Sweden’s Nobel Foundation, which oversees the awarding of all the Nobel prizes, has determined that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has not violated the foundation’s rules regarding the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oslo lawyer who has complained for years that it has, doesn’t appear to be giving up his fight.

Fredrik Heffermehl has sharply criticized the Norwegian Nobel Committee several times, claiming that its Peace Prize awards are not in keeping with the terms of the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist who set up and funded the prizes more than 100 years ago. Instead of giving the award to champions of disarmament and active peace brokers, the committee has awarded many prizes to human rights and environmental activists, for example. Heffermehl believes such prizes are not in line with Nobel’s intentions.

After years of having his complaints rebuffed by officials of the Nobel Committee in Oslo, Herffermehl took his fight to Stockholm, where the regulator of Swedish foundations (Länsstyrelsen) recently agreed to ask the Nobel Foundation (Nobelstiftelsen) to evaluate and comment on Heffermehl’s claims.

It did, and Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reported Thursday that Nobelstiftelsen has written back that it doesn’t see that the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s awards have violated the foundation’s rules. The Swedish foundation noted that it’s important and desirable to discuss how Nobel’s will should be interpreted, but they found no deviation.

The foundation’s report is viewed as a recommendation to the regulator Länsstyrelsen, which will make the final response to Heffermehl’s claims.

Geir Lundestad, director of The Nobel Institute in Oslo, told news bureau NTB that the Swedish foundation’s response was made in line with the Norwegian committee’s understanding. He said it was based on both the foundation’s interpretation of Swedish law and “our reaction to Heffermehl’s complaint.” Lundestad noted that an earlier complaint from Heffermehl was rejected in 2008, “and in our opinion, he hasn’t come with anything new now.”

Heffermehl appeared undaunted, telling NRK Wednesday that “great forces are at work here” but he still believes the Norwegians are not adhering to Nobel’s will. There’s also been some speculation that a new Swedish law will transfer responsibility for awarding all the prizes to the board of the Swedish Nobel Foundation.

While all the other Nobel Prizes are awarded by various committees and organization in Nobel’s native Sweden, he specifically wrote in his will that he wanted the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded in Norway, by a committee formed by the Norwegian Parliament. There also has been controversy over how the committee itself is formed, with committee chairman Thorbjørn Jagland firmly defending its independence from the Norwegian government.

Alex Morgan and the United States left the Algarve Cup with a win, but not the trophy.

Morgan scored her first career hat trick and Abby Wambach added her 134th goal, leading the United States over Sweden 4-0 Wednesday in the third-place match at Parchal, Portugal.

The Americans had been seeking their third straight title, and ninth overall, in the tournament before losing to Japan 1-0 in the semifinals in a rematch of last summer’s Women’s World Cup final.

“We had a lot of emotions after the last game,” Morgan said. “We were sad, so going into this game we wanted to get a shutout and finish the tournament off right playing the style that we like to play and we did that.”

Morgan scored in the fourth minute after running onto a pass from Heather O’Reilly that rolled past Wambach and chipping over goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl. Morgan doubled the lead in the 33rd with an angled shot off the right palm of Lindahl, who had come about 5 yards out.

Wambach scored in the 36th, running across the 6-yard box to head in Christie Rampone’s free kick.

Morgan completed her hat trick in the 72nd minute, catching Lindahl off her line again and lobbing a chip shot from Lauren Cheney over the Swede from 12 yards out.

“We saw the goalkeeper out the entire game. Even Abby turned to me during the game and said, ‘If you get it and look up, just hit it,’ because she was way off her line,” Morgan said.

It was Morgan’s fifth goal of the tournament, best of the Americans, and gave her 21 in 36 international appearances.

“It’s nice to get my first hat trick; I’ve had a few pairs of goals,” she said. “But I’m just happy with the way we finished off the tournament.”

Sweden had eight shots, seven on goal, and was able to make a few dangerous counterattacks off U.S. miscues. But constant pressure by captain Christie Rampone and Rachel Buehler kept star forward Lotta Schelin in check, and goalkeeper Nicole Barnhart was able to handle all of Sweden’s shots.

“We played well together today. We possessed the ball and we worked for each other,” Morgan said. “It was just a completely different game. We felt good going into the game, we wanted it really bad and it showed out on the field.”

