1940-1945. Major construction projects are particularly likely to turn up explosives, especially when new roads, railway lines or housing developments are built in or near areas that were heavily fought over during the war.

Aircraft bombs of this size are still discovered with some regularity. According to the EOD, in some years up to around 200 aircraft bombs are found across the country. In September last year, a similar 500-pounder was uncovered during track works at Raalte railway station, also in the eastern part of the country.

To this day, an estimated 100,000 kilograms of unexploded ammunition is thought to lie buried in Dutch soil, ranging from rifle rounds and grenades to large aircraft bombs. So far, no civilian has been killed in the Netherlands since the war by an unexploded WWII device, although accidents have happened during clearance operations elsewhere in Europe.

For commuters in the Randstad on Wednesday evening, the disruption was a reminder that 80-year-old wartime relics can still bring modern infrastructure to a brief but very real standstill.

After years of warnings from academics and a unanimous parliamentary motion last autumn, Dutch universities are now sitting down with the central government and IT cooperative SURF to draw up a concrete plan to reduce their reliance on American big tech. A new committee, set up specifically to deal with digital autonomy in higher education, has begun its work this month, financial daily Het Financieele Dagblad reported.

The committee is chaired by Alexandra van Huffelen, president of Radboud University Nijmegen and the Netherlands' first-ever state secretary for digitalisation. "We don't want to switch from one major provider to another," she told the FD, summing up the difficulty of moving away from Microsoft, Google and Amazon without simply landing in another concentrated dependence.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

How deep the reliance goes

To understand why this is so complicated, it helps to see how far the dependence has gone. A decade ago, every Dutch university still ran its own computing centre, fourteen universities, fourteen centres. Today there is one left, the Snellius supercomputer in Amsterdam's Watergraafsmeer, and according to media and digital society professor José van Dijck, even that one is "completely full."

In her own institution, Utrecht University, Van Dijck has put the situation bluntly: "We've almost become a Microsoft university." Once you are on the Azure cloud, she has noted, you are essentially pulled into Microsoft's other services as well.

The pattern repeats across the country. Email, document storage, video calls, learning environments, identity management, and increasingly AI tools, all run on the infrastructure of a handful of US companies. Roughly two-thirds of all Dutch digital services rely on American cloud providers, recent estimates suggest.

That dependence built up gradually, but accelerated sharply during the coronavirus pandemic. SURF and the universities had been developing their own services, like the open source video platform Jitsi, but as Van Dijck has pointed out, the rush to digitise teaching during lockdowns left no time to keep building alternatives.

What pushed the issue back up the agenda

Concerns about this dependence are not new. Dutch academics began raising alarms during Donald Trump's first term as president, around 2019. What changed in the past year is that the abstract risks have become very concrete.

A pivotal moment came when Microsoft was reported to have closed the email account of the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, after US sanctions. For Dutch institutions, especially those producing research that does not always align with foreign governments' political views, the message was hard to miss: a foreign company, under foreign law, can pull the plug.

There are also concerns about US surveillance laws such as the Cloud Act and Section 702 of FISA, which can in principle compel American firms to hand over data stored on their systems regardless of where the servers physically sit. And in the Netherlands itself, alarm spread through parliament when it emerged that an American company could acquire Solvinity, the Dutch firm whose software powers DigiD, the country's national digital ID system.

What the committee will do

The new committee brings together the universities, central government and SURF, the IT cooperative for Dutch education and research. Its core job is to coordinate, in particular pooling purchasing power, sharing alternatives, and building exit strategies so that institutions are not stuck if a single supplier goes down or pulls a service.

For Van Huffelen, having the central government at the table is essential. Joint negotiation gives universities and the state much more leverage when sitting opposite global suppliers, and joint investment can keep European alternatives alive long enough to mature. "This is about the heart of what universities are," she said. "About academic freedom, about protecting our data."

Universities already moving

Even before the committee, individual universities had begun acting. The University of Groningen has set itself the goal of being digitally independent by 2030, and plans to invest €500,000 in 2027, rising to €1.5 million per year by 2030, in alternatives. Radboud University now issues staff with Dutch-made Fairphone smartphones instead of iPhones. TU Delft stores most of its research data in two of its own data centres, while Tilburg University has set strict contractual conditions on data access, security and the location of where data is held.

