This rather startling news comes from David Tarp of the mainstream Danish daily Berlingske Tidende. No worries, though, if you’re rubbing your head and wondering “What the . . .” for he admits to having taken the news from this article in the Huffington Post that will explain everything. What the legislature thought it was doing was outlawing bestiality, but depending on how you want to interpret the word “animal” it might very well be that they outlawed all sexual intercourse, even between human animals.

That Huffington Post piece now carries an update making the case that judges will surely interpret “animal” in such a way that excludes humans. But for David Tarp’s Danish audience that’s almost irrelevant. The real point, of course, is to poke fun at what is seen as priggish American moral attitudes. He underlines his point with his choice as the piece’s illustration of a photo of the Florida governor on a beach checking out a couple young women – an image rated PG, I suppose, in that the rear of their bikini bottoms, shall we say, are in the Brazilian style. (Too bad that’s Charlie Crist, whom Tarp doesn’t bother to identify as the state’s ex-governor.) He also mentions at the end that, after all, laws banning oral or anal sex were in effect “in many American states” {i.e. not necessarily in Florida) until a Supreme Court decision of 2003 finally abolished them

                          

They summarize for Danish readers the fundamental numerical results: House lost for the Democrats, Senate retained (as Majority Leader Harry Reid “saves his political career”), and a Republican wave also taking over most state governors and legislatures. What this means for the future: “Over the slightly longer-term political chaos [awaits] in Washington, unless the parties can find a way to work together.” The authors also make mention of the “especially offensive” defiance directed at the president by “one of the election campaign’s absolute key figures,” Sarah Palin: (Translated back from the Danish) “We’re sending representatives to Washington to stop your fundamental transformation of America. Enough is enough.”

Over at the opinion newspaper Information, their long-time American affairs commentator Martin Burcharth takes a more philosophical tone (Varied outlook for cross-political cooperation). All things will pass, he assures the reader; sudden shifts in American political fortunes are really “quite common,” citing history back to Jimmy Carter (hero in 1976; goat in 1980) to prove his point. This latest heavy midterms defeat for the Democrats and President Obama need not be regarded as any real sort of tragedy.

Rather, anything is still possible for the 2012 elections, and Burcharth offers the president two possible strategies for success. He can tack to the political center (as former Clinton political advisor Paul Begala recommends) and push a new program of extensive public works, pushed as a “jobs plan,” which Republicans would not dare to oppose. Or he can stay on the left (the advice of Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) and launch a crusade against the Big Industry and Big Finance that got America into the economic mess it is in. That will also mean cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, but not for the rich: the latter should be required to pay for their misdeeds!

Whichever he chooses, Burcharth recognizes that prospects for real cooperation between the president and the Republicans in Congress will probably last only until around the end of next year, when politicking for the 2012 elections begins in earnest. In fact, he offers the rather cynical recommendation that Democrats make full use of the “lame duck” period still open to them – i.e. when they still have majorities in both Houses, before the newly-elected representatives and Senators come to take their seats – to enact major legislation such as immigration reform and even new climate/energy legislation (always a leading Danish concern). No cooperation with political opponents even required!

It’s ingenious, in a way – except that Burcharth forgets that, even today, the Democrats’ Senate majority is only 59, which causes certain complications of its own in passing legislation, and in any event exploiting the “lame duck” session that way somewhat contravenes American ideas of political legitimacy.

UPDATE: What do you know, the Rude Pundit also sees great merit in that “use the lame duck session to pass some serious legislation” argument of Martin Burcharth’s, and develops it further. But beware: he’s rude! (Sample language: “No, you need to blow us, Boehner and McConnell.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

                          

In Pakistan on the other hand, and particularly in that part of Pakistan affected by the floods which happens to border Afghanistan, you have the set of varying Muslim extremist elements loosely characterized by the label “Taliban” (and in some cases even “Al-Qaeda”). As an article in the German commentary newspaper Die Zeit now reveals, those Taliban are indeed moving to profit from the situation, offering $20 million worth of flood-relief assistance on the condition that the Pakistani government refuse all other aid coming from foreign countries, particularly America.

According to the article, US aid on offer already totals $35 million and that has also now been raised by another $20 million, with the prospect held out for even more if necessary. (And it will no doubt be necessary: Oxfam has termed these heavy floods a “mega-catastrophe,” while a UN spokesman called their collective impact worse even than the Asian tsunami of 2005 or this year’s Haiti earthquake.) Then again, there are good reasons for any impartial observer to favor the Taliban’s offer nonetheless: as the Zeit article details, the inundations make sheer access to the area very difficult, while many of the helicopters that are supposed to be available don’t work anyway. (The article does not explain why.)

