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Anything to declare? Yes, I have a dwarf in my suitcase
Swedish airport staff apparently had a 'little' surprise when a team from a Swedish TV comedy show checked in their luggage; it comprised of a dwarf in suitcase!
Bromma airport employees called police when the dwarf hopped out of the suitcase at the check-in counter. When the police arrived they quickly discovered it was all part of a sketch for a program on TV network Kanal 5.
According to police spokesman Mats Eriksson, the airport staff staff aren't going to be pressing any charges, even though the little stunt had "shocked and humiliated" them.
The picture isn't the actual people involved, but it made me chuckle.
Swedish airport staff apparently had a 'little' surprise when a team from a Swedish TV comedy show checked in their luggage; it compri... more -
TV Team Tries to Check Suitcase with Dwarf Inside
Swedish airport staff were not amused when a team from a TV comedy show tried to check in a suitcase with a dwarf inside.
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Drunken moose is shot after biting three-year-old
Too many fermented apples was believed to have been the reason a young moose bit a three-year-old girl who was playing outside her home in Kungalv, western Sweden, reports said Wednesday.
On Monday morning the girl's parents heard her scream and when they looked over a hedge saw the animal next to her, the Aftonbladet newspaper said.
Three-year-old Nova's mother Maria managed to pull the little girl to safety, but Nova was very upset after the attack where she sustained bruises in her arm.
The moose disappeared but was sighted later Monday evening and after a search a hunter managed to shoot it.
'The hunters said the incident could have been much worse. The animal could have trampled her,' Nova's father Michael said.
A spokesman for the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management said such cases were very rare, and advised people who come across aggressive moose to try to back away.
Too many fermented apples was believed to have been the reason a young moose bit a three-year-old girl who was playing outside her hom... more -
Man jailed for attacks on gay men he met in chatrooms
A life sentence has been handed to a Swedish man for his brutal attacks against gay men.
Swedish website The Local reported that the 35-year-old was convicted of killing a man in his own home on December 28th 2007 and of the robbery and attempted murder of a 44-year-old man the day before. He was also convicted of robbing two men on the ninth and 15th of December, having finished a sentence in January 2007 for similar crimes.
The man met his victims through internet chat sites and gave the impression that he wanted to have sex with them, meeting them in their apartments in Stockholm.
His last victim died from knife wounds and a knife was used in the attempted murder. The victim received a number of threats and stab wounds, including one on the sole of his foot as he lay naked in bed with his hand tied behind his back. He also had his wallet, holding 900 kronor (around £75), stolen.
"All the victims were, or are, homosexual," said public prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad at the man's indictment hearing. "He has taken advantage of their sexual preferences and violated them."
Have you ever met someone in person that you'd 'met' on the internet? Did they tie you up, stab you in the foot and steal your wallet? (I hope not) Can it ever be safe to meet up with someone you 'met' online? Are minority groups particularly vulnerable in cases like this?
A life sentence has been handed to a Swedish man for his brutal attacks against gay men. ... more -
Swedish Government Passes Wiretapping Law
The Swedish government appears to now be free to watch commication between its citizens and the rest of the world. How this will effect thepiratebay.org and other bittorrent trackers currently hosted in Sweden remains to be seen. The Swedish government appears to now be free to watch commication between its citizens and the rest of the world. How this will effe... more
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Full medicinal pot uses explored
"Scottish and Swedish researchers say they are researching how to get full medicinal uses of marijuana without the side-effects.
Roger Pertwee of the University of Aberdeen and Christopher Fowler, Professor of Pharmacology at Umea University in Sweden, say marijuana is a source of compounds known as cannabinoids -- one of which, THC, the main chemical responsible for the marijuana "high," has been licensed as a medicine for suppressing nausea produced by chemotherapy and for stimulating appetite in AIDS patients.
More recently, the marijuana-based medicine Sativex was licensed both for the symptomatic relief of neuropathic pain in adults with multiple sclerosis and as an adjunctive analgesic treatment for adult patients with advanced cancer.
"THC works by targeting molecules in our bodies called cannabinoid receptors," Pertwee said in a statement. "So some current research is focused on designing drugs that only target cannabinoid receptors in the part of the body relevant to the disease in question and not the receptors in the central nervous system involved in the unwanted effects of cannabis."
Another constituent of marijuana, THCV, blocks one of the cannabinoid receptors that may provide an alternative treatment route in the fight against obesity, Pertwee said.
