Riots broke out after Muslims resented the court decision to give custody of Maria Hertogh to her biological Dutch Catholic parents after she had been raised by a Muslim foster mother.

Maria Bertha Hertogh was five years old when the Japanese soldiers took her mother & father away from Bandung, Java, where papa Adriaanus Hertogh was a sergeant in The Netherlands East Indies army. Bertha was too young to remember just how it happened, but while she was staying at the…

When the Dutch recognized Indonesia’s independence (in November 1949), the status of Irian, which both countries claimed, would be settled at a conference to be held within a year.

In the Indonesian’s atlas the western part of New Guinea is called Irian. No one is quite sure what the word signifies. One theory is that it means nothing, another that it means “warm land.” It is, indeed, a torrid jungle and mountain wilderness as big as California. Sparsely inhabited…

According to Jesuit Father Antonio Messineo in Rome the Netherlands will be a tolerant country when Dutch Catholics become a majority.

“There’s no question of innovation, but only of clarification,” protested black-haired Jesuit Father Antonio Messineo in Rome last week. Those who regarded his article in the Jesuit fortnightly Civiltâ Cattolica as something new in Roman Catholic thought, he said, were wrong. Father Messineo’s conclusion had been that “tolerance is a…

In Finsterwolde, communists have been in the majority, in peacetime years since 1933. Last week the Dutch government asked Parliament to dissolve the Finsterwolde town council.

Finsterwolde (pop. 3,250) in northeastern Holland, hard by the German frontier, looks like any other scrubbed Dutch town; but it is not. Every year Finsterwolde sends a wire addressed to the Kremlin offering Joseph Stalin birthday congratulations. And Finsterwolde’s town fathers have officially made known that should Soviet forces cross…

In memory, of the 13 U.S. newsmen that died in a planecrash, the Dutch government established the William the Silent Award (best annual article on The Netherlands by a U.S. writer).

One year ago last week, 13 U.S. newsmen (including TIME’S Jack Werkley), coming home from an assignment in Indonesia, died in the crash of a Dutch plane near Bombay, India (TIME, July 25, 1949). Last week, in their memory, The Netherlands government established the William the Silent Award. The prize,…

The practical Dutch pointed out that the story of Hans Brinker was not true and technically quite implausible, but last week the Dutch Tourist Association had erected his bronze statue.

He looked up and saw a small hole in the dike through which a tiny stream was flowing. Any child in Holland will shudder at the thought of a leak in the dike! . . . That little hole, if the water were allowed to trickle through, would soon be…

Should newsmen be licensed as lawyers and doctors are? Proposals to license them are pending in Belgium and The Netherlands.

Should newsmen be licensed as lawyers and doctors are? Proposals to license them are pending in Belgium and The Netherlands, and in Italy journalists must now register with the Ministry of Justice. Last week in Rome, Editor Erwin Canham of the Christian Science Monitor warned an international congress of journalists…

As the first European sovereign to make a state visit to France since World War II, Queen Juliana of The Netherlands was treated to the full red carpet in Paris.

“There is an intimation at the women’s colleges that a counter-reformation which could become the hope of the Republic may be under way,” Author Bernard De-Voto (Across the Wide Missouri) observed in Harper’s. “Jeans are no longer universal wear and no one now loses caste by washing her neck ….

Old Dutch commando force leader Raymond Westerling was jailed in Singapore. U.S.I. officials demanded he be sent to Jakarta, to be tried for “crimes perpetrated by him in Indonesia.”

In Istanbul some 30 years ago, a baby was born to a Dutch antique dealer named Westerling and his Greek wife. Frére Adolphe, who afterwards taught young Raymond Westerling in Istanbul’s French Catholic St. Joseph school, recalled that he was “a mild, well-mannered, moon-faced little boy.” Raymond’s later development was…

A report on Suriname where Prince Bernhard arrived to congratulate the 21 Parliament members on their new autonomy in home affairs.

Circling the Caribbean on a good-will mission, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands last week set his red-nosed, silver-skinned DC-3 down in the only Netherlands territory on the American continent. Surinam, the middle of the three Guianas on South America’s north coast, gave the Prince a gaudily polyglot greeting.

Along the…

Stikker, a selfcalled multilateral diplomatist, will be the new ’super-boss’ of the OECC, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation.

Two weeks ago, ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman set out for Europe with the avowed intention of seeking some tangible progress on European integration which might impress the U.S. Congress. His program for the 18 Marshall Plan members included: 1) abolition of double pricing (one price for domestic consumption, another for exports)…

In Amsterdam Juliana ended 340 years of Dutch rule in Indonesia. In Indonesia people removed any rememberance of Dutch colonialism.

In Amsterdam’s Royal Palace one morning last week, 335 frock-coated Dutch and Indonesian officials gathered around a green baize table to hear Juliana, Queen of The Netherlands, end 340 years of Dutch rule in Indonesia. Juliana entered the palace hall followed by her husband, Prince Bernhard. From her crimson-upholstered…