SURF has taken on a central role. After running an internal pilot, it is now rolling out Nextcloud, a German-developed open source alternative to parts of Microsoft 365, to more than 30 Dutch educational institutions, with around 2,000 users in the first phase. Nextcloud is already in use at around fifty German universities, and offers document collaboration, file sharing, email integration and online meetings. Earlier this year, SURF was also explicitly named in an open letter from across all fourteen Dutch universities, signed by hundreds of academics, as the partner best placed to lead a shift away from big tech.

A wider Dutch shift

The universities' move dovetails with a broader push for "digital sovereignty" elsewhere in the Dutch state. In November 2025, all 150 members of the Tweede Kamer voted in favour of a motion from GroenLinks-PvdA and D66 telling the government to work "structurally" with universities and colleges to break the dependence on big tech. Several Dutch municipalities have announced their own moves away from American suppliers, with around forty smaller municipalities jointly building a sovereign cloud environment based on open source standards.

In December 2025, the cabinet adopted a new Vision on Digital Autonomy and Sovereignty, summarised by demissionary state secretary Eddie van Marum as "open where it can, protect where it must." The new Jetten cabinet went further in its coalition agreement, promising to scale back "strategic dependencies" in cloud and critical systems, to introduce national digital "stress tests", and to set up a new central agency, the Nederlandse Digitale Dienst, to enforce common standards across ministries.

Realism, not revolution

Despite the energy, university leaders are careful not to promise a quick exit. As Caspar van den Berg, chair of Universities of the Netherlands (UNL), and others have repeatedly stressed, fully replacing big tech in a few years is not a serious prospect. Microsoft, Google and Amazon are deeply woven into research, teaching and administration, and European alternatives are still maturing in quality, scale and feature set. Critics also warn that simply requiring open source or European-only suppliers will not, on its own, deliver real independence: contracts, governance, exit strategies and even staffing all have to be redesigned.

What is changing, observers say, is the direction of travel. Where Dutch institutions used to outsource by default, the default is shifting to "ask first." Whether that is fast enough to keep pace with rapid changes in AI and cloud infrastructure remains to be seen. But after years of opinion pieces and warnings, the country's universities, government and IT cooperative are now, at least, working from the same plan.

Cases of dog and cat neglect in the Netherlands are becoming increasingly severe, the Landelijke Inspectiedienst Dierenwelzijn (LID), the Dutch animal welfare inspectorate, has warned. According to its 2025 annual figures, inspectors are finding more animals that are emaciated, living in heavily soiled homes, or being denied urgent medical care.

This is the third year in a row that the inspectorate has flagged a rise in the severity of dog and cat neglect cases. "I find this a worrying development," said Gabor van der Straten, head of the LID.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Fewer reports, but more severe cases

The total number of reports to the LID actually fell slightly in 2025 compared with the year before. The change, the inspectorate says, is in the seriousness of what its inspectors are finding when they show up.

In previous years, complaints often concerned relatively mild forms of neglect, such as matted coats or overgrown nails. While these are still issues, inspectors are now more frequently confronted with animals that need urgent veterinary attention. "We used to mainly see overgrown nails and matted fur, which is still relatively mild," said Jelko de Ruijter of the LID. "Now, in the most serious cases, we even see animals that receive no medical care, or that have died because they never received medical care."

Vets sounding the alarm

The clearest signal of the trend, the LID says, comes from Dutch veterinary practices. Reports from vets to the inspectorate have tripled in three years, from around 100 in 2023 to 321 in 2025.

According to De Ruijter, by the time a vet contacts the inspectorate, the situation is often already advanced. "At the moment of such a report, medical care for an animal is actually already too late." The LID also says it sees a growing number of cases in which owners refuse to follow the care or treatment advice given by their vet, leading to repeated inspections, warnings, and enforcement.

In addition to neglect cases, vets are increasingly reporting suspicions of breeders producing animals with harmful hereditary traits, such as cats with folded ears or dogs with very short muzzles. Both are linked to chronic health problems and are subject to existing Dutch breeding rules.

A pandemic-era effect

The LID links the rise in serious neglect cases at least in part to the coronavirus pandemic. During lockdowns, many people in the Netherlands took on pets, often to combat loneliness or to fill time at home. "But these were often people who couldn't actually manage that care to begin with," said De Ruijter.