For now, it’s a “donkey or on foot” situation for getting help to where it’s needed, and of course the Taliban are already there in the area and offering to assist with distribution as well – provided that authorities promise not to arrest their personnel! And then this other article on the subject from the Danish daily Politiken gives another good reason: you can be sure that much of any outside aid will ultimately go to the bank accounts of corrupt local officials rather than to the victims for whom it was intended, while that is less likely to be the case with the local Taliban.

                          

“Sorry – did we say that? We weren’t really serious” was roughly the reaction from that same Hungarian government once they realized the wide-ranging storm their comments had unleashed. Clearly, the amateurs were now in charge within that government’s highest reaches, and you can get a quite informative treatment of the incident – with pictures of the major protagonists – from the realdeal.hu weblog. There writer Erik d’Amato makes a convincing case that all this was simply an attempt by the new government to position itself politically to impose some austerity measures in its upcoming budget, albeit one that went spectacularly awry.

But such incompetence cannot go unremarked upon for long, and as the Danish daily Politiken reports (Hungarians go off on top politicians’ mysterious pronouncements) feedback has now started to arrive. For one, the economics editor of one of the major national dailies, Zoltán Baka of Népszabadság, called last week’s pronouncements “completely idiotic.” The IMF chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also told the Associated Press that, in his view, there is “no basis to be worried” about Hungary’s fiscal situation. Other European finance ministers, however, couldn’t be bothered to offer an opinion: they are busy these days trying to find a solution to the ever-weakening euro, whose recent downward course last week’s Hungarian mini-fiasco only served to accelerate.

                          

In the Statsministeriet’s view, one of the main problems leading to the conference’s failure was the lack of mutual confidence between the Danish COP15 delegation – the conference’s hosts – and the secretariat of the UNFCCC, or United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which was the official UN body in charge of the deliberations. As commented John Nordbo, leader of the climate program at the World Nature Funds, “A relationship of confidence would have changed a lot. Then one could have been a bridge-builder towards an agreement. Instead, negotiations were stymied by argument and got stuck, and we ended up with an alarmingly meager result.” But such a strained relationship was probably inevitable, given the skant regard for the UN body’s ability to get anything done held by the Statsministeriet – the document describes what it saw as a “too many cooks” problem within that UN organization, with officials all going off on their own separate ways.

However, the Statsministeriet’s is also frank enough to pinpoint how the Danish government caused a lack of confidence in itself to arise in the crucial period leading up to COP15. In the early part of last year that government decided that it had to be realistic about what it could hope to achieve at the December conference, given that unanimity was required for any final accord, and so ceased to advocate any climate agreement with legally-binding obligations on the participating states but rather a mere political agreement. Not only were many countries not yet ready to cut back in this way their ambitions about what could be accomplished, but most of them were notified of the new Danish approach only about one-and-a-half months before the conference was to start. The result was widespread suspicion about Danish intentions and the belief that the Danes were simply in the pocket of the US and other highly-polluting states that wanted as few results as possible. It might be recalled that, at around the mid-point of the actual conference, the Danish delegation did present a proposal for an agreement; it went nowhere and, despite even frantic high-level deliberations among world leaders, things did not much improve from there.

And thus it was, at least in the eyes of the Danish government, that “Hopenhagen” 2009 turn into a flop.

                          

(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).

                          

Hyuk-hyuk. If you’re still interested, though, all of that other than the “pyramid scheme” part is true. Rasmus Dam Nielsen* of the Danish newspaper Politiken gives us the details.

The Egyptian government has always had a problem with the workers who built the pyramids being characterized as slaves, since in their view that opinion gives short shrift to the considerable construction talents that such personnel must have possessed. Just look at the results: it’s apparently difficult even to slip a knife into the cracks between the building-blocks. It was actually an Egyptian research time which recently made the key discovery of graves situated alongside the pyramids, 4,500 years old and containing the remains of workers who died while in the service of their construction. This has to mean they were not slaves: slaves would never have been allowed to be buried so close to the pharaohs’ tomb, which of course were the pyramids themselves.

The Egyptian researchers further calculate that around 10,000 workers were involved in constructing the pyramids in all (i.e. not all at the same time); they were involved in the work in shifts of three months at a time; and they consumed daily 21 cattle and 23 sheep, provided by outside ranchers who thereby discharged their tax burden to the prehistoric Egyptian state.

And how about this, also from Politiken: El Dorado did exist, namely somewhere in the Amazon jungle, and contemporary researchers believe they have found the site using Google Earth! But I’m moving on from this stuff . . . if you really want to know more, either learn yourself some Danish or e-mail me a request.

* He reminds me of one of my main complaints about the Danish press: there are too many Dam Nielsens!

