The news site Indymedia.be will close down, while its staff of volunteer citizen-journalists will move to a new media project, founder Han Soete announced last week. The new project will be run in conjunction with other media partners, whose names have also not been revealed. Volunteers last week received details of the plan and were invited to an information evening on 12 February, after which more will be revealed.

A court in Bruges last week sentenced three men to two, three and four years in prison for an attack on a Togolese man in May 2006 which put him in hospital for more than eight months. Raphaël Mensah died later of a pulmonary embolism, which family say was caused by his injuries. Two other men were given community service terms of 200 hours. The court heard that the five, all patrons of a Bruges skinhead bar, had beaten Mensah specifically because of the colour of his skin.

A woman and her two sons were last week given suspended sentences of one year for renting out rooms to illegal immigrants and the unemployed, despite the danger of electrocution, fire and carbon monoxide poisoning. Caroline Willemsen and her sons Karl, 37, and Philip, 34, were warned by inspectors in 2004 that their properties in the Antwerp North area were unsuitable for habitation. The trio were also each fined €5,500 and had €127,145 in illegal rents seized by the court.

Women are twice as likely as men to suffer from sleep problems, according to the coordinator of the multidisciplinary Centre for Clinical Sleep and Waking Research in Antwerp. A conference looking at sleep research from a variety of specialist angles took place last week at Antwerp University Hospital. Almost 25% of over-50s in Belgium suffer from some form of sleep disturbance, and the use of sleeping pills has gone up from 5% in 1997 to 9% now.

The court of appeal in Brussels last week declared itself incompetent to rule on the case of a man who describes himself as a “fiscal conscientious objector”. Jan Hellebaut refuses to fund the defence ministry and instead deposits 7% of the tax he owes in a peace-tax fund. Hellebaut, a teacher from Antwerp, must now go to the Court of Cassation, and then to the court of appeal in Ghent. “Military service has been abolished, but we are all still fiscal soldiers,” he said. “I refuse to sponsor wars.”

Singer Helmut Lotti and his wife, literary journalist Jelle Van Riet, have started proceedings against three magazines after two of them published a photo of Van Riet naked. The photo had previously been shown on TV during the quiz show De slimste mens ter wereld. The couple claim breach of copyright. One of the magazines, Story, protested that they had not published the photo, but like most other media (including Flanders Today) had only written about the incident.

The next time polar explorer Dixie Dansercoer goes to the North Pole, in April, he will be carrying a sample of chicken DNA. The DNA is part of the long-running art project of Koen Vanmechelen to breed various types of chicken in an attempt to create a universal chicken (or “Superbastard”). Dansercoer will bury a vial of DNA in the polar ice to be found by future generations.