In a secret session, the Amsterdam council chose former housing minister Eberhard van der Laan as the new mayor for the city.

Van der Laan, who is a lawyer and has been leading the Labour Party in the city council for years, announced his candidacy for the Amsterdam top job, after Job Cohen resigned to take over the Labour leadership for the national elections.

The canals of Amsterdam’s city centre will be included in UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites from next month. The UNESCO World Heritage Centre’s Deputy Director Kishore Rao announced the decision during the official designation as world heritage of the Wadden Sea, the area of tidal channels and mudflats off the northern Dutch coast.

A call for the formation of a Gay-Straight alliance encompassing all sections of Dutch society has been made during a demonstration in Amsterdam. It follows recent violent attacks against gay men in the capital.

KLM, taken over by Air France in 2004, will remain a Dutch company based at Schiphol airport, the Financieele Dagblad reports on Wednesday.

The portrait of a glum, bespectacled man was about to go on auction in Amsterdam when someone at Sotheby’s noticed a problem: Israel’s national museum owned precisely the same painting.

One of them had to be a fake.

Restrictions on air travel from Schiphol and Rotterdam airports were lifted from 13.00 on Monday afternoon, ending the flight ban which caused the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

Flights to and from Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport have been cancelled at least until 14:00 Dutch time due to high concentrations of volcanic ash from the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano.

The flight ban began at 6:00 this morning. Schiphol Airport expects around 500 flights to be cancelled. Around 60,000 passengers will be affected, including passengers on transfer flights.

South African writer J.M. Coetzee has been knighted in Amsterdam at the start of a festival dedicated to the Nobel prize winner.

The pilots of the Turkish Airlines aircraft that crashed in a field near Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport on February 25, 2009, had plenty of time to abort their landing for a go-around and possibly prevent the accident, reveals a report on the crash presented on Thursday.

Around 50 people were injured when panic broke out during the Remembrance Day commemorations attended by thousands of people in central Amsterdam on Tuesday evening.

Amsterdam police have been given extra powers to stop people entering the special security area around Amsterdam’s war memorial on Dam square ahead of this evening’s Remembrance Day ceremony, the Parool reports on Tuesday.

Amsterdam city council has appointed a new local government. Following lengthy negotiations after the March local elections, the Dutch capital will for the next four years be governed by a coalition of Labour, conservative VVD and the Green Left party.

The house where artist Karel Appel was born has opened its doors in Amsterdam. It has been furnished in the artist’s style and will house domestic and foreign students from the Dutch Royal Academy of Visual Arts.

Former housing and integration minister Eberhard van der Laan has put himself forward as a candidate for the job of Amsterdam mayor and will not appear on the Labour party’s list of prospective MPs.

Although flights are slowly due to resume from Dutch airports on Tuesday, airlines are urging passengers not to turn up without checking first if their plane will take off, for the next few days at least.

The Association of Dutch Commercial Pilots wants flights to be resumed. The pilots believe that at least some flights are possible.

Tens of thousands of passengers were left stranded across northern Europe after airspace was closed in many places on Thursday. A huge cloud of volcanic ash from a volcano that erupted in Iceland on Wednesday led authorities to ground planes.