• Here’s your connection between the two episodes: As Jyllands-Posten reports, the Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who barely escaped injury in the capital, was scheduled today to be on Utøya to address the young people there at what was after all a summer camp run by the Labor Party, of which Stoltenberg is the head. (That article also has at the top a brief video giving a helicopter-view of the island itself – and of some swimmers desperately trying to get away from it.)
  
• Another Danish mainstream paper, Berlingske, wields the obvious parallel: A Norwegian Timothy McVeigh. It quotes a few experts who maintain that the likelihood for violent incidents of this kind should have been apparent from extreme-right literature, imagining future race-wars and the like, that has been circulating in Scandinavia for a while. And it examines the alleged shooter’s social media trail and unearths his self-description as a conservative Christian fed up with the Norwegian Church’s hyper-modernism, wanting it to get “back to basics.” Right, back to Jesus and his disciples, presumably – a notorious gang of killers . . .
  
• As for a Christian Danish paper, namely the Kristeligt Dagblad . . . well, they get it wrong. Very wrong. Their on-line article Here is why Norway became a target for terror, datelined today (Saturday, 23 June 2011), goes on and on about why Norway is logically a target for Muslim extremists, even as the caption to the picture up top mentions the arrest of “a 32-year-old strongly nationalistic man.” It’s hardly the only media outlet to fall into this trap – frankly, I was hearing a lot about “Muslim terror” on the BBC World Service during its initial coverage – but that’s no excuse. Don’t be surprised if the article is gone, or at least heavily modified, should you decide to click through to see it.
  

                          

The next project will be creating a link ultimately to connect Copenhagen with Hamburg, one that crosses that strait you see there at bottom labeled “Fehmarn Bælt” between the Danish Rødby Havn (North) and the German Puttgarden (South). Right now a couple of commercial ferries serve cars, trains, bicycles and pedestrians for crossing that distance of about 18.6km in about 45 minutes. But that is increasingly not good enough for the requirements of 2010, at least in the eyes of the Danish Transport Ministry which has taken over the project’s leadership – supervised, of course, by the Danish legislature, or Folketing.

Things have reached the stage where construction calculations have been made public and are now subject to Folketing discussion, as we read in a Ritzau news-agency piece (appearing, among other places, in Berlingske Tidende: S and DF [two Danish political parties]: A bridge would be coolest. (That’s the translation I’ve taken of the very flexible Danish adjective flot.) You see, just because they built bridges before, that doesn’t mean they’ll build a bridge again. They could also just make a tunnel. And indeed, as we learn from a parallel Ritzau article (let’s take the one published in Jyllands-Posten), a tunnel would be slightly cheaper to dig/install, namely DKK 37.9 billion (= €5.08 billion) as opposed to a bridge’s DKK 38.5 billion (= €5.16 billion). The point of the JP article is that authorities at first thought the bridge would be rather cheaper than the tunnel, until they factored in the extra reinforcement that would have to be added to its pillars to enable it to stay standing after the inevitable ship-collision happens. But the point of the Berlingske article is that key Folketing members don’t care, they view that monetary difference as minor in the face of how nice and pretty the finished 18.6km-long bridge will surely look. “I don’t have any pictures of tunnels at home in our [family] photo-album,” the Social Democratic Party (“S”) traffic policy spokesman Magnus Heunicke remarked, for example.

Uh . . . and The Germans?

The Germans! Did anyone remember to ask what they want? (I must confess here that I could not find any indication whether those 37.9/38.5 figures are total costs for the bridge/tunnel or only Denmark’s, nor what relative or absolute amount the German government has committed to pay for the project.) It turns out that at least the Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad (they would!) did inquire as to the opinion of the Naturschutzbund Deutschland (NABU), the leading German ecology organization (sort of like the Sierra Club in the US): German nature-folks prefer Fehmarn tunnel.

Actually, they would rather have neither, but if they had to choose, they want the tunnel because of three serious disadvantages to the bridge:

1. As mentioned previously, ship-collisions: you just know that one will happen sooner or later, and in fact the Baltic will surely become a more busy waterway with increased Russian commercial traffic – and some of that traffic (NB!) includes oil-tankers!
   