In the title game, Celia Okoyino da Mbabi completed a hat trick in stoppage time to cap a wild finish in Germany’s 4-3 victory over Japan.

After Japan rallied from two goals down to tie the game, Okoyino appeared to win it for Germany by converting a penalty kick in the 88th minute. But Japan tied it again in the 90th on a goal by Yuki Nagasato. Okoyino then came through again, scoring her third goal of the game in stoppage time.

It was the second Algarve Cup title for Germany.

Surging support for Sweden’s Social Democrats under a new leader has helped opposition parties overtake the centre-right minority government in popularity, an opinion poll showed on Monday.

The poll was a warning to Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt as he nears the mid-way point in his second term in September and seeks momentum for an unprecedented third term in an election due in 2014.

The Social Democrats, Green and Left parties would garner 47.3 percent of the vote if an election were held now against 46.6 percent for the ruling Moderates, Christian Democrats, Centre and Liberal parties, the YouGov poll showed.

YouGov has only been polling since October 2011 and the opposition has never been ahead in that time. New Social Democrat leader Stefan Lofven, a former union official who took the leadership post in January, is given much of the credit.

“The party can show voters it has its house in order again, that they have returned to stability and that they are no longer a party that is characterized by internal divisions,” Said Ulf Bjereld, Gothenburg University professor of political science.

The previous leader quit after blunders.

A poll-of-polls by researchers Novus shows the opposition was last ahead in June 2011. But with two years to go to an election, the government has time to recover.

“The Social Democrats had strong support two years before the previous election, much higher than they have, in fact, today and they lost that election, anyway,” said Stina Morian, chief analyst at YouGov Opinion.

“They shouldn’t be too confident until we get a bit closer to the vote.” In the 2010 election, the centre-left opposition won 43.6 percent of the vote to the government’s 49.3 percent.

The Social Democrats, who governed Sweden for most of the 20th century, have seen their support surge, according to the YouGov poll, to 29.6 percent from 21.9 percent the month before.

Reinfeldt is still seen by voters as the best leader, even though his government has been beset by problems, including policy defeats in parliament and a scandal over Sweden’s proposed involvement in a Saudi weapons factory.

Reinfeldt has also had personal worries, announcing last week that he was splitting from his wife.

War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception are essential for starting an unpopular colonial war. Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers’ and viewers’ consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.

To the chagrin of many in authority and the media, WikiLeaks has torn down the façade behind which rapacious western power and journalism  collude. This was an enduring taboo; the BBC could claim impartiality and expect people to believe it.  Today, war by media is increasingly understood by the public, as is the trial by media of WikiLeaks’ founder, and editor Julian Assange.

Assange will soon know if the Supreme Court in London is to allow his appeal against extradition to Sweden, where he faces allegations of sexual misconduct most of which were dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and do not constitute a crime in Britain. On bail for 16 months, tagged and effectively under house arrest, he has been charged with nothing. His “crime” has been an epic form of investigative journalism: revealing to millions of people the lies and machinations of their politicians and officials and the barbarism of criminal war conducted in their name.  For this, as the American historian William Blum points out, “dozens of members of the American media and public officials have called for [his] execution or assassination”.  If he is passed from Sweden to the US, an orange jump suit, shackles and a fabricated unconstitutional indictment await him. And there go all who dare challenge rogue America.

In Britain, Assange’s trial by media has been a campaign of character assassination, often cowardly and inhuman, reeking of jealousy of the courageous outsider, while books of perfidious hearsay have been published, movie deals struck and media careers launched or resuscitated on the assumption that he is too poor to sue.  In Sweden, this trial by media has become, according to one observer there, “a full-on mobbing campaign with the victim denied a voice”. Fot more than 18 months, the salacious  Expressen, Sweden’s equivalent of the Sun, has been fed the ingredients the ingredients of a smear by Stockholm police.

Expressen is the megaphone of the Swedish right, including the Conservative Party which dominates the governing coalition. Its latest “scoop” is an unsubstantiated story about “the great WikiLeaks war against Sweden”.  On 6 March, Expressen claimed, with no evidence, that WikiLeaks was running a conspiracy against Sweden and its foreign minister Carl Bildt.  The pique is understandable. In a 2009 US embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks, the Swedish elite’s vaunted reputation for neutrality is exposed as sham. (Cable title: “Sweden puts neutrality in the Dustbin of History.”)  Another US diplomatic cable reveals that “the extent of [Sweden’s military and intelligence] co-operation [with Nato] is not widely known” and unless kept secret “would open up the government to domestic criticism”.

