Drenthe extended a helping hand to Ter Apel. In Gieten, 130 asylum seekers were temporarily accommodated in a sports hall to prevent them from having to sleep outside. And there was also a strike this week in the dairy sector in Meppel.
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Employees in the dairy industry took action on Monday because they want higher salaries. They don’t want a 3, but 4 percent pay increase. There is also a call for a better collective labor agreement in Meppel.
“Fuel prices have skyrocketed and so have the costs of groceries,” says John Willemsen, member of the FNV trade union and working in Meppel. “Life became 3.3 percent more expensive last year. If you then receive an offer of a 3 percent salary increase, you will die financially at the end of the day. Things really need to improve.”
In addition, the employees from Meppel want a four-day working week and a higher allowance for people who participate in shifts. Willemsen: “We do this not only for the old guard, but also for all younger employees who work part-time in this industry. They simply arrange things differently at home, for example because of their children, than the older generation.”
Rijkswaterstaat has closed the entrance to the A28 towards Meppel at Hoogeveen. The A28 is closed for work, but some road users take shortcuts through Hoogeveen. This causes nuisance and unsafe traffic situations.
This only concerns the driveway towards Meppel. With the closure, the municipality wants to prevent road users from bypassing the deliberately chosen diversions in this way. The driveway will remain closed until the end of the work on June 8.
The Mining Damage Committee (CM) has announced the boundaries of the area where damage may have occurred due to the earthquake near Eleveld. This concerns a radius of about 10 kilometers around Geelbroek. The area includes places such as Assen, Rolde, Nooitgedacht, Andere, Bovensmilde, Smilde, Hijken and Zwiggelte.
There, the CM considers it likely that houses were damaged by the earthquake near Eleveld on March 14. Nearly 4,000 damage reports have now been made, most of them from Assen.
What this means for the claims settlement remains unclear. Claims handling in the Eleveld area differs from that in Groningen, and therefore the scheme for the former must be broader. “We said: if damage has been caused or worsened by mining, then you must receive the full amount to repair that damage,” said Margriet Drijver of the Mining Damage Committee.
The Public Prosecution Service has demanded a 10-year prison sentence against Epko F. (81) from Assen for the manslaughter of his 72-year-old wife Ida. According to the Public Prosecution Service (OM), he violently killed her last summer, after which he dumped her body in the Noord-Willemskanaal near Tynaarlo.
According to the judiciary, this is a case of femicide. “She was killed because she didn’t do what he wanted,” the prosecutor said in court. “He took Ida’s future,” she said. “He doesn’t think about the future of his children.”
The court will make its ruling on June 9
The municipality of Aa en Hunze offered a helping hand to the neighboring municipality of Westerwolde on Thursday evening. Asylum seekers for whom there was no room in the overcrowded registration center in Ter Apel were accommodated in the De Goorns sports hall.
The sports hall in Gieten was chosen as a location because of the large hall that was available. “A logical choice,” Mayor Anno Wietze Hiemstra calls it. “We also did that a few years ago. At first it was a hundred people, but in the end it turned out to be 130. You need quite a large space to accommodate so many people at such a short notice.”
According to Hiemstra, emergency shelter is not a structural solution. “It’s a traveling circus,” he says. “Things are being built up at breakneck speed. But letting people sleep in the grass is even worse. Those people are just here, they don’t evaporate. You have to try to find a human solution,” he concludes firmly.
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