The findings are being presented at the Federation of European Pharmacological Societies in Manchester, England." "Scottish and Swedish researchers say they are researching how to get full medicinal uses of marijuana without the side-effects. ... more -
US fails on "human index"
Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed country. And while it has the second-highest income per head in the world, the United States ranks 42nd in terms of life expectancy.
These are some of the startling conclusions from a major new report which attempts to explain why the world's number-one economy has slipped to 12th place - from 2nd in 1990- in terms of human development.
The American Human Development Report, which applies rankings of health, education and income to the US, paints a surprising picture of a country that spends well over $5bn each day on healthcare - more per person than any other country.
The report, Measure of America, was funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad Hilton Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. It shows each of the 11 countries that rank higher than the US in human development has a lower per-capita income.
Those countries score better on the health and knowledge indices that make up the overall human development index (HDI), which is calculated each year by the United Nations Development Programme.
And each has achieved better outcomes in areas such as infant mortality and longevity, with less spending per head.
Japanese, for example, can expect to outlive Americans, on average, by more than four years. In fact, citizens of Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica, South Korea and every western European and Nordic country save one can expect to live longer than Americans.
There are also wider differences, the report shows. The average Asian woman, for example, lives for almost 89 years, while African-American women live until 76. For men of the same groups, the difference is 14 years.
One of the main problems faced by the US, says the report, is that one in six Americans, or about 47 million people, are not covered by health insurance and so have limited access to healthcare.
As a result, the US is ranked 42nd in global life expectancy and 34th in terms of infants surviving to age one. The US infant mortality rate is on a par with that of Croatia, Cuba, Estonia and Poland. If the US could match top-ranked Sweden, about 20,000 more American babies a year would live to their first birthday.
"Human development is concerned with what I take to be the basic development idea: namely, advancing the richness of human life, rather than the richness of the economy in which human beings live, which is only a part of it," said the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen, who developed the HDI in 1990.
"We get in this report ... an evaluation of what the limitations of human development are in the US but also ... how the relative place of America has been slipping in comparison with other countries over recent years."
The US has a higher percentage of children living in poverty than any of the world's richest countries.
In fact, the report shows that 15% of American children - 10.7 million - live in families with incomes of less than $1,500 per month.
It also reveals 14% of the population - some 40 million Americans - lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks such as understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.
And while in much of Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia, levels of enrolment of three and four-year-olds in pre-school are running at about 75%, in the US it is little more than 50%.
The report not only highlights the differences between the US and other countries, it also picks up on the huge discrepancies between states, the country's 436 congressional districts and between ethnic groups.
It has 5% of the world's people but 24% of its prisoners
Despite spending $230m (£115m) an hour on healthcare, Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed count... more -
ABBA's Bjorn Ulvaeus Suffering From Long Term Memory Loss
Ulvaeus, 58, (on the far right) has tried everything to cure his condition, including hypnosis, but nothing has helped him recover his lost memories.
The father of four composed the music for the Mamma Mia! stage music, the recently released film version of which has enjoyed the biggest film opening for a musical in the UK and been credited with generating an ABBA revival.
But for Ulvaeus, it will be as though seeing the band's popularity for the first time.
His condition has even made him forget their Eurovision victory in Brighton with their best-known song Waterloo - a victory that was instrumental in propelling them onto the world stage and making them one of the world's best selling bands, shifting almost 400 million records in total.
"It is like I was not even there," he said.
Ulvaeus, 58, (on the far right) has tried everything to cure his condition, including hypnosis, but nothing has helped him recover his... more -
Hell of a ride: Theme park ride collapses
Dozens of fun-seekers have been injured after a theme park ride collapsed in the city of Gothenburg, in western Sweden.
Officials said around 20 people were seriously hurt in the accident, which happened at the Liseberg theme park. Several people were thrown out of the swinging Rainbow ride in Tuesday evening's accident, police said.
The ride is composed of a spinning arm with a compartment at one end which carries passengers. The Rainbow was full, with 36 predominantly Scandinavian passengers, at the time of the accident, in which it fell about 10 feet (three metres) to the ground, police said.
The cause of the incident is under investigation. A popular Swedish tourist destination, Liseberg is the country's biggest theme park, with more than 30 different rides.
None of the injuries are said to be life-threatening, emergency services officials told the Associated Press news agency.
(Excerpts / BBC News) Dozens of fun-seekers have been injured after a theme park ride collapsed in the city of Gothenburg, in western Sweden. ... more -
FRA Leak - American Communications Captured and Stored, Storm Continues
To say that the new FRA law in Sweden is controversial is really an understatement at this point. New reports have surfaced that say how not only MPs of the Swedish government are currently being bombarded by a huge flood of e-mail over the new law, but now an investigation by the Chancellor of Justice has been launched into the leak of a secret document from the internal FRA website - a leak that shows American communications were captured in the system.