Swedish foreign policy is largely controlled by Bildt, whose obeisance to the US goes back to his defence of the Vietnam war and includes his leading role in George W. Bush’s Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He retains close ties to Republican Party extreme right figures such as the disgraced Bush spin doctor, Karl Rove. It is known that his government has “informally” discussed Assange’s onward extradition to Washington, which has made its position clear. A secret Pentagon document describes US intelligence plans to destroy WikiLeaks’ “centre of gravity” with “threats of exposure [and] criminal prosecution”.

In much of the Swedish media, proper journalistic scepticism about the allegations against Assange is  overwhelmed by a defensive jingoism, as if the nation’s honour is defiled by revelations about dodgy coppers and politicians, a universal breed.  On Swedish Public TV “experts” debate not the country’s deepening militarist state, and its service ti Nato and Washington, but the state of Assange’s mind and his “paranoia”. A headline in Tuesday’s Aftonbladet declared: “Assange’s moral collapse”. The article by Dan Josefsson suggests Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged source, may not be sane and attacks Assange for not protecting Manning from himself. That the source was anonymous and no connection has been demonstrated between Assange and Manning and that Aftonbladet, WikiLeaks’ Swedish partner, had published the same leaks undeterred, was not mentioned – censorship by omission.

Ironically, this circus has performed under cover of some of the world’s most enlightened laws protecting journalists, which attracted Assange to Sweden in 2010 to establish a base for WikiLeaks. Should his extradition be allowed, and with Damocles swords of malice and a vengeful Washington hanging over his head, who will protect him and provide the justice to which we all have a right?

The following is a press release from Statistiska Centralbyran, or SCB, the Swedish central government authority for official statistics.

STOCKHOLM–The inflation rate was 1.9% in February 2012, unchanged from January.

The Swedish Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased by 0.7% from January to February 2012.

The CPI for February of 2012 was 313.92 (1980=100).

Increased prices for food (0.9%) and tobacco (5.5%), as well as higher prices for clothing and footwear (2.0%), contributed upwards by 0.1 percentage point each to the change from January to February. Further, rises in the price of fuel (2.1%), transportation services (2.2% ), electricity (1.7%) and package holidays (4.7%) contributed upwards by 0.1 percentage point each.

The inflation rate according to CPIF was 1.1% and according to CPIX 1.2% in February 2012. CPIF increased by 0.7% and CPIX increased by 0.7% from January to February 2012. HICP increased by 0.7% from January to February 2012 and increased by 1.0% since February of 2011.

The message was clear: “Don’t do what we’re doing” when it comes to welfare and economic policies.

That’s what (former) Senator Franco Debendetti and lawyer Alessandro De Nicola of Italy, and University of Athens professor Aristides Hatzis said in policy forums organized by the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE) in Seoul last August and October. Professor Hatzis took it one step further, in a speech that caught the attention of Korean president Lee Myung-bak: “If you see Greece doing something, then do the opposite thing.”

“But what about Sweden” was the response from those pushing for universal welfare policies in Korea. That has become the common refrain from politicians and academics around the world for several decades in the West and recently in Korea. “What about Sweden?”

With that in mind, CFE invited Johnny Munkhammar, a member of the Moderate Party in the Parliament of Sweden, to Seoul from March 5 to 7. Munkhammar surprised the audience and Korean media with his talk, “Sweden’s Welfare State: Fact and Fiction.”
Munkhammar said the lesson to learn is that free markets created success in Sweden and that the country’s turn to bigger government led to an array of problems that Sweden is trying to recover from now. He cites the 1870s as a turning point in Swedish history, when, rather than hiding behind trade protectionism and the “infant industry” argument favored by popular Korean author Chang Ha-joon, Sweden opened its economy to the world with free trade and economic freedom.

That continued for a century until the 1970s when the welfare state was greatly expanded and increased regulations and taxes were imposed on the economy. Sweden began to reverse that in the 1990s, implementing reforms that would have made Adam Smith proud: state-owned enterprises were sold; public monopolies in health and education were replaced with free competition; product and financial markets were deregulated; and the central bank was made independent.