2. Any huge new bridge (it is planned to be on average 724m above the water!) will severely inconvenience seabirds trying to migrate in that part of the Baltic.
   
3. Actually, a bridge would also disturb the water-currents there in ways that would displease the German naturalists! They’re even sore about how that previously-mentioned Great Belt Bridge of 1998 already does that. (No word of complaint about the Øresund Bridge, maybe that’s far enough away from Germany that they just don’t care.)

Again, they really don’t want a tunnel, either, since it probably be a “sunk tunnel” rather than “bored tunnel,” i.e. a big ditch would be dug in the ocean floor, and then the pre-fabricated tunnel would be laid inside and then covered up with earth. Very traumatic for the aquatic life living in the area, to be sure – and you thought you were inconvenienced when the city tears up the street where you live to lay new sewer lines!

But the Danish are rich enough to prefer pretty to cheap, and also to get their way. Expect to see a stylish – and very long – bridge after about a decade or so.

                          

Nonetheless, The Hurt Locker clearly came out on top last Sunday night, in a classic David-vs.-Goliath encounter. But why? Uffe Christensen of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten has devoted a bit of thought to this question (together with considerably more energy in tracking down scattered opinions from the Web), and presents his findings in Days afterward: Hollywood is astonished.

According to Christensen, here is why The Hurt Locker prevailed:

1. It’s not any sort political film, just a band-of-buddies movie.
   
2. It’s a film with a powerful message about the Iraq War. (I know, this conflicts directly with #1 above but, like I said, Christensen is throwing together here all the opinions he has been able to find or think up himself).
   
3. It didn’t matter that the film has not earned that much at the box office (yet); in fact, Oscar juries tend to be perverse to the point of even giving such “obscure” firms a slight voting edge.
   
4. The Bigelow angle: here was a chance to be very PC and award the first female film director of note with a bunch of awards in a very public forum!
   

1. The very nature of the Oscar jury might have doomed Avatar’s chances. They are described here, in an direct quote from Time Magazine, as “older, politically liberal and artistically conservative” – especially artistically conservative, as Christensen reminds us with the tale of how the iconic Citizen Kane, after all, was beaten across the board at the 1942 Awards by How Green Was My Valley.
   
2. Avatar is, after all, a sci-fi film, and those never win. Plus, it’s much too grandiose anyway, and the jury doesn’t like that.
   
3. Cameron is a blowhard – the jury was ready to do anything, to violate any standard of artistic judgment, just to spare itself having to witness what inevitably would have been an arrogant, ego-driven acceptance speech from him up there on that Kodak Theatre [sic] stage.
   

                          

Still, Winslow makes sure to qualify his reporting, pointing out for example that “[t]he study . . . has just been submitted to a medical journal and thus hasn’t yet cleared rigorous peer review that precedes publication.” And it’s good that he does so, since today Line Ziegler Laursen of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten takes up the same subject.

Her headline does read “DNA decides whether diet-cures work,” yet she also goes on to discuss how Danish researchers have investigated the same question and remain a bit more skeptical. Arne Astrup, known as “one of Denmark’s slimming-experts,” is quoted here that, although results of the Danish research do come out along the same lines, the statistical relation they discovered “is relatively weak, and therefore it is unreliable for researchers to guarantee patients a large weight-loss if they know their DNA.” Rather, the Danish scientists are of the opinion that successful weight-loss is still a matter of at least three or four different factors, not just the patient’s DNA. They have put in a request to Stanford to review the data from the tests conducted there, in order to look into the question further.

                          

This choice of topic is not accidental, although its further elaboration in the Danish press is serendipitous. And to a great extent I am offering my find here in gratitude for some great introductory curling material already enjoyed. I’m referring specifically to Letterman, Wednesday night, February 17, and his material could also be of help in providing some background for those of you who may have no idea what this Olympic sport of “curling” is all about.

In curling, they get a 40 lb. granite stone and send it down the ice and then they sweep the debris from in front of it. It’s all the fun of shuffleboard, plus household chores.

This is Letterman, remember, so there is also a Top Ten List, “Top Ten Surprising Facts About Curling.” Some selections:

10. Every year it’s watched by dozens of people.
9. Consistently ranked the world’s no. 1 broom-related sport.
8. It’s a lot like hockey, minus the speed and excitement.
. . .
5. Longest match ever: unknown, because no one ever stays till the end.

