Amsterdam - Male victims of domestic abuse in the Netherlands can seek refuge in special shelters such as that due to open Tuesday in The Hague by Deputy Health Minister Jet Bussemaker.

The four biggest cities - Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht - each received 200,000 euros (255,920 dollars) to provide safe havens for abused men, the ministry said Monday.

Each city should provide 10 shelters. Half the total of 40 abused men's homes will be secret shelters.

Amsterdam, Feb 5 : A team of French and Italian astronomers has devised a new method for measuring the size and shape of asteroids, which would increase the number of asteroids that can be measured by a factor of several hundred.

This method takes advantage of the unique capabilities of ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI).

"Knowledge of the sizes and shapes of asteroids is crucial to understanding how, in the early days of our Solar System, dust and pebbles collected together to form larger bodies and how collisions and re-accumulation have since modified them," said Marco Delbo from the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, France, who led the study.

Amsterdam - Obama flowers are expected be the trend of the upcoming gardening season in Europe.

Dutch flower farm Royal van Zanten in Valkenburg in the southern Netherlands has developed a special chrysanthemum that it has named after the new US President Barack Obama.

"We expect to sell 250 million Obama flowers in the next three years," Ton Griekspoor of Royal van Zanten told Dutch TV.

"Yes, we can," he added, laughing.

Amsterdam  - Dutc

Amsterdam, Feb 4 : The European Space Agency's (ESA's) COROT space mission has found the smallest terrestrial planet ever detected outside the Solar System, which has a surface to walk on.

The amazing planet is less than twice the size of Earth and orbits a Sun-like star. Its temperature is so high that it is possibly covered in lava or water vapor.

About 330 exoplanets have been discovered so far, most of which are gas giants with characteristics similar to Jupiter and Neptune.

Amsterdam  - A Dutch national has died of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, or mad cow disease, the Dutch Royal Institute for Health and the Environment RIVM said in a statement released on Monday.

The patient died in early January.

Post-mortem investigations performed by the Utrecht Medical Center, the teaching hospital affiliated with Utrecht University, and the Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease expertise centre in Rotterdam, confirmed the patient died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob.