From the magazine
Amsterdam
Hirsi Ali returns: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim and outspoken critic of Islam, returned to the Netherlands this week after nearly a year in the United States. The Somali-born Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, has been a target of death threats ever since 2004, when she authored a short film about the mistreatment of women in conservative Muslim societies. The film’s director, Theo van Gogh, was murdered by an Islamic extremist. The Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad reported that Hirsi Ali was forced to leave the U.S. because the Dutch government would no longer pay for her bodyguards unless she lived on Dutch territory. The paper said Hirsi Ali would continue working for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, from a safehouse in the Netherlands.
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London
Diana inquest opens: The official coroner’s inquest into the death of Princess Diana opened this week, a decade after she and her lover, Dodi al-Fayed, were killed in a Paris car crash. “You have to decide four important but limited factual questions,” Scott Baker told the 11 jurors at London’s Royal Courts of Justice. “Who the dead were, when they came by their deaths, where they came by their deaths, and how they came by their deaths. The first three questions are unlikely to give rise to any difficulty. The fourth is rather wider.” Conspiracy theorists have long contended that the British royal family had Diana killed because she was pregnant with the child of al-Fayed, a Muslim. The coroner has already established that Diana was not pregnant, and the inquest is expected to find that the deaths were accidental.
Portimao, Portugal
Maddy inspector fired: The Portuguese detective leading the investigation into the disappearance of little Madeleine McCann was fired this week after claiming that British police were more interested in defending the parents than discovering the truth. The detective’s superiors said the comment amounted to unprofessional conduct. Maddy, 4, disappeared from a Portuguese resort on May 3, after her parents left her and her 2-year-old twin siblings alone in their hotel suite while they ate dinner nearby. The case has pitted Portuguese investigators, who suspect the McCanns may have accidentally given their daughter an overdose of sleeping pills and then disposed of her body, against British investigators, who insist the girl was abducted. Chief Inspector Goncalo Amaral, the fired detective, is already facing a criminal hearing for his conduct in another case. He is accused of covering up the police torture of a Portuguese woman accused of murdering her daughter.
Vienna
Bomber targets U.S. Embassy: A Bosnian man carrying a backpack filled with explosives, nails, and Islamic literature tried to enter the U.S. Embassy in Austria this week. The man, who was described as rambling and confused, ran away when his pack set off the metal detectors at the entrance. He was quickly arrested. “There were a lot of nails in that bag,” said Doris Edelbacher of Austria’s counterterrorism office. “Had it exploded, it would have had an enormous shrapnel effect.”
Paris
David Lynch honored: President Nicolas Sarkozy gave France’s highest award, the Legion of Honor, to offbeat U.S. filmmaker David Lynch this week. Sarkozy said that seeing Lynch’s 1980 film The Elephant Man as a teenager had “definitively convinced” him that “cinema was a highly important matter.” Lynch, whose works also include the TV series Twin Peaks and the films Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, was effusive. “My French is poor, but my heart is rich,” he said in poor French. “I love France—the art-making, art-loving, and art-supporting people of France.”
Kiev, Ukraine
Too close to call: Pro-Western parties appeared to win Ukraine’s parliamentary elections by a hair this week—but it’s not over yet. With nearly 98 percent of the votes counted, the parties led by President Viktor Yushchenko and former Premier Yulia Timoshenko—the leaders of the 2004 democratic Orange Revolution—together took a commanding 45 percent. But the party of Moscow-backed Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych could still pass the Orange alliance if one of Yanukovych’s allies, the Socialist Party, gets the 3 percent support it needs to make it into parliament. The Socialists were teetering on the brink with 2.9 percent of the vote. The counting is going particularly slowly in regions traditionally loyal to Yanukovych, and Yushchenko has ordered an inquiry into possible fraud there.
The news at a glance...International