The week in brief: 5 August

Antwerp theatre collective Berlin has been awarded this year’s Flemish Culture Prize for Stage Arts. The jury praised the group for its “unique inter-disciplinary artistic approach”. Berlin was set up in 2003 by Bart Baele (pictured left) and Yves Degryse (right), and each piece – a mixture of fiction and non-fiction – is performed in a real-world location. 

The court of appeal in Ghent will begin hearings in November in the latest stage of the bankruptcy of West Flanders speech recognition technology company Lernout & Hauspie. The two owners were sentenced in 2010 to five years in prison with two years suspended for fraud. The civil part of the case, with more than 10,000 parties seeking damages, went through various procedures until it landed before the court of appeal two years ago. The settlement of damages claims is about to begin.

Belgium’s two Zaman newspapers, in Turkish and in Dutch, are closing down operations after threats from supporters of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Zaman papers are linked to the opposition Gülen movement, blamed by Erdogan supporters for the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July. According to the editor, the paper and its staff have received “hundreds” of death threats since the coup attempt.

Brussels Airport has begun tests of a new radar system to detect the presence of  birds, which present a danger to air traffic. The radar sends information to patrols that can chase the birds away from runways to escape being sucked into engines. It has the advantage of working in poor visibility and bad weather when the Bird Control Unit cannot. After the tests, the airport will decide whether to install the system permanently.

Weather forecasters on Flemish public broadcaster VRT will begin providing information on wind and solar energy along with temperature, humidity and rainfall, meteorologist Frank Deboosere has said. The information could be directly linked to current weather conditions or be general information on energy production, he said.

The Muslim feast of the sacrifice will take place this year on 12 September, Belgium’s Muslim Executive has announced. The feast involves the slaughter of an animal, usually a sheep. Brussels has introduced a temporary slaughter facility to cope with demand, but Flanders bans ritual slaughter – when the animal is not stunned before being killed – outside of official slaughterhouses.

The first Burger King in Belgium will open its doors in the summer of 2017, owners QSR, which took over the Quick restaurant chain in Belgium and Luxembourg, has announced. The company also said the Quick brand would remain, with the two brands existing side by side for an undeclared period. The location of the first Burger King was not revealed.

Flinterstar, the Dutch cargo ship that sank off the coast of Zeebrugge after a collision with a gas tanker last year, has now been fully salvaged. The ship foundered on a sandbank, and the Dutch owner refused to pay for the salvage until forced to by a court. The work was carried out by dredging companies Jan De Nul and DEME.

Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has been named choreographer of the year by the prestigious German dance magazine Tanz. De Keersmaeker won the magazine’s dancer of the year award in 2012 and 2013. She and her company Rosas, based in Brussels, begin a reprise of her 2001 work Rain next month.

Police should be allowed to work with civilians to make it easier to follow the activities of terrorist groups, the Brussels prosecutor-general Johan Demulle has argued. Such groups are often closed and secretive, he said, making it impossible for a police officer to infiltrate, whereas civilians, including informants, could do so more easily. He also argued that infiltrators should be allowed to commit crimes in order to maintain their position in the group.

Belgium’s top position in the world for the use of in vitro fertilisation treatments is largely due to IVF-tourists – foreigners who come to Belgium either because the treatment does not exist in their homeland or because of Belgium’s reputation as a centre of excellence – Genk gynaecologist Willem Ombelet has explained. The country came top of the list in a survey by The Economist, which reported 2,992 IVF cycles per million residents here in 2010, compared to 1,438 in the Netherlands and 1,392 in France.

A 31-year-old Moroccan woman was attacked in the street in Ghent last week by her ex-partner and died of stab wounds in hospital, the prosecutor’s office has announced. The man is in custody and faces a murder charge.