Countries don’t always set aside enough money to pay for the pensions they promise. One country appears to have found a better way: The NL, “the globe’s No. 1 pensions country.”

In early June, the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)–the club of the world’s wealthy and almost wealthy nations–released a 208-page document perversely titled Pensions at a Glance. Inside is a rundown of how generous OECD members are to their burgeoning ranks of retirees.

The U.S. is…

In the NL., home to 1 million Muslims, a spokesman for the Dutch intelligence service says it believes as many as 20 different hard-line Islamic groups may be operating in the country.

The last time Myriam Cherif saw her son Peter, 23, was in May 2004, when the two of them stood at the elevator on the fifth floor of the gritty public-housing project where they lived, just north of Paris. Myriam, 48, was born in Tunisia, moved to France when she…

The right-wing coalition government proposed closing radical mosques, ramping up monitoring of foreign imams and stripping suspected extremists of their Dutch passports.

Vincent van Gogh’s great-grandnephew is shot and stabbed to death in broad daylight on the edge of a city park. Streets fill with tens of thousands of angry protesters. Islamic schools are attacked and mosques vandalized and set ablaze–with a severed pig’s head left as a calling card outside…

Different cultures have different views on whether adult-adolescent sex is always wrong. In the Netherlands, the law allows children ages 12 to 16 to make their own decision about sex.

It’s easier not to ask too many questions about pedophilia. The questions make you blush; some of the answers make your skin crawl. But it seems that almost daily we see another grown man tell his story and weep, suddenly becoming the terrified kid he once was. All the…

There’s something creepy about how far the Dutch have gone with the law that formally legalizes euthanasia. When it takes effect doctors will be able to euthanize sick children as young as 12.

French writer Emile Durkheim noticed a century ago that such intensely regulated environments as religious sects and military bases had higher suicide rates. Which makes you wonder what he would say about a society that decides to regulate suicide–that actually allows you to apply for it like a driver’s…

The article looks back on earlier periods of flourishing economic times that is currently the case in the U.S. From 1609 to 1713 diversity brought on a golden age for the Dutch.

1990S U.S.: WHAT MORE COULD YOU ASK?

Unemployment: Under 5% this year Growth: Modest but steady; 2% average this decade Inflation: What inflation?

ECONOMIC BACKDROP Even veteran economists are rubbing their eyes in disbelief at how well the U.S. economy has behaved this decade. For years policymakers couldn’t figure out…

Euthanasia has been openly debated and researched for more than 20 years in Holland, which has a record of pragmatism in dealing with thorny social issues like drugs and abortion.

Frans Swarttouw, former chairman of the Fokker aircraft company and one of the Netherlands’ most colorful businessmen, bid an unusual farewell to his countrymen a few weeks ago. Stricken with throat cancer, the executive, 64, who once characterized an entrepreneur as “a guy who works hard, drinks himself into the…

Discussion on euthanasia in the U.S. Some American health professionals has cited a government report from the Netherlands on assisted suicide.

Whatever one thinks about the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, there can be little doubt of its judicial aggressiveness. At the time, the abortion issue, although hardly unsung, had been debated fully in only a few state legislatures. By grabbing the case, locating a previously unspecified…

Legalization has resulted in so much abuse that last year the Dutch government was forced to change its euthanasia laws.

“DID YOU ASK FOR YOUR HEMLOCK?” THANKS TO APPEALS-court judges in New York and California, this question will now be in your future.

You will be old, infirm and, inevitably at some point, near death. You may or may not be in physical distress, but in an age of crushing…

Suriname have begun to open huge tracts of forests for logging by timber and trading companies. Conservationists around the world are horrified at the prospect.

From high atop a massive bald rock called the Voltzberg, visitors to Suriname can look in awe at the same sight that greeted explorer Sir Walter Raleigh 400 years ago: an emerald forest that seemingly stretches to infinity in all directions. Even though the world has 11 times as many…

Dutch psychiatrist Chabot helped a woman, depressed but healthy patient to commit suicide. Officials charged Chabot with violating the strict guidelines, but wasn’t punished.

Hilly Bosscher endured 25 years of repeated beatings by an alcoholic husband before the marriage ended in divorce. One of her two sons committed suicide at 20; the other died of lung cancer at the same age. When the 50-year-old former social worker from the Dutch town of Ruinen went…

Legalized prostitution, as in the Netherlands and Germany, “is an open door for traffickers,” claims Janice Raymond, an activist with the U.S.-based Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.

On Saturday nights, as many as 300 young women line the margins of E55, a Czech highway near the German border. Their costumes vary: light frocks, skimpy red dresses, glow-in-the-dark Spandex pants. They speak a babel of languages: Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, German. But they have only one thing to…

With Jack Kevorkian, discussion on legal assisted suicide arose in the U.S. Ethicists point to the world’s euthanasia laboratory, the Netherlands, where doctors are allowed to do so.

Death abides with all fanatics, not least because they are so often willing to risk it for their cause. It presses close around Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who has made death his specialty, closer still last week as he returned to the practice that so often had seemed destined…

Dutch parliament approved the world’s most liberal rules on euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide. Both practices are still technically illegal, but doctors, following rules, won’t be charged.

IN MOST PLACES, A DOCTOR WHO HELPS A TERMINALly ill patient commit suicide could face prosecution. But not in the Netherlands, which has just stepped into the vanguard of the right-to-die movement. Its parliament approved the world’s most liberal rules on euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide. Both practices are still technically…

Black Harlem is one of the city’s main attractions, with 330 years echo of history. Peter Stuyvesant established Nieuw Haarlem in 1658, and it was later connected to New Amsterdam.

He lived there for years, and New Yorkers even named a street in his honor. But these days would dapper Duke Ellington feel at ease taking the A train 2 1/2 miles north from midtown Manhattan to black Harlem? Not if he believed the vision this New York City community…