As lifestyles returned to normal and household budgets came under pressure from inflation, some of those animals ended up in situations that have become harder for owners to manage, particularly when illness, financial stress, mental health problems, or social isolation are involved.

More cooperation between authorities

Given the increasing complexity of the cases, the LID says it wants to work more closely with other authorities, including the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA), the police, veterinarians, and municipalities. According to Van der Straten, "the problem is too big to tackle alone. The problems that vets and enforcement officers are seeing are becoming increasingly distressing."

The LID currently has around 25 inspectors operating across the country. They are special investigating officers (boa's), with the legal authority to seize animals in the most serious cases, in consultation with the Public Prosecution Service. In other situations, they can issue warnings, give compliance instructions, or work with the Dutch Enterprise Agency (RVO) to impose welfare-restoration measures.

Reporting neglect

In the Netherlands, anyone who suspects an animal is being neglected or mistreated can call the national reporting number 144. Reports can be made anonymously. Calls about pets and hobby animals are mostly handled directly by the LID, while the police step in for emergencies. The NVWA handles concerns involving professionally kept animals, such as those at breeders or commercial farms.

The LID's message, ahead of what it expects to be another challenging year, is straightforward: animals depend on their owners to look after them, and when that goes wrong, early intervention by neighbours, family members, or vets can make the difference between a fixable situation and one that ends in serious harm.

A massive cyberattack on education software company Instructure, best known as the parent company of learning platform Canvas, has hit users at universities and colleges across the world, including in the Netherlands. The hacker group ShinyHunters, also behind the recent attack on Dutch telecom company Odido, claims to have stolen data on around 275 million students, teachers and staff at almost 9,000 schools worldwide.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

What was stolen

Instructure has confirmed that names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages between users on the Canvas platform were stolen during the attack. According to the company, there is no evidence so far that passwords, dates of birth, government identification numbers, or financial information were involved.

The hackers themselves claim much more. ShinyHunters say on their dark web leak site that they have 3.65 terabytes of data, including "billions of private messages" exchanged between students and teachers, and between students themselves. They also claim to have breached Instructure's Salesforce environment, which is reported to be the entry point used in this attack.

That second category, the messages, is particularly sensitive. Communications inside an education platform can contain conversations about study progress, personal circumstances, disciplinary issues, support requests, or other private exchanges between students and staff.

Dutch institutions affected

Canvas is one of the most widely used learning management systems in the world, and many Dutch universities and colleges of higher education rely on it for everything from coursework and assignments to internal communications. Confirmed Dutch users include Fontys Hogescholen, Maastricht University, Hogeschool Utrecht, the University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU Amsterdam, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Tilburg University.

Maastricht University has informed its students and staff by email that it is aware of the attack. The university says it does not yet know whether data of its own students or staff has been stolen, but states that Canvas is still safe to use.

Who are ShinyHunters

ShinyHunters is a financially motivated cybercriminal group that has been linked to a series of high-profile data thefts in recent years, including attacks on Google, AT&T, Air France-KLM, Microsoft, and Ticketmaster. Earlier this year, the same group was behind the cyberattack on Dutch telecom Odido, which exposed the data of millions of people in the Netherlands.

The group's typical playbook is to steal data, list the victim on a dark web leak site, and demand payment under threat of releasing the data publicly. In Instructure's case, ShinyHunters has set a deadline of 6 May. "Instructure Holdings, this is a final warning," the group wrote on its leak site. "Get in touch before 6 May, otherwise we will leak data and other unpleasant (digital) problems will come your way. Make the right choice — don't be the next headline."

A pattern at Instructure

This is not the first time Instructure has been hit by ShinyHunters. In September 2025, the company disclosed a separate incident in which attackers used social engineering to gain access to its Salesforce instance. At the time, Instructure said no Canvas product data had been accessed and the exposed information was largely public business contact data. The fact that ShinyHunters has now reportedly used a Salesforce vulnerability to attack the company a second time has raised questions about whether the remediation taken after the first incident went far enough.

Instructure has confirmed that the company has applied patches, increased monitoring, and rotated application keys to deal with the breach. Users of certain integrations have been asked to re-authorise their access. As of 3 May, Canvas Data 2 has been restored for all customers globally, but the Canvas Beta and Test environments remain offline for maintenance.

