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The day before yesterday, queen Beatrix of the Netherlands announced that she will abdicate on April 30, when she will have been on the throne for exactly 33 years. Her efficient, professional and even perfectionist style is also reflected by the telephones which are in her office in the palace of Huis ten Bosch: a simple modern white phone from the Unifoon series: Queen Beatrix in her office at her last meeting with prime minister Mark Rutte Notice the white Unifoon against the wall and the prime minister having two mobile phones while the queen only has paper and pencils in front of her (April 22, 2013). (Photo: Minister-president @ Flickr) Allthough the Netherlands is a very liberal society, the government and the royal family are still less open. Opposite to the United States, where we can get almost day-to-day pictures of the president and the White House, pictures of queen Beatrix and her surroundings are quite rare. The Dutch queen Beatrix in her office at the Huis ten Bosc

(Updated: December 29, 2015) Based upon popular culture, many people think both the US and Russian presidents have a red telephone on their desks, as part of the famous Hotline between both countries. In a previous article we showed that the Washington-Moscow Hotline is not even a telephone line, let alone there are red phones at both ends. But, as we can see in the picture below, the prime minister of Isreal does have a red phone on his desk: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (right) and defence minister Ehud Barak hold talks in the prime minister's office (Photo: Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry/Flash90, November 2012) The dark gray phone at the right, which Netanyahu is using, is a high-end Nortel M3904 executive phone - a model which is also used at the NSA headquaters and at the office of the British prime minister. Nortel was a big Canadian telephone equipment manufacturer, but was dissolved in 2009. The Enterprise Voice and Data division of Nortel was bought by t

(Updated: January 17, 2017) Earlier, we discussed some of the phones which are used by the US president in his Oval Office. Now we have a picture of a telephone set which was used by White House staff members, presumably in the years around 1990, during the presidency of George H.W. Bush: A White House staff phone from around 1990. (Click for a bigger version) This is a quite common corded telephone from the 900-series of AT&T. It has standard buttons for program, pause, flash, mute, hold, redial, volume and speaker, and also 16 programmable buttons for two entries each. Red lights indicate when the mute, hold and speaker functions are enabled. Most distinctive is the big, customized sticker with the security warning "OFFICIAL USE ONLY - WHITE HOUSE NON-SECURE TELEPHONE - DO NOT USE FOR CLASSIFIED OR SENSITIVE INFORMATION" Allthough there's always a small chance such a sticker could be fake, in this case it's most likely real. Apart from the fact that in real lif