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One person has been killed and at least one other hurt as two explosions rocked the centre of the Swedish capital, Stockholm, reports say. A car blew up near the busy shopping street of Drottninggatan, and another explosion hit nearby shortly afterwards, AP quoted police as saying. A man's body was discovered after the second blast, the agency reported. Swedish Aftonbladet newspaper showed images of a burning white car. The cause of the blasts is not yet known. Rescue services spokesman Roger Sverndal said the car which exploded had contained gas canisters, AP reported. A former AP worker, Gabriel Gabiro,...

The remains of a ship dating from the 1600s have been discovered outside the Grand Hotel in central Stockholm. The vessel was built with an almost completely unknown technology, delighting archaeologists. The planks of the ship are not nailed down, but sewn together with rope. The discovery was made by labourers close to the royal palace and in front of Stockholm's Grand Hotel during renovation works to a quay. "The discovery of the wreck is extremely interesting given the place where it was made. There was a naval shipyard on this spot until the start of the 17th century," Maritime...

A Stockholm hotel has launched a new pilot security system enabling guests to open their rooms, and even check in and out, with the help of their mobile phones, the participating companies said Tuesday. Starting this week the Clarion Hotel Stockholm provide a number of guests with telephones equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The chosen clients will not only be able to reserve their rooms and receive confirmation on the devices, they will have the option of checking in even before arriving at the hotel and have their electronic room key ready in the phone when they get...

Which is preferable; 1. The advantages of easily climbing the social ladder in a poor nation (like cab drivers of India do) 2. The disadvantages of being poor and sticking to the device of "Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope" (like certain Mexican Americans do) 3. The predictability of being an average citizen going to an average mall in an average PC corner of the World (like most Stockholmers enjoy doing) I, sincerely, recommend viewing the clips linked to below.

Al Gore -- He did it again. Recently, Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore toured again. Or maybe he does that all the time. This time, he turned up in Gothenburg (Sweden) for the usual alarmist talk. In advance, all distinguished guests were politely advised to – if possible – use any form of public transportation to go to the event, in order to minimize CO2 emissions. Intriguingly, the Master of World Climate himself arrived in a rental car (with or without driver is unclear), from the airport, and subsequently left the engine running for the entire lecture. That is...

(The article and other links, see below, are all in Swedish. So far international media has not reacted. But it will not be long....) Julian Assange is wanted by Swedish police on probable grounds suspected of rape. Two women 20 and 30 years old contacted the police on Friday.

June 07, 2010 I SUPPOSE IF I SUGGESTED SUMMARY EXECUTION I WOULD BE CALLED "HARSH"? SNIPPET: "U.S. Intelligence Analyst Arrested in Wikileaks Video Probe Note that he didn't just lift a video and send it to Wikileaks. He also stole and released 260,000 classified US State Department diplomatic cables."

The Swedish Crown Princess Victoria is set to tie the knot with Daniel Westling, her former personal trainer, in the country's long-awaited royal wedding. More than 1,000 guests, including royalties from around the world, were expected to attend the ceremony in Stockholm Cathedral on Saturday. Security was tight in the capital, with 7,000 security personell deployed, the biggest security operation ever in the Scandinavian country. The future queen's relationship with Westling, a commoner from a small town, has been under close scrutiny since it got known to the public eight years ago.

Daniel Westling is keen to settle down and have kids with Crown Princess Victoria after the pair wed next month, the future prince said in a joint interview with his fiancée published in Saturday. "In 10 years time, I hope we will have created a family," Westling told the Svenska Dagbladet daily in response to a question on what he hoped his life would look like in a decade. Asked how many small princes and princesses he'd like to raise, Westling answered: "A number, although that is not the kind of thing one can really predetermine." The 36-year-old luxury gym...

A chef at a Stockholm restaurant rushed out of his kitchen on Thursday afternoon and threw a meat cleaver at a departing thief as his restaurant was robbed for the second time in a week. The robbery took place at 2pm at a restaurant in Hässelby Villastad in west Stockholm. Two masked robbers held staff at knifepoint and forced them to hand over all the cash in the till. "Apparently the chef's meat cleaver struck one of the robbers in the back, but they were able to disappear from the scene. The same restaurant was robbed a week ago and...

"The environment here is good, it's beautiful, it's clean," summed up Anna Elig, a 37 year-old Stockholm dweller pushing her eight-week-old daughter's carriage through the city centre on a cool, sunny afternoon. "All the moms and dads who are on parental leave go out for walks around the city ... This wouldn't work in Paris," she chuckled, strolling along the broad walkway near the sparkling water. With 40 percent of the inner city composed of green spaces, the Baltic Sea archipelago city seems a natural place to begin the European Commission's Green Capital initiative. "I wasn't surprised," said Katarina Eckerberg,...

