EU-DIGEST - special edition

The owners of cafés in the centre of Amsterdam are again up in arms against what they say is the umpteenth attempt to turn the city into a prudish provincial backwater. A majority of the Amsterdam district council 'Amsterdam Centrum' have voted in favour of a measure that would forbid customers from sitting outside on a terrace past midnight. A Dutch newspaper says the centre of Amsterdam is moving another step towards becoming a 'Staphorst on the Amstel'. Staphorst is considered the most strict and devout Calvinist town in the Netherlands.The Amsterdam City Council is also in the process of "cleaning up" the city. Permits for a large numbers of rooms in the Red Light District, where prostitutes stand behind windows, are being rescinded. The rooms are being turned into fashion shops and the women replaced by mannequins in designer clothes. Recently the town council ordered the closure of the famous sex club Yab Yum as well as the live-sex theatre Casa Rosso.

One website which has collected thousands of signatures protesting against the council's policies writes: "This is where Rembrandt rose to fame, Michiel de Ruyter departed for his epic journeys, the great author Descartes wrote his best works and (besides Paris) the first city to erect lights...we were then progressive. Now...our city seems more like a provincial village than one with the allure of an international metropolis...The beautiful vibrant city centre is being literally paralysed. A city is a city with all of its achievements, as well as its bad habits...When someone moves to the country he can't ask for a ban on fertiliser, roosters and mooing... Amsterdam should remain Amsterdam. A fantastic place where for centuries freedom and individual development have been of paramount importance."

For the complete report from Radio Neterlands click on this link

Charlotte Roche's exploration of filth in all its meanings now tops Germany's literary charts. Soon it will hit the shelves in her country of birth. Wetlands, which has beaten Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns and Ken Follett's latest to the top of Amazon's international sales list, has sparked a frenzy among major British publishers. Roche's German publishers last week refused to speak to The Observer or to arrange an interview with Roche to avoid pre-empting what is expected to be a massive UK deal and publicity campaign. 'No, nothing, impossible,' they said.

For whether it is the fantasies about sex, the polemics against the use of deodorants, the avocado cores grown specially for use in masturbation, or the detailed and inventive passages of scatological or genital description, Wetlands has left few indifferent.

French magazines have run articles on 'taboos and literature', Swiss papers have worried about moral corruption and, after seven weeks at the top of the bestseller list in Germany, no one is tiring of the debate. Der Spiegel summed up the message of the book as 'I stink therefore I am' - a reference both to the heroine's distaste for personal hygiene and her sexual fantasies about bodily odors.

For the complete report from the Guardian click on this link