Swedish News

Agnes’ big carrot. No ecological food for school children. Sea eagle reported. Many young Swedes doubt al-Qaida 9/11 guilt.  

• Agnes’ big carrot.
  Talk about a green thumb! Three-year-old Agnes pulled up an enormous carrot from her parents’ garden in Borup, outside Västerås. The carrot had more than the usual amount of greens and was particularly difficult to pull up. “We had to dig it out,” says Agnes’ mother Frida. The carrot measured 16.9 inches and weighed 3.3 pounds. Agnes took it to her nursery school and shared it with her friends for snack. “It was enough to go around for everyone,” Frida said.

• No ecological food for school children.
  Nutritional directors in Göteborg want to buy locally grown or produced food for schools, but to do so is discrimination. “Of course we would like to buy fresh meats from the farmer around the corner,” says Margareta Adler, nutritional director in Askim. “But the way the law is today, we can’t.” According to the law of official purchase nobody is to be discriminated against, therefore it is not allowed to buy from local producers. Annika Unt Widell, a dietitian and project leader for the organization Skolmatens vänner (friends of the school meals) says that people who eat ecological food eat more and healthier: “Nutritional directors know about food. And then the law becomes an obstacle in their way, that’s a frustrating situation.”

• Sea eagle reported.
  "Murder, she wrote." A sea eagle dove down in a garden in Väddö outside of Stockholm, and attacked a little rabbit, which happened to be a family pet. The poor rabbit didn’t stand a chance - the eagle killed and ate it. The owner of the rabbit, a little girl, could not be consoled, so her father reported the incident to the local police. The police however, decided that they could not begin an investigation since no crime had been committed, at least not according to the law.

• Many young Swedes doubt al-Qaida 9/11 guilt.
  Almost one in five Swedes under the age of 30 think that George W. Bush's U.S government was behind the attacks on September 11th 2001, according to a new survey by Novus Opinion. The Swedish TV program “Kalla Fakta”, which commissioned the survey, will address the subject of the Truth Movement, an international group which espouses the conspiracy theory that the terror network al-Qaida was not behind the September 11th attacks. The movement, also known as the "September 11th research community" argues that it was in fact the American government that staged the attacks, which claimed the lives of 3,000 people, in order to legitimize the war on terrorism. The Novus poll indicates that a significant number of young Swedes are persuaded by the logic of the argument. Of the 1,000 Swedes surveyed in an Internet panel, 70% responded that al-Qaida were behind the attacks, while 7% did not think so. Among those under-30 only 58% believed responsibility lay with al-Qaida, while 15% did not. When asked whether the U.S government orchestrated the attacks, eight percent supported the theory while 64% rejected it. However, among the under-30s there was once again more skepticism: 51% rejected the conspiracy theory while 18% believed that the U.S. government, led at the time by President George W. Bush, had a role in the attacks. As many as 31% of the young people interviewed in the survey responded that they did not know what to believe.