Amsterdam - The sexual morals of Dutch youth has gone astray, the country's youth and family affairs minister was on Monday quoted as saying in a report by the daily Algemeen Dagblad.

"A girl is seen as an object and sex as a currency. The meaning of love does not play any role anymore in the lives of youngsters," Minister Andre Rouvoet said.

Rouvoet said he wants to raise debate about the subject and emphasized he was not proposing specific legal measures.

Amsterdam - Three finalists were named Thursday in an international architectural competition to design a new home for the International Criminal Court (ICC).

An international jury chaired by Liesbeth van der Pol, the Dutch government's chief architect, picked designs from Ingenhoven Architects of Germany, Schmidt Hammer Lassen/Bosch & Fjord, Arhus of Denmark and Wiel Arets Architects & Associates of the Netherlands.

The winning firm will be decided in the coming months. Construction on the Hague-baed court will begin in 2011. Work is scheduled to be completed by 2014.

Amsterdam  - The value of Dutch insurer giant Aegon's shares fell slightly Thursday on the Amsterdam stock exchange following the publication of its third-quarter company results.

Aegon said it lost 329 million euros (428.92 million dollars) in the third quarter of 2008, below the 350 million euros which the company had announced to shareholders in late October.

By 11 am local time (1000 GMT), Aegon share value stood at 3.92 euros, a drop of 2 per cent.

Aegon said the loss came mainly from the ongoing drop in share value on the stock exchange and write-offs on investments.

Write-offs on the US banks Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, both of which collapsed earlier this fall, amounted to 336 million euros.

Amsterdam  - Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende congratulated Barack Obama on Wednesday with his victory in Tuesday's US presidential elections.

The Dutch prime minister sent a letter to the US president-elect, wishing him success.

In a statement released by the Dutch government communication service RVD, Balkenende further said "it was beautiful to see this election has moved millions of people, both in the US as well as abroad."

Referring, among others, to the global credit crisis, Balkenende said Obama's presidential term will be "challenging" and noted that the need for "intensive trans-Atlantic co-operation" was "never more urgent" than today.

Amsterdam  - A memorial sculpture was unveiled on Tuesday in the southern-Netherlands city of Riel to honour the "humanity" of a soldier from the German army during World War II.

The initiator of the memorial in Riel in the southern Netherlands, Herman van Rouwendaal, 76, said the sculpture "honours the humanity displayed by a soldier of the German army, or Wehrmacht, during WW II".

Karl Heintz Rosch was an 18-year-old soldier when he saved the lives of two young Dutch children on October 6, 1944.

Amsterdam, Nov 4 : Researchers working at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI has improved the entire process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting infrasound, which would help them detect events that have ‘inaudible’ sounds like illegal nuclear tests.

Sources of infrasound are often large and powerful, like meteors, explosions, ocean waves, storms, volcanoes, avalanches, earthquakes and nuclear tests.

Infrasound is measured with arrays (series) of highly sensitive microbarometers.

TU Delft PhD student Laslo Evers, who works at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute KNMI, has now improved the entire process of measuring, analysing and interpreting infrasound.