Universal welfare advocates point to Sweden’s generous policies, but not Sweden’s history of free markets and its recent switch back. It is unlikely that South Koreans will be ready to accept such reforms during this election cycle. For example, Munkhammar shocked reporters in one-on-one interviews when he informed them that Sweden has no inheritance tax (it was abolished in 2005). In contrast, Korea’s emotional debate on “polarization” makes it unlikely that local politicians will push to repeal or lower estate taxes.

Sweden has few restrictions on trade imports. In contrast, since the late 1980s, Koreans have fiercely battled against efforts to open various markets and, even now, opposition lawmakers are trying to nullify the KORUS FTA. Sweden doesn’t have a wealth tax, but Korea’s majority party recently implemented the Buffett tax and the minor parties are threatening to impose more taxes if they win April 11’s parliamentary elections.

Cherry-picking in research and politics is the process of ignoring information that may undercut one’s argument. Welfare state advocates point to Sweden’s welfare state, but ignore Sweden’s historical model of having free markets and free trade.

If the proponents of a universal welfare state are serious about following Sweden’s model, then they might want to consider the following grand compromise based on Sweden’s history: Eliminate tariffs and barriers on imports, eliminate wealth and inheritance taxes, eliminate subsidies for business with more of a laissez-faire approach, set up a school voucher program, and sell off state enterprises. After that is done, set up a universal welfare state.

But that’s only if they are serious about following the Swedish economic and welfare model. It is more likely that they will keep perpetuating the myth about Sweden in order to keep pushing for universal welfare policies while blocking market liberalization.

Meat industry representatives from Sweden and Norway were scheduled to arrive in Namibia this week to discuss meat exports to those Scandinavian countries.

The Meat Board of Namibia’s Manager for Information Systems, Willem Schutz, told Nampa that the Swedes were expected to arrive yesterday and the Norwegians on Friday.

It will be Sweden’s first discussions with Namibia about meat exports to the Scandinavian country.

Namibia already exports to Norway, and has a Generalised System of Preference (GSP) quota of 1 350 tonnes (2 700 tonnes shared by Botswana and Namibia 50:50). This quota was made available by the Norwegian government to Namibia, and is filled on a first-come-first-served basis.

The quota is separate from the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) country-to-country quota of 250 tonnes (500 tonnes shared by Botswana and Namibia 50:50), which is auctioned off.

Schutz said Norway intends to increase its current quota from Namibia. The meeting will thus discuss bigger exports to that country. “The world has a marked need for environment-friendly, naturally-produced meat. Namibia has the production environment and systems to fulfil that need, but unfortunately does not have the necessary provision of cattle for slaughtering,” he noted.

Schutz said it is important for the future and the sustainability of the Namibian meat industry that the local abattoir capacity is supported in order to create diversification opportunities from current markets.

The visits will include, amongst others, meetings with the Meat Board, Meatco, Namibia Agricultural Union (NAU), various abattoirs, as well as the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Forestry. Schutz added that a visit from representatives in the meat industry from Iran is also earmarked in the near future, and will be confirmed in due course.

Meanwhile, the Bank of Namibia projected that the meat-processing sector will grow by three per cent this year. The figure contributes about N$279 million to the gross domestic product (GDP) this year, up from N$255 million in 2011.

Local independent economist Klaus Schade predicted earlier this year that since Namibia’s meat industry serves as a niche market, exports to Europe will continue, despite the Euro-zone debt crisis. According to the Meat Board, the total marketing of cattle up to the end of 2011 stood at 347 253 livestock units, recording a decrease of 1,52 per cent from 2010 when 352 613 animals were marketed.

Swedish inflation held below target in February as the central bank cut rates to prevent the largest Nordic economy from entering a recession.

The inflation rate was an annual 1.9 percent, unchanged from the previous month, Statistics Sweden said today. That beat the 1.8 percent median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of 14 economists. Prices (SWCPMOM) rose 0.7 percent in the month. Adjusted for mortgage costs, inflation was annual 1.1 percent last month as prices rose a monthly 0.7 percent.

“The economic downturn has been considerably deeper than we predicted after fourth-quarter GDP (SWGDPWYY) came in so incredibly weak,” said Anna Raman, a senior analyst at Nykredit Bank A/S in Copenhagen, said before the report. “The Riksbank will cut rates one more time this year at its next meeting in April” before raising it in the second quarter of 2013, she said.