                          

The snow came down particularly heavy in England, canceling several Premier League football games (if you want an indication about just how serious it really turned out to be), so the paper’s Astrid Søndberg mainly concentrates on the travails at London’s Heathrow airport. “I spent the night in terminal 5 together with 2,000 others,” reveals on-the-spot witness Line Bjørn. Everyone needs to rebook their flights due to the weather, she says, but “that’s going to slowly since there are not enough personnel. They can’t come out to the airport because of the weather.” Naturally, both the telephone service and website of her carrier – British Airways, note bene – are also down. Similar scenes occurred in Dublin and Amsterdam, according to an SAS Airlines spokesman.

                          

Brit Therkildsen of the Danish newspaper Politiken has a brief treatment about how that 2018 competition is shaping up. The short answer: underpopulated. The stimulus for her article in the first place is the fact that the deadline for applications for the 2018 Winter Games passed yesterday, and ultimately only three “cities” succeeded in putting themselves forward. I write “cities” because one of those is Pyeongchang, which is not really a city. “Sure it is!” you might be yelling, “It’s the capital of North Korea! What on earth are those leftist pinkos on the IOC thinking?” No, no – calm down! Pyeongchang is certainly Korean, but South Korean: it’s a “county” in northeast South Korea, not really that far from the “Demarcation Line” dividing the North from the South (they are still technically at war with each other – hmmm), but with “long, cold winters” and plenty of mountains, so presumably possessing what it takes (if you add massive money for construction to the mix) to stage the Winter Games. Plus, this is the third Winter Games in a row that Pyeongchang has officially applied to host.

Moving on to the others, “city” also does not describe Annecy, which is properly a “commune” in the French Alps. And it also does not really describe the third candidate, Munich, Germany. Yes, I know, Munich is properly a city, but the authorities there have made clear that, should it get the Games, many events will take place on the Königssee* or at the mountain resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the 1936 Winter Games were held.

Indeed, any of those Winter Games’ “sliding-down-a-hill” events (e.g. skiing, bobsled, etc. – the ones that first come to mind for many of us, I suspect, when we think “Winter Olympics”) will have to take place at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, because that’s where the mountains are, not Munich. One begins to suspect that all this is a clever scheme by the German authorities to take a proposal that is really “the 2018 Garmisch-Partenkirchen Winter Games” and give it a false label of “the Munich Winter Games” in order to boost its appeal. Why would “Munich” have a special appeal? The article mentions that, if awarded the 2018 Winter Games, Munich would make history as the first city to stage both Summer and Winter Games. It does not mention – but anyone with a sense of history should realize – that Munich might also have a powerful sentimental claim to these games because of the tragic mess that was the 1972 Summer Games there, what with the Black September hostage-taking, failed rescue attempt at the airport by the German authorities and final toll of eleven Israeli athletes, one West German policeman and five terrorists dead. Staging the Olympic Games once more, presumably successfully, could do much to finally lay these painful memories to rest.

In any case, it looks like the German authorities realized the need to take such extraordinary measures – i.e. disguising their proposed 2018 Winter Olympics as “Munich” – in the face of intimidating competition from other locales. Sure, only two other candidates ultimately followed through with their applications, but there had also been interest in 2018 from places like Harbin and Changchung in China (Huh? “Changchung”?), and even Almaty in Kazakhstan! Wow; if candidates such as these had actually managed to formally enter the selection process, how could the IOC have told them any of them “no”?

* The article does mention the Königssee as an alternate location for some events should “Munich” win the bid, but I have to think that is incorrect, that the bigger and closer-to-Munich (and closer-to-Garmisch) Chiemsee might have been meant instead. On the one hand, the Chiemsee is very well-known as a water-sports location; on the other hand, the Königssee is not known for water sports at all, but rather for its pristine water (only electric boats are allowed on it) and for the fjord-like ambiance along its banks (so general access to that water is quite a problem – and they’re probably not interested in Olympic-scale development!). Oh, and if you have bothered to read down this far, through the footnote, then you deserve to be reminded that the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics are to be held in Vancouver, Canada.

                          

(The identical brief news-text about this appears in at least three on-line Danish papers that I’ve been able to identify; it’s a Ritzau news agency pooled report. I hate that; but OK, I’ll just close my eyes, jab my finger blindly and select to link to . . . Arctic Sea’s sister-ship runs aground, in the mainstream daily newspaper Politiken.)

What’s up? It’s pretty simple: This unnamed sister-ship has run aground off the Swedish coast, not far (northeast) from Stockholm, near the town of Norrtälje. Still, it’s mysterious: that part of the Swedish coast is pretty dangerous (check it out here, all those islands everyplace), and everyone knows that, so it is carefully marked with buoys, lighthouses, etc. instructing incoming ships “Go this way!” and “Don’t go that way!” Well, this sister-ship went a way it wasn’t supposed to go, according to Swedish Coast Guard spokesman Kenneth Neijnes, and suffered the predictable result. So the authorities got the vessel unstuck, towed it to a secure location, and took the crew off for some questioning. Who knows, maybe they’re all a bunch of Russian FSB agents again, up to no good.