Can anything good come out of Holland?

Yes... Fr Werenfried van Straaten for one. :) But surprisingly, the Dutch may well deliver something else that'd be good - a no vote to the European Constitution.
Also in the Telegraph, an article about the 200th birthday of the Paris lost property office.

Curiosities among the 70,000 still awaiting to be claimed include a sword made in 1892, a funeral urn that went astray in a metro station and a perfectly preserved black horse's head.
Nobody has yet come forward to ask for a certificate belonging to the Master of one of France's secretive masonic lodges.

A curious story from France in the Times about the Government's botched attempt to cancel the traditional Whitsun holday.

In a fiasco that has dented M Raffarin’s already low credibility, the SNCF state railways have given most of their 120,000 strike-happy workers the day off after the unions threatened to stop work. In return, all SNCF staff will work one minute, 52 seconds more per day throughout the year.

Also an opinion piece in the Times - Is Google God?
Reading
I recently stumbled across a copy of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities which I had forgotten I'd had. Alas, my current involvement in the world of money is of an amatur rather than a professional nature, but I do enjoy reading about it. Anyway, those of you looking for some summer reading and find the world of high finance interesting could do much worse than Micheal Lewis's Liar's Poker and (especially) Bryan Burrough & John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate are well worth reading.