Sweden’s central bank lowered its main rate last month for a second meeting to 1.5 percent and predicted it will keep it unchanged over the next year to keep inflation close to its 2 percent target as exports, which account for about half its output, are under pressure from Europe’s debt crisis.

Swedish wireless equipment company LM Ericsson AB says it has made a binding offer to buy the broadcast services division of French media firm Technicolor.

Ericsson says it will pay €19 million ($25 million) for the unit, as well as a potential additional payment of up to €9 million ($12 million) based on the division’s 2015 revenues.

When David Cameron went to Sweden recently, he did some thinking aloud. He made some remarks allowing Number 10 to hype up the suggestion that the Government was seriously considering Swedish style tax relief for working mothers to use domestic staff. David Cameron said: “What you do in Sweden in terms of tax help and tax relief, not so much on child care but on other things that help women go out to work, I thought that was a very interesting idea that I want to look at further.”

The Swedish government allows people to deduct from their tax bill half the cost of household services such as cleaning, cooking, lawn-mowing and babysitting. If George Osborne does introduce tax relief on domestic cleaning staff in the UK, there is no doubt it will help well off families but it will also further entrench gender inequality among lower earners. The revolution in gender roles is unfinished business. Women still shoulder the overwhelming burden of household tasks, particularly after they have had children. When they earn more, their bargaining power with their partners increases, so closing the gender pay gap would help.

New IPPR analysis, published this week, shows that just one in ten married men (10%) do an equal amount of housework as their wives but that a slightly higher proportion (13%) actually do more housework than their wives.

The latest statistics show the number of ‘house husbands’ in Britain has trebled in the last 15 years, although there are still just 62,000 men who are economically inactive and say they care for family or the home.

But this shows that couples find it easier to split into traditional ‘breadwinner’ and ‘homemaker’ roles than they do to share employment, childcare and housework.

IPPR’s analysis shows how patterns of housework have slowly changed over the last half century. We looked at women born in 1958 and compared them to women born in 1970, when both cohorts of women were in their early thirties. More than eight out of ten women (85 per cent) born in 1958 said they do more ‘laundry and ironing’ than their partner, while just over seven out of ten women (75 per cent) born in 1970 agreed. For the latest cohort of women in their thirties, progress has slipped slightly back, with 77 per cent saying their do more than their husbands.

We were surprised to find that more than eight out of ten married women (87%) still do seven or more hours a week of housework, the equivalent of an entire working day spent on housework. Just 3% of married women are able to do less than three hours of housework each week. It is likely that most of these couples have paid help although there are no official figures for the number of UK homes that employ domestic staff.

Swedish family policies are lauded for enabling women to go to work as well as have children. Sweden has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe. What you can do with your children once you have them, however, is not altogether a matter of choice.

You can put them in a free kindergarten, costing $20,000 per child a year, from the time they are one year old, but if you wanted to look after them yourself at home you would be pretty much on your own. Homecare allowances are small and few and far between.

And if you want to educate your child at home, you are in real trouble. Home-schooling is banned in the Scandinavian utopia and families who defy the ban are feeling the full force of the law. Several families have gone into exile in neighbouring countries (which allow home-schooling) as a result, and a handful living on the Finnish Aland Islands were joined in early February by the most high-profile home-schooling dissident yet — President of the Swedish Association for Home Education (ROHUS), Jonas Himmelstrand, his wife and three children.

For more than three years Mr Himmelstrand and his wife have had a conflict with the Uppsala municipality over educating their daughter (now 13) then their younger son (7) at home. After two years they were able to appeal to a court, but while the court decision was pending, the civic authorities continued what Mr Himmelstrand calls a “political persecution” of his family. In November they were reported to the local “social authorities” and, around Christmas, received notice of fines — US$25,000 for their daughter’s non-attendance at school in the 2010-2011 year, and $15,000 for not enrolling their son for the current school year.

The recent punitive action occurred after Mr Himmelstrand debated home education on national radio with the chair of the Education Committee of the Swedish Parliament. Coincidence? It also came at the end of a year in which he spoke internationally about Swedish family policies, presenting a critical view based on his research for the Swedish family association, Haro.