Perhaps we have a clue there, in #5, why the Danish women’s curling team felt the need to call in a sports psychologist, namely to help them work on their drive and determination to see matches through all the way to the end. But no, the article itself quickly gives a couple much more powerful reasons:

1. These ladies have been carrying a very heavy weight of expectations on their womenly shoulders. As the article puts it, “The Danish curling-women were named ahead of the Olympic Games as Denmark’s one great medal-hope.”
2. They have failed miserably! So far the ladies have played six curling-matches (which apparently pit a team against just one other opponent), and won only one of them.

So yes, one can understand how they could use someone’s shoulder to cry on, to get over the disappointment and even humiliation so they can approach their remaining games with a good, stiff upper-lip even as they know that their chances for any sort of winner’s medal are now purely theoretical.

But there’s more! The article gives the ladies’ trainer, Kjell-Arne Olsson (a man’s name, I believe), as he reveals to the Ritzau news agency his view of what went wrong. Basically, the Danish lady-curlers always did alright in the first half of a match, but started “missing some decisive stones” in the second half, so that the opponent could usually come back to win. And you also have here a somewhat tougher assessment from the marvelously-named Freddy Frederiksen, the “elite coordinator” of the two Danish curling-teams (men’s and women’s, natch) there in Vancouver: “We played some very tight games. . . . It’s the tight competition that means we can’t go any further. They [the ladies] played toe-to-toe with their opponents, but unfortunately were just not good enough.” C’mon gentlemen, all that should provide you with more-than-enough of what you need. “Danish curling rocks!” anyone? Dave? Craig? Coco?

On the other hand, from the photo at the top of the article – go ahead, go there now, guys – it does seem that this sport attracts more than its quota of genuine Danish babes. They don’t look like any losers to me; they can come cry on my shoulder anytime! (Maybe I need to look into joining my local curling club.) But that’s if the picture is genuine, of course; you never know, Jyllands-Posten might just have bought it instead from the “women’s curling section” of an on-line photo store like iStockphoto.

* I know, I shut off the comments on this site. But stay tuned! I’m just about to start parallel-posting entries to this blog on the EuroSavant Facebook fan page, so you’ll then be able to post your comments, and your curling-jokes, on that fan page’s wall!

                          

(Absalon – pictured here, photocredit to Uncle Buddha on Flickr – was the “fighting archbishop” of the Danish Middle Ages, who did much to build up Copenhagen towards the city it was to become by building a fort there. His statue is there in the city’s center, mounted on a magnificent rearing horse, in Højbroplads – that’s the square right by the Folketing, Denmark’s one-chamber parliament. The main sort of enemy he fought in his day, it turns out, was in fact Baltic Sea pirates.)

It’s no surprise that the Absalon has already seen some action, and the Danish press is following along to report.

First there was an engagement last weekend with an Indian ship, a “cargo-dhow,” covered in the Jyllands-Posten by an article from Ritzau. There was a problem with that ship: it had already been taken over by a band of pirates for use as a “mother ship” supporting smaller pirate-skiffs, with its regular 12-man crew confined away somewhere on board. That meant that the Danes really didn’t want to actually attack it, and so risk the crew’s lives; the Absalon instead just shadowed the ship for three days, warning other ships away and so preventing it from committing any actual piracy. The dhow finally headed back to the Somali coast – slipping away from the Danes’ observation for a while, it must be said – before it was rediscovered on that coast with the pirates gone and the original crew unharmed and only needing some fuel and food supplies to continue their journey.

You could call that one a stand-off, then. Admiral Rune and his men did somewhat better on Thursday. Among others, Marianne Fajstrup of Berlingske Tidende reports that the Absalon then got a distress-call from a Slovenian-owned, Antigua and Barbuda-registered ship called the Ariella, 35 nautical miles away, that pirates were attacking. The Danish warship promptly set sail in that direction, and also sent out a helicopter, which saw absolutely no one on the ship’s bridge but did find a pirate-skiff moored alongside, with pirates on it, which were driven away by gunfire. When the Absalon itself arrived, Danish sailors boarded the Ariella and ultimately found the ship’s crew barricaded away in a “safe room,” wondering whether it was safe to come out again and take back control of the ship.