The discrimination ombudsman (DO) has asked Stockholm local transport authority, SL, to adequately compensate a gay man after a bus driver ordered him to leave the bus. The man boarded the bus at Danderyd hospital on his way home to nearby Täby when the bus driver is alleged to have said: "Do you think it is fun that I can see your panties?" according to the man's report to the discrimination ombudsman (DO) which has taken up the case. The man explained that while he was not wearing panties, his underwear could be seen just above the waist of his...

Stockholm-area police arrested nine left-wing activists on Wednesday in connection with a string of disturbances in the southern suburb of Fittja in Botkyrka. For several nights earlier in the week, Fittja Centrum was plagued by several car fires and other acts of vandalism. Police who responded to the violence were then met with a barrage of stones when arriving on the scene. But when police responded to calls about continued unrest in the predominantly immigrant area on Wednesday night, they recognized a 20-year-old woman who is wanted on suspicion of rioting from an earlier case. Police then tracked her to...

I live in Gothenburg, the eternal "second" town of Sweden. But today, it's hats off to big brother! Stockholm is expensive, but marvelous and has recently become home to two million inhabitants. Like it or not Denmark, Stockholm is THE capital of Scandinavia. Varsegod, smörgåsbord; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbNnw5Z0V6k&feature=PlayList&p=B965A4BE393A70A5&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=34

Art student Anna Odell has been fined by Stockholm District Court after acting out a faked suicide attempt as part of an art project. Odell had denied the charges of false alarm, violent resistance and fraudulent practice, date back to January 21st 2009 when she was detained by police on Stockholm's Liljeholmen bridge following what at first appeared to be an attempt to commit suicide. She was then taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Göran's Hospital for treatment, only to reveal the following day that the whole episode had been faked as a part of her final art exam...

Quite contrary to the received wisdom concerning Islam's advance on Scandinavian soil, recent birth statistics from Stockholm, sole Scandinavian city boasting more than two million inhabitants, indicate that Muslim immigrants of Stockholm fail to keep up with native Swedes in this domain. According to today's edition of the free daily newspaper of City Stockholm, the inhabitants of Sweden's capital have lately been catching up with the rest of Sweden in terms of breeding, which actually is something rather unique. For a long time, Stockholm has been way behind the rest of the nation in this regard (- during the last...

Bamboo-wielding guards at the royal palace in Stockholm have damaged a portrait of the first Bernadotte king while in hot pursuit of a renegade jackdaw, TV4 reports. The jackdaw snuck into the royal cabinet meeting room via an open chimney. Royal guards, who were armed with bamboo sticks, chased the bird into the room as it flew directly at the painting. In their attempts to apprehend the flying fugitive, the guards ripped a hole in Fredric Westin's 1838 portrait of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who reigned as King Karl XIV of Sweden February 5, 1818 until his death on March 8, 1844....

A small parish (församling) in the Östermalm neighbourhood of Stockholm has more money to spend than it has people to spend it on. The parish has now petitioned government authorities to allow it to amend its regulations so that money can used to help poor people living in other Stockholm parishes. Fewer than 100 individuals in the Hedvig Eleonora parish in Östermalm receive social assistance. As a result, the parish has now sought permission from the Swedish Legal, Financial and Administrative Services Agency (Kammarkollegiet) to amend its regulations in order to be able to direct its resources towards those in...

The social and economic costs of lost productivity and wasted fuel from traffic-choked streets are estimated to be $87 billion a year, according to the Texas Transportation Institute’s 2009 Urban Mobility Report. So far, federal, state and local efforts — focused mostly on expanding road capacity — have been largely unsuccessful at slowing the growing congestion on U.S. roads. Transportation experts now advocate a different approach, changing the emphasis from increasing supply to reducing demand. To reinforce smart growth policies, plug mounting transportation funding gaps and achieve immediate traffic relief, London, Stockholm, Singapore, Milan and three cities in Norway have...

Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Blog Details Saudi Arabia: We Prevented An Attack On Saudi Embassy In Stockholm The Saudi ambassador to Sweden has said that an attempt to set the Saudi Embassy in Stockholm on fire yesterday was part of a plan to attack it, not a random incident as the police first stated. He said that embassy security personnel noticed an unfamiliar, Arab-looking bearded man pouring gasoline on the building's entrance, and then trying to start a car parked nearby; they apprehended him and handed him over to police. Source: Al-Watan, Saudi Arabia, May 8,...