The social authority decided not to investigate the family but told Mr Himmelstrand that if he wanted to home educate safely he should leave Sweden. Staring financial ruin in the face and refusal on the part of the authorities to discuss the issues with them, the family quietly left Sweden in early February.

”It is an incredible relief, and only now are we starting to understand the degree of pressure we have lived under for many years”, says Jonas Himmelstrand. ”At the same time it is an almost surreal experience to be forced to leave Sweden for an issue which in most of the democratic world, and by the UN, is regarded as a human right.”

He is vowing to continue the work of ROHUS. ”In fact, we will be more effective when we do not feel our families are under threat.”

Home education is regarded by the UN as a valid form of education under the concept of ”the right of education”. Home education is permitted in most of the world’s democracies with the exception of Germany (under their school law of 1938) and now Sweden.

Anja Paerson, an Olympic gold medalist in 2006 and seven-time world champion skier, plans to retire after this week’s World Cup finals because of a string of injuries.

The 30-year-old Swede said in a statement on her country’s ski federation website Monday that she has been slowed by the injuries, especially to her left knee.

“My career has been fantastic and I’ve achieved more than I could ever dream of,” Paerson said. “The last years, with all the spectacular crashes and protracted injury problems, have reduced my chances to perform at the top level.”

Paerson won 19 medals at major championships – six at the Olympics and 13 at the worlds. She has won 42 World Cup races since her debut in 1998 and clinched overall titles in 2004 and 2005. She was the first skier to win world championship gold medals in all five disciplines.

After winning a bronze medal in the slalom at the 2002 Salt Lake Games, she returned four years later to capture gold in the same event in Turin. At three Olympics, she won four bronzes and a silver to go with her gold.

The races in Schladming, Austria, this week will be her last.

“I have always been a fighter and this is a tough decision,” she said. “But after some time of thoughts and many discussions with myself I feel I’m ready for new challenges in my life.”

Paerson won three gold medals at the 2007 world championships in Are, Sweden, and a bronze medal at the 2010 Winter Olympics. She opened the Vancouver Games with a horrendous crash in the downhill – sliding across the finish line headfirst – then came back 24 hours later to win bronze in super-combined.

“I just couldn’t let the hill in Whistler defeat me,” Paerson said. “In addition I’ll always remember the great duels between me and Janica Kostelic, and other fantastic skiers.”

Lindsey Vonn, who clinched the World Cup overall title last week, said Paerson remained one of the best skiers throughout her career.

“She’s won in every discipline, has world championship medals, Olympic medals and a couple of overall titles,” Vonn said. “But beyond what she’s done as an athlete, she’s been driving the women’s World Cup forward as a significant member of the athletes council. I’ll miss her on the tour, but know she’ll stay close to the sport.”

Paerson said she would serve on the athletes’ commission of the international ski federation for another year. The Swedish Ski Association said Paerson’s “achievements will always be in the hearts of the Swedish people.”

Foreign minister Carl Bildt believes Sweden should be a “world power” and once called Russian prime minister Vladmir Putin a “chetnik”, according to internal emails from a US security firm released by WikiLeaks on Monday.

The details are included in a September 2009 email exchange between employees of Strategic Forecasting, Inc., a US security consulting company commonly known as Stratfor and are attributed to a Swedish member of the European Parliament referred to only as “SW501”.

According to the report, SW501 is a “very well connected” Swedish MEP with “extremely close links” to Bildt.

“Bildt believes that Sweden should become a world power,” Stratfor’s Marko Papic wrote in the message entitled “INSIGHT – SWEDEN: Carl Bildt”.

In addition, the report claims that Bildt has a “very rocky” relationship with Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt dating back to the days when Bildt was prime minister and Reinfeldt was head of the Moderate Party’s youth organization.

According to the Stratfor report, Bildt is also “very critical” of Russia, having at one point called Putin a “chetnik”, a term used to refer to ultra-nationalist Serbs.

Bildt was reportedly also “at odds” with French president Nicolas Sarkozy over a dispute over French maneuvering related to Sweden’s presidency of the EU in 2009.

The unnamed Swedish MEP explained as well that Sweden views EU enlargement as a way to “break the German-Frenc [sic] stranglehold on the EU”, according to the Stratfor report.

Bildt’s work on the Balkans prompted him to conclude that “he does not like Croats and Albanians,” according to the report.