There is parallel coverage of this incident from Rikke Faurfelt of Politiken, who adds an interesting wrinkle. Yes, pirates were driven away from the Ariella in their skiff, but there’s no guarantee that that was all of them. Some might still be aboard – and, at 183 meters long and 32,000 tons, the Ariella has plenty of space that needs to be searched before the “All clear” can be given. Interestingly, there is also coverage of this very same incident in the press of the landlocked Czech Republic, from Mladá fronta dnes (Somali pirates strike again, commandos from warship liberate crew), which adds the detail that there was a second pirate-skiff involved in the attack on the Ariella which managed to leave before the Danes could get there but was apprehended by a Russian warhead operating in the area on the same anti-pirate mission, the Neustrashimy (the “Fearless”; note that Admiral Rune cannot tell this Russian warship what to do, since it is not NATO).

                          

Ah – but were they his works? Did he really write them? Doubt about his whole literary output is now cropping up in the Scandinavian press, such as in an article by Uffe Christensen on kpn.dk (“Allegation: Larsson could not write”), the on-line culture pages of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper. “Could not write”: Note well that this does not reflect some mere aesthetic judgment (as in “Really, old chap, in the final analysis James Joyce just could not write!”). Rather, these are assertions that Larsson simply did not have the minimal command of the Swedish language to have written “his” fiction himself.

The main claim comes from Anders Hellberg, now a journalist at the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, but formerly a close colleague of Larsson’s at the Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå. (Larsson worked mainly as a graphic designer there, but also was editor – and, supposedly, a writer – for various other science fiction and Trotskyite journals.) Says Hellberg: “The Millenium-author Stieg Larsson was a master of research, but a poor reporter. One can suspect that his significant-other [DK: samlever] Eva Gabrielsson had an active role in his authorship.” Plus, he had poor handwriting, could not spell, and had a shaky grasp of grammar.

Hellberg is willing to state flatly that Larsson could not have written his works himself. And this judgment is seconded by one Kurdo Baksi, who is currently writing a biography of Larsson and who also tells the Dagens Nyheter, “It has always been a riddle to me how he could have written these books.” But what about Ms. Gabrielsson herself? She stands by her (deceased) man:

What is in the Millenium Trilogy Stieg wrote. I read the proofs and had discussions with Stieg. But I did not intervene to write anything myself. That would have been like taking the brush from a great painter.”

Maybe even if it turns out that she did have a rather greater role in helping him write than she is willing to admit, it won’t turn out to be that big a deal. Larsson no longer walks among us, anyway. But if somehow it does, remember: unless you regularly read Danish or Swedish, you probably heard about it here first!

                          

Of course, no curiosity is needed as to what happened next: the Pakistani Foreign Ministry condemned the newspaper’s action, and demonstrators materialized in the Pakistani city Lahore, burning Norwegian flags. But this time, according to Ehlers, they numbered only a “two-figured number of persons,” i.e. in the tens. The editor-in-chief of the Norwegian paper, Hilde Haugsgjerd, was not particularly upset at seeing her country’s colors go up in smoke (then again, I think few Norwegians would be, just because they are laid-back): “They should have their freedom-of-expression in the same way that we have our freedom-of-expression. That doesn’t change anything in our judgment.”

Nor should it. Frankly, the cartoons should really published anew on a regular schedule, not just in reaction to some new event. Yes, they are supposedly insulting to some aspect of Islam, but by this point they could be a key symbol of Western-style freedom-of-expression, one of our fundamental freedoms, which holds that anything and everything should be allowed to be ridiculed, and if anyone doesn’t like that, then that’s just too bad. Remember that the reason the Jyllands-Posten editor decided to commission and print them in the first place back in late 2005 was his fear that implicit threats of violence were leading to de facto self-censorship of any writings or drawings concerning Islam, in effect a creeping, furtive denial of that freedom-of-expression. It’s to fight that sort of craven self-denial, by means of clear, repeated examples of refusing to be intimidated, that I feel these cartoons should be republished on a regular basis.

