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…

Saturation had made the dikes top heavy and even more unstable as water levels subsided. Almost all the embankments were holding as last week ended, but a red alert persisted.

FIFTY YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR II, SOMETHING LIKE BLITZKRIEG returned to Nijmegen last week. Dutch soldiers swarmed around the city while low-flying helicopters thundered overhead. Sirens pierced the air as police cars escorted emergency crews and equipment into town. The scenes reflected the kind of combat the Dutch know best:…

In the six months new appointed bishop Gijsen sacked his deputy bishop and two vicar generals. Laying down a strict policy against birth control and abortion.

To the easygoing Roman Catholic burghers of the Dutch diocese of Roermond, their new bishop came on like a thunderclap. Last January, when Johannes Mathias Gijsen, 39, was named to the see from the rectorate of an old-folks home, hardly anyone knew who he was. They soon found out. In…

Because The Netherlands’ economy is geared more closely to Britain’s than to those of her continental allies, the Benelux countries still had no coordinated monetary policy.

Everybody was talking integration. In Paris, ECAdministrator Paul Hoffman had urgently warned Western Europe that it must take steps to integrate its separate economies (TIME, Nov. 7). Barely had Hoffman returned to the U.S., when Secretary of State Dean Acheson took off for Paris. For two days this week he…