Bildt spokesperson Anna Charlotta Johansson told The Local referred to the details in the emails as “hearsay”.

“I think we’ll do what we normally do in these circumstances which is refrain from commenting. This is information from a third part,” she told The Local on Monday.

In addition to an array of alleged foreign policy insights, the email also included several personal details about Bildt, including how tall he is, his alleged brain power and the fact that his wife Anna Maria Corazza Bildt is “apparently Italian and does not speak really good Swedish

Later on Monday, Bildt used his official Twitter account to brush off the significance of the email.

“Wikileaks released obscure email saying I’m “super tall, has photographic memory and is very smart”. Isn’t this slightly ridiculous?” he wrote on his Twitter account.

The email exchange is one of an estimated five million Stratfor emails released by WikiLeaks on Monday in what the whisteblower website is calling “The Global Intelligence Files”.

The emails are dated between July 2004 and December 2011 and, according to WikiLeaks, “reveal the inner workings” of the Texas-headquartered global intelligence firm, which provides analytic reports to a number of major corporations and US government agencies.

The release comes just days after Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that WikiLeaks was planning a “smear campaign” against Sweden in an attempt to prevent the country from eventually extraditing founder Julian Assange to the United States.

Assange is currently in the UK in the last throes of an extended legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sex crimes allegations.

World number one Novak Djokovic continued his domination over Kevin Anderson, rolling over the South African 6-2, 6-3 in the third round of the ATP-WTA Indian Wells tournament on Monday.

Top seed Djokovic has now beaten Anderson four straight times, including three matches in 2011. After winning the Australian Open, defending champion Djokovic is now 12-1 for the season in his third tournament.

He will be hard-pressed to match his performance of last year when he had one of the best seasons in the history of the sport, but he is showing no signs of slowing down either.

“I think I served well and put a lot of pressure on him and returned really, really good,” Djokovic said. “So I’m really happy with this win today. It wasn’t easy.”

The 24-year-old Serb advances to the fourth round, where he will play Spaniard Pablo Andujar, who beat countryman Albert Ramos 7-6 (7/5), 6-4.

Djokovic had five aces, was a perfect three-for-three on break points saved and won 67 per cent of his first-serve points in the 97-minute match.

He broke Anderson twice in the first set and once in the second to go up 4-2, closing out the contest on his first match point when Anderson smacked a forehand wide.

“It was close,” Djokovic said. “The score doesn’t indicate how close it was. I played him a couple of times before and in most of our matches the first set goes for a half hour or more.”

Australian qualifier Matthew Ebden surprised Mardy Fish, beating the eighth-seeded American 6-3, 6-4 to advance to the fourth round.

The 24-year-old Ebden said the win over the US number one was the biggest win of his career.

“Especially in America, to beat the top player here is, it’s an incredible feeling,” Ebden said. “Very big win. I’m pleased with my progress.”

Ebden took his chance at 4-4 in the second set when the umpire called a hindrance penalty against Fish, who had called out a “Come on” before the ball was dead.

Fish lost his cool with the umpire and Ebden ended up breaking serve to go ahead 5-4. He served out for the match, winning all four points in the final game.

“It was right under the umpire’s nose, so it was pretty clear what happened. I think umpire made the right call. Unfortunately he did say ‘Come on’ before I hit the ball,” Ebden, who missed the shot, said.

“I did get there in reasonable time to hit the ball. I still had a decent play on it.”

The Durban, South African-born Ebden, who now lives in Perth, Australia, is ranked 91st in the world and came into the tournament with a modest 4-5 record.

Ebden will next face another American, John Isner, who beat Juan Monaco of Argentina 7-5, 7-5.

It was a mixed day for the Aussies on Monday.

Playing for the first time since their epic three-hour, 16-minute match at the US Open last year, Nadia Petrova outlasted Australia’s Samantha Stosur in another three-set marathon.

This time, Petrova won on the third match point but she needed two hours, 46 minutes to defeat sixth-seeded Stosur 6-1, 6-7 (6/8), 7-6 (7/5).

“After that loss in New York it has been hard,” Petrova said. “I was very pumped coming out today. I wanted to turn everything around. I wanted to win and walk off the court with a W.”

Stosur, who beat Petrova at the US Open before going on to win her first grand slam title, has lost five of seven career matches to the world number 33 Petrova dating back to their first meeting at the 2004 US Open.