(And is there no aesthetic consciousness out there in the Muslim world – somewhere? anywhere? – that would interpret a rendering of Mohammed’s head fused with traditional Islamic half-moon-and-star iconography as a clever piece of art, as even a tribute and compliment to the Prophet and those who follow his teachings?)

                          

Naturally, this is the subject of extensive coverage today in the Danish press. This includes the Danish news agency Ritzau so that, as is usual with a major Danish story, identical articles attributed to that agency make up the core coverage of most on-line papers, supplemented here and there by original in-house reporting.

What better instance of the latter to refer to first than that from Jyllands-Posten, the paper that published the Mohammed cartoons in the first place? “It was tight. It was really tight,” was the 74-year-old Westergaard’s comment to JP reporters in the aftermath of the attack, in which the 28-year-old Somali broke into his house and went after him with the axe and knife. Westergaard survived only by being able to escape into the inner bathroom which he had previously made into a locked-down “safe room”; his five-year-old grandson was also present and also survived unhurt. While escaping, Westergaard was also able to set off an alarm, which brought the police within three minutes. They spotted the accused as he was leaving the house, whereupon he also attacked them with his axe and knive and had to be shot, once in the right-leg and the left-hand. (“A most un-Danish situation!” remarked Chief Police Inspector Bent Preben Nielsen at a news conference afterwards.)

The Jyllands-Posten reporters further write that two more suspects are thought to be involved in the attack, although there was just the one attacker, and he left no bomb or anything of that sort behind at Westergaard’s residence. The Danish Police Investigation Service (PET) was quickly able to link him to al-Shabaab, a Somali-based terror organization with ties to al-Qaeda. Another Ritzau report has him taken into court in Aarhus on a stretcher, just a few hours ago (i.e. midday on Saturday, 2 January), with both areas in which he was shot in a cast. Nonetheless, he pled “Not Guilty” in his preliminary hearing.

Introducing Al-Shabaab

Now, “al-Shabaab”? We get further insight into this new terror organization from another Ritzau piece, appearing in the Danish Christian newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, among others, citing a terror-expert at Aarhus University, one Prof. Mehdi Mozaffari. That organization is based mostly in Somaliland, the northern part of Somalia that completely lacks any sort of governmental authority, where it has been active for five or six years and probably has received some of its funds from the notorious pirates that operate there to prey on the international sea lanes off the coast. Then there’s a further source in Mohammed Gelle, chief of an organization in Denmark called the Somali Network, who adds that al-Shabaab was formerly just a political organization within Somalia, marked by a blend of nationalism and religious fervor, until it was forced out of a government coalition and took to terror activities. He adds that it only became serious about working together with al-Qaeda a few weeks ago, when the Americans (via the pilotless drones?) killed a highly-placed al-Shabaab leader in Pakistan.

There have already been reactions to the attack among various Danish political figures; strangely, perhaps (at least to any American observers), none has seen fit to use the incident to launch any attack on the current Danish government of Lars Løkke Rasmussen for security-carelessness. Anyway, there’s also a Ritzau article about what political reaction there was – of course – but I’d prefer to consult instead a Jyllands-Posten piece produced in-house on the same subject. Yes, they’re all appalled (rystet), and Aarhus’ mayor Nicolai Wammen is particularly good with his statement of defiance. (An extract: “We in Aarhus will never allow sinister terrorists to set the frame of public debate and the workings of democracy.”) But it’s the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DF) that of course is in the best position to reap political gain. As the statement from DF leader Pia Kjaersgaard reads:

The attack on Kurt Westergaard is very unpleasant and serves as a rude reminder that an earlier time’s naive immigration policy has made it possible that we now have a group of people in the country who are willing to use violence to overturn Danish democracy in its present form. We therefore must make it much easier to expel terrorists and their sympathizers [from the country].

Kjaersgaard went on to demand that the government compile a report on how many “terrorist-related Islamists” are in prison in the country, with a view towards in fact starting proceedings to expel them. Note that the DF is not part of the current governing coalition, but it still a powerful party on the Danish scene, with much influence.

Oh, and if you were wondering, Somalis living in Denmark are shocked over the incident, according to their “Somali Network” spokesman, Mohamed Gelle – in another Ritzau article appearing (among other places) in the leading paper Berlingske Tidende.