We have been following the FRA controversy since just about the first report that said how legislation was tabled. Since that time, it seems as though controversy has been growing just about exponentially. While warrantless wiretapping is, by far, not unique to Sweden, the aftermath alone has made the debates a sight to behold.
Of course, the aftermath expands beyond a few concerned privacy rights advocates. More recently, Swedish news site 'The Local' has been following the developments at least since the controversy over the laws took off and their more recent stories seem particularly noteworthy. The first story discusses how the new surveillance law would 'drive businesses out of the country'.
"Take us, for example. We are a fast-growing internet company offering mobile email services to a global market. Since all our international services pass through a network operations centre in Sweden," writes Roger Grönberg, CEO of Momail, "our customers' communications are now going to be subject to surveillance regardless of the prevailing laws in their home countries."
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While all this is going on, an additional report from the New York Times clearly adds a brand new dimension to the privacy debates in Sweden. From the NYTimes:
The United States and the European Union are nearing completion of an agreement allowing law enforcement and security agencies to obtain private information — like credit card transactions, travel histories and Internet browsing habits — about people on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The potential agreement, as outlined in an internal report obtained by The New York Times, would represent a diplomatic breakthrough for American counterterrorism officials, who have clashed with the European Union over demands for personal data. Europe generally has more stringent laws restricting how governments and businesses can collect and transfer such information. To say that the new FRA law in Sweden is controversial is really an understatement at this point. New reports have surfaced that say h... more -
Swedes massively protest wiretap law
In June the Swedish parliament passed a controversial surveillance law that gives authorities a mandate to read all email and listen in on all phone calls without warrant or court order. In response to the law, The Pirate Party organized rallies, bloggers and journalists turned into activists, and even Google decided to relocate their servers.
That’s not all. Google and former public telecoms company Telia moved their servers out of Sweden. Belgium says it will sue Sweden since Belgian citizens may be wiretapped without any apparent reason. Anne Ramberg, secretary-general of the Swedish Bar Association, has called for challenges to the law in Swedish and European courts and similar demands have been heard from several other interest groups, like the Journalist’s Union. It’s FRA hunting season this summer in Sweden!
It is now obvious that the legislation was a deal made between the leaders of the four government parties without full support, even from within their own ranks. Active party members resigned in protest, like Fabian Norlin of the Moderate party who quit on June 24 and instead launched FRApedia, a Wiki covering everything about the law and the authorities.
Meanwhile, the people responsible have not uttered a word in defense of the legislation. They haven’t even tried to justify it. In fact, the few quotes that were made referred in smug terms to the nature of the debate and the debaters. Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said “It would be best for everyone if the debate would calm down.” Others have called your-rights-online-bloggers “spirited amateurs”, sparking even more fury.
During the time since the vote, the Members of Parliament have appeared everything from sad through to ridiculously stupid when trying to handle the turbulence. A representative of the “ridiculous” faction was Liberal Party member Gunnar Andrén who wrote a very upset internal email claiming he hadn’t been told by party colleague Camilla Lindberg that she was going to vote against the bill (she was the only member of any of the four government parties that voted against the bill and received much appreciation and media by it). His email was leaked to the press by another party colleague and Andrén was later heard on a recorded phone-call exclaiming that his secrecy of correspondence had been broken and that it was “Gestapo methods”. Dude, you just voted for a bill that allows all emails to be read and all phone calls to be recorded. Live with it!
The big shift in public opinion came at the time of the vote when the blogs, who had pushed on the issue for many weeks before the vote, finally found the mainstream media with them, and with that the power to reach the masses. Some 6.6 million emails were sent to the Members of Parliament through an online petition created by daily newspaper Expressen which allowed easy protests to the members. Göran Petterson of the Moderate Party (until 2006 an military officer and one of those in favor of the FRA legislation) wrote on his blog: “Email is a great way to communicate with my voters but then you can’t do like Expressen has done now. […] Now, normal emails from the citizens are drowning in these.” Clearly, he didn’t understand his voters were trying to communicate with him, sending him a clear message of what they thought of him and his party.
