Amsterdam  - Dutch nationals and tourists visiting Amsterdam were warned that travel times in the Amsterdam metropolitan area would lengthen as maintenance is carried out this summer, a municipal spokesman told Dutch media Thursday.

The city is using the summertime, when traffic lessens, to execute multiple maintenance projects in and around the city, causing delays for people travelling by car or public transportation, he said.

On Friday, the IJ tunnel on Amsterdam's northbound ring road is to partially close until August 25 for maintenance.

The east-west road near the Central Station, which is undergoing a massive expansion and is not to be finished until 2011, is to also be closed for the summer.

Amsterdam  - Dutch Islam critic Geert Wilders praised Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen for taking Jordan's decision to charge Wilders with incitement against Islam seriously, news reports said Thursday.

"It speaks to his credit although I am not at all comfortable about the situation," the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party said Thursday, a day after talking with Verhagen.

Wilders had requested the meeting to discuss the consequences of a Jordan public prosecutor's decision to charge him over his 16-minute political film Fitna, released late March.

In the film, Wilders expressed his concern about what he called the Islamization of the Netherlands and the spreading of Muslim fundamentalism in Europe.

Amsterdam - Inflation in the Netherlands is expected to increase, Dutch central bank president Nout Wellink indicated during a debate with the Dutch parliament on Tuesday.

Amsterdam, June 11 : Astronomers have re-discovered one of the youngest and brightest supernova remnants in the Milky Way, the corpse of a star that exploded around 1000 years ago.

The supernova was observed by ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) orbiting X-ray observatory XMM-Newton.

Exploding stars seed the Universe with heavy chemical elements necessary to build planets and create life. The expanding cloud of debris that each explosion leaves behind, known as a supernova remnant (SNR), is a bright source of X-rays and radio waves.

Generally, the debris is thought to appear as an expanding bubble or ring.

Amsterdam, June 11 : Scientists are hoping that with the development of a new telescope known as LOFAR (Low Array), the search for aliens would get a boost.

Researchers from all over the world will now contribute to this effort to find ways in which LOFAR can be used in the search for extraterrestrial life.

There are about 100 thousand million stars in the galaxy and most of these are expected to harbour planetary systems. Some of these planets might actually be suitable for life.

Now, the search for such planets has got a shot in the arm with the LOFAR telescope that is currently being built by ASTRON. It consists of about 25,000 small antennas that will receive signals from space.

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