Napier Siege and De Volkskrant

[sierra_le_oli]

Comparing how the media cover a story in different countries fascinates me despite myself. This time it involved the events in Napier, where a man killed a police officer, wounded three others, and later killed himself to end the siege.

The man's name was Jan Molenaar, which seems to have led de Volkskrant to publish a small article headlined,

Comments

[kelvix]

I did hear something on the radio and identified the words "new Zealand" and various other words connected with violence, incident etc. I just never got round to looking for the BBC news report on it. We have no telly yet, so it's a Dutch "words only" type of news that is harder to decipher with no visual cues :)

[sierra_le_oli]

The BBC had two stories, presumably 'cos it's NZ. I doubt it would've been on Dutch TV (same day as the 8th death from Apeldoorn) and I can't find anything on the NOS. Interesting that it was on the radio though!

Hope you manage to get a telly soon, that will make your Dutch news gathering easier. :-)

[bonnie_j]

Yeah, you often hear various people on the radio with non-Anglo names and where it's not an issue to the story, their origins aren't mentioned. Even Melissa Lee only occasionally gets described as an Asian or Korean MP.

I'm left to draw my own conclusions - my working assumption is that anyone with the name Cornelius living in NZ is probably from Sth Africa, for example. Although it's only an assumption - I know a guy called Tijs who I assumed had Dutch ancestry until he said his parents just liked the name.

[sierra_le_oli]

Hm, I guess I can see why they liked the name Tijs, though he must spend a lot of time spelling it.

Would you like some more easily spellable suggestions? 0:-)

[bonnie_j]

Ingeborg?

[sierra_le_oli]

Ingeborg has long fallen out of fashion. The past several years have seen a fashion for short names, and for girls, names ending in A. Here's a recent top ten:

Girls' names

1 Sophie
2 Julia
3 Lieke
4 Emma
5 Sanne (had spent a million years at No. 1)
6 Anna
7 Lotte
8 Eva
9 Anne
10 Lisa

Boys' names

1 Daan
2 Tim
3 Sem
4 Jayden
5 Thomas
6 Thijs :-)
7 Jesse
8 Ruben
9 Lars
10 Milan