Stosur struggled on her serve, making six double faults and winning just 43 per cent of her second-serve points.

Just six months ago Stosur became the first Australian woman to win a grand slam since 1980 when she captured the final major of the year in New York.

In other third round matches Monday, second seed Maria Sharapova defeated Romania’s Simona Halep 6-3, 6-4 and defending champ Caroline Wozniacki outlasted unseeded Sofia Arvidsson of Sweden 3-6, 7-5, 6-2 in the night match.

Sharapova, who is chasing the world number one ranking, advances to the fourth round, where she will play Roberta Vinci of Italy.

Wozniacki needed two hours and 37 minutes to oust Arvidsson who was fresh off winning her second WTA Tour career title last month in Memphis.

France’s Marion Bartoli beat Chanelle Scheepers of South Africa 6-2, 6-0 and Lucie Safarova advanced when Italy’s Francesca Schiavone retired from their match after the first set with a virus. Schiavone was behind 6-2 when she pulled out.

From Swedish swear words to China’s dating culture, Transparent Language’s Language & Culture Blogs teach language learners everything they need to know. And we mean everything.

In a recent post on Transparent Language’s Swedish Language and Culture Blog, one of the contributors tackled the subject of profanity in the post “Swedish Swear Words”. In addition to sharing common Swedish expletives, the author discussed the important cultural differences associated with using profanity in America versus that in Sweden. For example, while the “F-word” is one of the most notorious swear words in the United States, in Sweden, the term is literally child’s play (FYI: the four worst swear words in Sweden all have ties to religion). A reader working to learn Swedish corroborated the post with this observation:

“Yup, we had quite the lively discussion about this last summer when I was in Sweden! We (a group of both Americans and Swedes) were talking about how disconcerting it was for us as Americans to hear a song using the word F*** while walking around in a local grocery store, and how shocking it was to hear 10 year olds using the same word…”

For those pursuing language proficiency, there is an extensive market of solutions, from downloadable software and online language courses to live language instruction and personal tutoring., As a general trend, these solutions often focus entirely on teaching grammar and vocabulary, with very little coverage of the more colloquial or cultural elements of a specific language. However, the fact is that these topics can be more sensitive for companies in the business of teaching language, and finding a way to handle them can be a difficult proposition.

As a leading provider of language-learning solutions for the government, military, education, library, and consumer markets, Transparent Language believes in teaching real world language. “Consider the case of profanity; it has historically been a topic to which teachers do not expose students. We believe that the purpose of learning a language is to actually use that language, and in order to be able to use language in a real, natural way, there are certain areas that are beneficial to know, regardless of their sensitivity,” said Michael Quinlan, CEO of Transparent Language, Inc. “Our Language and Culture Blogs give us an outlet in which we can cover these topics.”

In addition to Language and Culture Blogs, Transparent Language has also worked to build and foster an online social community of over 2 million friends, fans, and followers across both Facebook and Twitter. By supporting Facebook pages for over 35 languages, Transparent Language makes it possible for learners and language experts to come together and share language outside of the confines of a typical classroom.

About Transparent Language, Inc.

At Transparent Language, we develop language-learning resources and systems that deliver more rapid, reliable, and engaging language learning to those who need language skills for work or school, as well as those who simply find joy in learning and using other languages. Every day, we use our expertise in the research and practice of language learning to build programs that are licensed for use by all personnel of Foreign Service Institute, Defense Language Institute, US Special Operations Command, US Marine Corps, US Navy, and many other government organizations, as well as by thousands of schools, hundreds of public libraries, and millions of individual users.

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]]> http://swedendating.net/free-dating-site/feed/ 0 http://swedendating.net/free-sweden-dating-site/ http://swedendating.net/free-sweden-dating-site/#comments Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:53:51 +0000 admin http://swedendating.net/?p=19

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]]> http://swedendating.net/sweden-dating-online/feed/ 0 http://swedendating.net/sweden-women/ http://swedendating.net/sweden-women/#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:57:03 +0000 admin http://swedendating.net/?p=11

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]]> http://swedendating.net/sweden-women/feed/ 0 http://swedendating.net/sweden-dating/ http://swedendating.net/sweden-dating/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:07:49 +0000 admin http://swedendating.net/?p=8

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