Why education is increasingly a target

Cybersecurity experts say the attack underlines a broader trend: education systems have become attractive targets because they hold large volumes of personal data, often with security budgets that lag behind those of the commercial sector. Education has become "a soft target," one cybersecurity expert told Dutch IT Channel.

The attack also highlights what experts call a single point of failure. Because so many institutions worldwide rely on one platform for their entire teaching process, a single breach affects huge numbers of people at once. For organisations, the question is no longer just whether their supplier was well secured, but how dependent they are on that supplier in the first place, and how quickly they can act if something goes wrong.

What users can do

For students and staff at affected institutions, the immediate advice from cybersecurity experts is to change passwords on Canvas and any linked accounts, and to be especially alert to phishing emails referring to Canvas in the coming weeks. Even though Instructure says no passwords were stolen, the stolen email addresses and student ID numbers can easily be used in targeted phishing campaigns.

The investigation is still ongoing, and Instructure has said it will continue to update users as more becomes clear.

Supermarket chain Albert Heijn is launching a trial in which external security guards will wear bodycams in four of its stores, in response to what the company says are thousands of reports of aggression against staff every year. The trial starts in stores in the centres of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and could be expanded if it proves effective. The story was first reported by Dutch newspaper AD.

Rentals in the Netherlands

Signaal tracks the Dutch rental market and notifies you the moment something matches your search. Be first to apply.

Download Now

Why bodycams, why now

According to Albert Heijn, the supermarket receives thousands of reports of aggression each year, ranging from verbal abuse and intimidation to physical violence against staff. "We find that very worrying," Sonja Boelhouwer, director of stores and logistics at Albert Heijn, told AD.

While most customers behave normally, the chain says the volume and severity of incidents has reached a point where additional measures are needed. The trial is part of a broader package of measures aimed at protecting employees, alongside the chain's existing in-store cameras and security staff.

How the trial works

The bodycams will only be worn by external security guards, not by regular Albert Heijn employees. The trial begins in four stores in central Amsterdam and Rotterdam. If it proves effective, the chain plans to expand the use of bodycams to more locations, but only in stores where security guards already work.

The cameras do not record continuously. They are designed to be activated only when a tense or threatening situation arises. Footage is automatically deleted after 14 days, unless it is needed for a police investigation. Recordings can only be viewed by the local store manager and a small group of people at Albert Heijn's head office.

A different approach from competitor Dirk

Albert Heijn is not the first Dutch supermarket to introduce bodycams. In 2024, discount chain Dirk became the first supermarket in the country to equip its own staff with bodycams in around 40 stores. In Dirk's case, employees themselves wear the cameras and decide when to switch them on; the bodycams have a small screen that lets the person being filmed see themselves, which the chain says helps de-escalate situations.

Albert Heijn has chosen a different model, leaving the cameras in the hands of trained external security guards rather than supermarket staff. The reasoning is that professional guards are already trained to handle aggression, while regular employees are not.

Privacy concerns

The Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), has raised concerns about the use of bodycams in supermarkets in the past. When Dirk introduced its bodycams in 2024, the AP said it found it "concerning" that a supermarket felt the measure was necessary at all, and warned that bodycams are normally seen only on police officers and special enforcement officials.

Camera surveillance, the regulator said, is "very invasive," and bodycams are even more so, because they film people up close and directly in the face. According to the AP, businesses must therefore be "very restrained" in deploying them. Bodycams should only be used as a last resort, when other measures have not worked, and as part of a broader package of safety steps. The regulator has also warned that bodycams should not become a cheap substitute for trained security personnel.

The AP confirmed at the time that it would ask supermarkets using bodycams for an explanation of why the cameras are necessary, and what other measures had been tried first. The watchdog has expressed similar reservations about the new Albert Heijn trial.

Part of a broader trend

The bodycams in Albert Heijn fit into a wider Dutch trend of expanding camera surveillance in environments where workers face aggression. Dutch railway company NS has begun deploying bodycams for its conductors, after years of incidents on trains and platforms. Police and special enforcement officials, known as boa's, have used them for years.

For Albert Heijn, the goal is straightforward: to protect staff and de-escalate threatening situations before they tip over into violence. Whether bodycams achieve that, and whether the privacy concerns can be resolved, will depend on how the trial unfolds in the coming months.