Friday March 12 2010 15:09
1°C / 6°C
But Kortrijk was already busy with plans for a new mall to give the shopping district a much-needed boost. In 2007, construction started on a project that would change the city's commercial heart completely. Expected to make the area vibrant once again and bring people back to the centre of Kortrijk, it opens on Thursday, 11 March, with the name K in Kortrijk.
At 34,000 square meters, K in Kortrijk is bigger than the floor space of all the existing shops in the commercial centre put together. The planning and construction of this shopping giant took seven years.
It’s an interesting question to contemplate.
When you really pay attention, you’ll notice how adept we’ve become at tuning out every-day noises: the bell that rings every time a tram passes on a nearby street, the rumbling of cars as they drive by, the whooshing sounds of jet engines from above.
It will be a while before that film, Honey by Semih Kaplanoglu, arrives on Belgian screens, but thanks to Cinema Novo we can see the director's previous film, Milk. This tells the story of a young man with ambitions to write poetry whose tenuous grip on reality is threatened by his imminent military service and the suggestion that his widowed mother may remarry.
So when my eyes fell on a piece of mundane local news about the opening of a new kapsalon, I was surprised to find myself reading on. The proud owner is a young man called Nassim, who made his way to Belgium from Iraq to escape the miseries of the war there. The article begins tantalisingly: Achter de twee blauwe ogen die schuchter naar me kijken, schuilt een woelig verleden – Behind the two blue eyes that look at me shyly hides a turbulent past.
As many as 300 people employed by the Flemish public broadcaster VRT – about 11% of its entire workforce – could lose their jobs in a coming round of spending cuts, according to unions in a memo released last week. The management of the VRT is due to present its spending plans to the board of directors on 15 March.
“Freya” is one of those people about whom everyone has an opinion. Her political career got a kick-start after her obvious talent (and model looks) were spotted in a political TV show. She became a federal minister in 2003, only three years after her first steps into the political arena. By 2005, she was the socialist viceprime minister and federal budget minister. Even her own father said that was too much, too soon.
The two men, who were reported as speaking Italian, posed as policemen to gain entry to the home of Pankaj Maldar, an Indian who heads the Antwerp diamond traders Karp Impex. After resisting for hours, he was forced to go to his office while the gang stood guard over his family – a so-called “tiger kidnapping”. The robbery took place on Friday, 5 March, but only became known after news leaked out on the website of The Times of India.
"In the 1970s, box office numbers were going down, with television coming up, so the studios decided to make pictures that would pull in audiences by showing things you couldn't show on the small screen," explains Micha Pletinckx of Marcel, one of the organisers behind the Offscreen Film Festival. A selection of these films is one of the highlights of this year's festival, which runs in Brussels over three weekends in March.
It is up to the Flemish government to decide on the new Scheldt crossing. Will it involve the BAM solution, which includes the much-debated Oosterweel viaduct? Or will it be the Arup/Sum route, which uses tunnels as an alternative? This in itself is an extremely hard decision to make, but it is complicated further by the fact that there is a lot at stake for every coalition party.
Unions feared the cuts were only the beginning and immediately announced strike action that saw all Carrefour stores closed and picketed at the weekend. Politicians condemned the French group’s decision and called for a viable social plan to deal with laid-off workers. Unions promised “a long and hard fight” to oppose closures.
“For six months I’ve been holding our stores up to the light,” said company CEO Gérard Lavinay. “The stores we have marked for closure could not be saved; the cancer was too deep. Nothing short of a doubling of turnover could offer any hope.”
Flanders Today is an independent weekly newsmagazine about Flanders
