News in brief

Mother Barbie was supposed to give birth in two weeks, but, perhaps under the influence of mother Diamant, who gave birth to a baby boy 1m80 tall, went into labour three days later and had her own baby, whose sex has not yet been announced. Giraffes give birth standing up, so the babies’ first experience of the outside world is a 2m fall to the ground. The giraffes moved from Antwerp Zoo last year to a new African savannah enclosure at Planckendael. “The fact that the giraffe family has got bigger all of a sudden is a wonderful thing,” said park spokeswoman Ilse Segers. Visitors to the park website can take part in a competition to name the two babies.

www.planckendael.be

The national railway authority NMBS has demanded the repayment of €37 million from electricity provider Electrabel. The utility is alleged to have charged NMBS for CO2 pollution rights, despite the fact that these were obtained free from the electricity regulator.

Young people up to the age of 18 will be eligible for free dental treatment from May this year. Previously free treatment – classified as “maintenance” but including all normal cavity and nerve work – was limited to the under-15s. At present, 15- to 18-year-olds have to pay a small fee for treatment.

Supermarket giant Delhaize has reached an agreement with consumer-goods multinational Unilever that brings to an end a weeks-long dispute that saw about 50 Unilever products cleared from the supermarket’s shelves. Delhaize claimed Unilever had applied excessive price increases. The content of the agreement has not been revealed by either side, but a Unilever spokesman said it was “a positive outcome for both parties”.

A court in Dendermonde fined internet giant Yahoo! €55,000 for failing to cooperate with judicial authorities who sought personal data on customers in an investigation into internet fraud. The internet company will also have to pay €10,000 a day if it continues to refuse. Yahoo claims only an American court has jurisdiction and plans to appeal.

Inspectors for the Flemish public transport authority De Lijn now have the power to carry out personal searches, detain passengers and order them out of vehicles. In the past their powers were limited to writing a report and requesting identity details. The authority recently trained 250 new security personnel in an effort to combat rising violence.

Murder suspect Kim De Gelder, accused of the stabbing to death of two babies and a child-care worker in a crèche in Dendermonde last month, has admitted killing an elderly woman at her farmhouse a week earlier, his lawyer said. Police investigating the crèche murders found photographs of the farm on De Gelder’s computer.

A Ghent University professor helped a 31-year-old woman give birth on board a flight to Orlando last week. Gert De Meerleer, who works as a radiologist at the university hospital, responded to a call for help from cabin crew. Luckily, he had previously done a student rotation in the maternity unit of a hospital in Birmingham, England. The plane turned back, and mother and baby Joshua were treated at Saint Luc hospital in Brussels.

From 2010, all teenage girls will be entitled to a free vaccination against cervical cancer in Flanders. The Human Papilloma Virus vaccine will be administered via the medical service of schools. Parents in the French-speaking part of Belgium will continue to pay for the time being, after health minister Cathérine Fonck said that she had “no faith” in the vaccine’s effectiveness.

Taxman demands payments for 11,000 “mistakes”

As many as 11,000 unemployed and retired people face a new tax bill of between €120 and €600 in the next few weeks because the tax authorities miscalculated how much they owe.

Tax bills sent out in December and January contained calculation mistakes, the director general of the tax administration admitted last week. The errors arose out of a misinterpretation of a change in the law introduced last year, which gives an extra tax allowance to the retired and to people living on benefits. But when it was introduced into the tax system’s new computer programme, the calculations came out wrong, Carlos Six said. The people concerned were granted too much allowance, and so paid too little tax.

Last year 3,000 taxpayers had to repay up to €5,000 after the software used by the tax system had miscalculated their tax bills. This year’s mistake is the fault of a different system altogether – because of the number of changes to tax regulations over the years, a new system was introduced, ostensibly to simplify matters.

Elsewhere it was revealed that every tax computer in the country crashed and stayed down for two days last week, making it impossible for inspectors to work on data from 2008. The database, which includes declarations made online or scanned in from paper documents, refused to function on Wednesday afternoon, unions said, and was only restored by IBM engineers on Friday morning. The breakdown was the fifth in a month.