Swedish News

Swedish Crown Princess reported over bribery. Annika Östberg, controversial radio host. Jurassic Park the Skåne version. Golfloving reindeer move onto Skellefteå golf course. 418 lbs Atlantic halibut greatest catch. 

  • Swedish Crown princess reported over bribery
    Three persons have notified the Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel to the police for bribery. When the royal couple went on honeymoon, they borrowed a rich businessman's private plane and yacht. The head of the National Anti-Corruption Unit, Gunnar Stetler, says that the notifications argue that the princess is an official person, thus not allowed to receive this kind of gifts because it conflicts with the law on bribery. The case will be heard next week.

  • Controversial radio host
    Annika Östberg, sentenced for murder in the USA and back in Sweden after 28 years in an American prison, hosted the radio program "Sommar" the other day. She spoke mostly of her time in the prison in California and how she handled that difficult time. When it became clear that Annika Östberg would be one of the "summer speakers" in the popular national radio program "Sommar" (summer), it aroused mixed feelings. Some claimed that it was inappropriate to allow a person convicted for murder to speak out in national radio after such a short time in Sweden. Annika Östberg did not mention this discussion in her 90 minutes. Neither did she criticize the American judicial system. She simply spoke about her life, from her childhood in Sweden, to her problematic time in the USA. Östberg's gripping story of her forced move to the U.S was only the beginning. She was 10 years old when she and her mother moved after her mother had met an American man. Östberg claims she lost the feeling of belonging. Even if she learned the language she felt that she had lost her roots, she was lost. Then she spoke of how she started using heroine, which she tried to quit several times without success. Only when she (at age 16) gave birth to her son Sven (who died in an accident at age 15), did she stay clean. She also spoke of the situation in which the murders took place. The murders, which led to her sentence to "25 years to life" in prison. She spoke low but clear about her guilt in this situation.
    Download hosts on 'Sommar' through Sveriges Radio: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/sandningsarkiv.aspx?programid=2071

  • Jurassic Park the Skåne version
    Sweden isn’t exactly spoiled when it comes to dinosaur relics, so far some footprints outside Helsingborg, a vertebrae, and four teeth are all that has been found. But now the meager harvest has gotten some addition, in conjunction with some digging. Fossil hunters have found what they suspect is a small dinosaur bone in Skåne, southern Sweden. The finger bone is more than 80 million years old. Dinosaur fossils are rarely found in Sweden because glaciers once swept over Scandinavia dragging sediment with them. At the site researchers also found vertebrae and teeth from prehistoric sharks and reptiles. Says paleontologist Elisabeth Einarsson “We believe the bone belongs to a dinosaur called leptoceratops. The area covering Kristianstad was a shallow sea 80 million years ago, with an archipelago and the dinosaurs lived on these islands.” The leptoceratops was a plant-eater, a primitive ceratopsian dinosaur genus from the Late Cretaceous Period. Skulls from it have been found in Alberta, Canada and in Wyoming. It could probably stand and run on its hind legs, and it was around 2 meters (6.6 feet) long and could have weighed anywhere between 68 to 200 kilos (150 to 440 lbs).

  • Golf-loving reindeer
    Three reindeers have decided that a golf course outside Skellefteå in north Sweden is their new home. The reindeer "Irene" came two weeks before midsummer. She got company from two other reindeers a couple of weeks ago. The three animals usually like to hang in the bunkers and even if they sometimes have been hit by golf balls, they have stayed.

  • Greatest catch
    Ten-year old Johannes Lindgren from Edsvalla in Värmland was on a fishing holiday in Norway with his father when he caught the fish of a lifetime, an enormous Atlantic halibut (hälleflundra) weighing 190 kilos (418 lbs). Father and son had to fight together for several hours before the fish gave up. “I felt that it was a very heavy fish,” says Johannes. “I had to ask my dad to help me, because I couldn’t pull more than 15 minutes.” When they finally got the fish out of water, professional fishermen had to help take care of it. Bringing it back to Värmland was impossible. “We would have never been able to bring it back in one piece,” Johannes says.