In Malmö, Peter Sunde of The Pirate Bay spoke at the rally saying “the FRA bill is unnecessary, ineffective, unwanted and last but not least, expensive. The government should listen to the people, as they cannot replace us. However, we have the power to change the government.” Meanwhile, in Stockholm, Maria Wetterstrand of the Green Party promised that an abolishment of the FRA bill would be one of their demands in order to form government with The Social Democrats after the elections 2010 while Alice Åström of the Left Party promised to motion this fall to give members of the government alliance parties the possibility to break up the legislation. ... more -
Swedish man wins bike for 'most ridiculous commute' - Yahoo! News
I feel guilty about not riding my bike to work anymore (30+ miles) and yet this guy is driving a few feet!
Hopefully he'll actually use the bike. I feel guilty about not riding my bike to work anymore (30+ miles) and yet this guy is driving a few feet! ... more -
Drunken man tries to row home...from Denmark to Sweden
A drunken 78 year old man who didn't have enough money for the last ferry stole a dingy and decided to row home. Then fell asleep.
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8-year-old accused of discrimination after failing to invite classmates to party
An 8-year-old boy has been the subject of a heated debate in Sweden after failing to invite two classmates to his birthday party.
The boy's school in Lund has filed an official complaint with the Swedish Parliament arguing that if invitations are handed out on school premises no discrimination may take place. The boy had distributed invitations to his birthday party in class and when a teacher noticed that two students had been left out, all invitations were confiscated.
According to the boy's father, his son did not invite the two students because he had had an argument with one of them and had not been invited to the other's birthday party. "My son has taken it pretty hard," he told the newspaper Sydsvenskan.
An 8-year-old boy has been the subject of a heated debate in Sweden after failing to invite two classmates to his birthday party. ... more -
Hello Kissey Asplund!
The Daily Fix says hello, or hej as they say in Sweden, to Stockholm-based soul sensation, Kissey Asplund.
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Lykke Li, Sexy Swede
Sexy Swedish chanteuse, Lykke Li, steals the seat on the Daily Fix to tell us about her first full length album and her evolving dance styles. Sexy Swedish chanteuse, Lykke Li, steals the seat on the Daily Fix to tell us about her first full length album and her evolving dance... more
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Sweden approves wiretapping law
Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic.
The country's intelligence bureau will be able to scan international calls, faxes and e-mails.
The measure was passed by a narrow majority after a heated debate in the Stockholm parliament.
Critics say it threatens civil liberties and represents Europe's most far-reaching eavesdropping plan.
(End of excerpt)
Full story at link by BBC NEWS | Europe Sweden's parliament has approved controversial new laws allowing authorities to spy on cross-border e-mail and telephone traffic. ... more -
uberskychannel
A collective of norwegian/swedish artists works, pretty diverse and out there.
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artists - erika nordqvist
And its like when you meet up in a café and you’re a little early but not that early and you order your latte and is it lAttey or laattee but you’ve got the pointy shoes on and glossy lips and you get your latte(ey) and she comes straight after and you kiss on cheeks and sit down and you laugh and drink your latte and its not about pointy shoes, at all, and she says you should have seen this girl yesterday like she had this massive arse and she tried it on with absolutely everyone and with the shortest rah-rah I’ve ever seen it was the most embarrassing thing ever it was absolutely hilarious and she was a big girl you know massive arse and absolutely wasted and lip gloss, latte it all goes down down the throat. And its like when you meet up in a café and you’re a little early but not that early and you order your latte and is it lAttey or laat... more
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Sweden donated twice more relief money than US?
"Sweden is donating SEK 500 million (USD 75.6 million) in relief aid, reported the Swedish paper Aftonbladet. The US is donating USD 35 million. Norway has decided to increase its donations by doubling the original amount and has now allocated NOK 100 million (USD 16.5 million) to the survivors of the disaster.
The amount the US decided to donate has created reactions. The Norwegian UN Undersecretary Jan Egeland, who is in charge of UN’s emergency relief coordination, stated Monday that rich countries are too stingy when it comes to emergency aid.
"I don’t understand why they are so stingy. If a country donates 0.1 or 0.2 percent of GDP in foreign aid, I don’t think that is particularly generous," Egeland said at the press conference Monday.
Egeland was forced to modify his statement when President George Bush became furious. Bush claimed Egeland was "very misguided and ill informed" and claimed that the amount allocated was only the beginning. However the American institution, the New York Times, completely agrees with Egeland’s statements. In an editorial under the headline "Are We Stingy? Yes" printed Thursday, the New York Times states that "Mr. Egeland was right on target." "Sweden is donating SEK 500 million (USD 75.6 million) in relief aid, reported the Swedish paper Aftonbladet. The US is donating USD 3... more
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