Norway is emerging from a knotty merger of public agencies designed to provide one-stop shopping for social benefits. The treasury is now more easily accessed, but those who take from it face an extended gauntlet of bureaucratic tough love.
                      Citizen Today magazine

Kjartan Fløgstad's acclaimed 2009 novel about World War II and its echo in Norway and Germany, with fresh research into the underpinnings of Hitler's rise. Two chapters translated for the publisher. Norwegian title: Grense Jakobselv.
                            Gyldendal Publishing

The dramatic story of the Penguin anti-ship missile, the most advanced weapon ever developed by a small country, now in use by the U.S. and several other NATO forces. Norwegian title: Flygende pingviner, by Hans Christian Erlandsen. 324 pages.
      Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace

2 May 2012
Disturbed killer on the stand: Anders Behring Breivik may be psychotic, but under Norwegian law that doesn't disqualify the killer of 77 people from parading his xenophobic demons and trying to incite new attacks in his psycho-thriller of a trial.
    A psychiatric ruling won’t come until mid-summer, yet Breivik has held the stand for almost two weeks. He has recited militant screeds, wept over medieval crusaders and shared bomb recipes. This man who felt “no choice” but to massacre Norwegian summer campers as young as 14 (because the government had let in too many Muslims) must suffer from something. Paranoid schizophrenia? Narcissistic personality disorder? I sat an arm’s length from him in court and reported this, this, this, this and this with Reuters colleagues, and feel little wiser.
    Expert squabbling over Breivik's psyche will be resolved only at trial’s end, when he is sent to prison or hospital. In our eagerness to air out a political black hole, we in the media may be ransacking a victim of mental illness.

15 April 2012
Trial preview: Norway's nightmare circus: Anti-Islam militant Anders Behring Breivik appears determined to stage a foul circus when he goes on trial on Monday for killing 77 people, reopening wounds in traditionally tolerant and tranquil Norway. Reuters report. 

10 April 2012
Of sound mind? Depends what you mean: Anders Behring Breivik was sane when he killed 77 people in attacks designed to punish pro-immigration "traitors" in Norway, a psychiatric team has said, contradicting a prior report that found Breivik psychotic. The admitted killer has insisted he is mentally stable and demanded that his bomb attack and shooting spree last July be judged as political militancy and not the work of a deranged mind. See my Reuters report with Victoria Klesty.

7 April 2012
Teens who survived Norway massacre will define future:
The lives that Anders Behring Breivik failed to take at an island summer camp for Labour Party youths will put the lie to his cracked idea that European strength resides in ethnic purity. That's clear after a Reuters crew spent two hours on now-deserted Utøya island with 18-year-old Alexandra Peltre, a budding actress born in Angola but otherwise Norwegian to the core. She is one of 33 people Breivik maimed in a gun massacre that killed 69 others. Breivik also set off a bomb that day in Oslo, killing eight. Alexandra brimmed with smarts and humour as she tried to make sense of a woeful day. Read my Reuters report.

14 May 2012
Norges Bank slashes rates to slow runaway currency: Norway's central bank has unexpectedly cut interest rates as it battles a strong currency and stubbornly low inflation, raising the risk that prolonged low rates could cause an already-developing housing bubble to gain pressure. The bank cut its key policy rate to 1.50 percent from 1.75 percent, the lowest since late 2009, in a move that one analyst called "really, really dangerous". Here is the full report by Balazs Koranyi and I.

7 March 2012
Norway killer faces terror charges as court date nears:
The Norwegian anti-Islam militant whose bomb attack and shooting massacre shocked Norway and the rest of the world last summer was formally charged with terrorism and the premeditated murder of 77 people as officials prepared for a trial to start next month. My Reuters report from Oslo.

27 Feb 2012
Nobel Peace Prize candidate field closed for 2012:   Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki, alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning and former U.S. President Bill Clinton are thought to be among the hundreds of nominees for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. The list of nominees is now officially closed for this year's award, to be announced in October and presented in December. Reuters story.

20 Dec. 2011
Norway's Statoil hopes to extend oil luck -- in Africa: After an extraordinary year of big oil finds off Norway, energy major Statoil has picked up two prime deep-water blocks off Angola in its first assignment to lead exploration and production in the West African's country's waters. "We consider this some of the very best unexplored acreage left on the planet," Erling Vågnes, senior vice president for exploration technology and expertise, told Reuters. Statoil plans to drill through a deep salt layer into formations its hopes will mirror those containing massive oil reservoirs off Brazil.

20 Nov. 2011
Northward march: Norway unveiled a 20-year plan to unlock offshore Arctic oil and gas resources and channel them to worldwide markets, a project the foreign minister said may cost billions of dollars and bring rivalries over Arctic resources to a head.  "It is the project of a generation," Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said in an interview. "As the ice melts, new transport routes are opening up, resources are becoming accessible and human activity is drawn to this region."  The 134-page white paper said massive infrastructure building, research investment, a new fighter-jet fleet and careful diplomacy will help bring "a new industrial era in the high north," including an island group where jurisdiction is contested.

23 Oct. 2011
Lucky country: Most geologists thought the North Sea was played out after 40-plus years of drilling for crude. But one more elephant lurked. Earlier this summer Statoil and tiny Lundin Petroleum found it. On Friday Statoil announced jubilantly that recent test drilling gave a high-end estimate of 3.3 billion recoverable barrels, ranking this hidden giant (provisionally named Aldous/Avaldsnes) as a field for the ages, only slightly behind the historic Statfjord and Ekofisk discoveries and likely far ahead of Britain's famous Brent. The oil is fantastically easy to extract and refine. Norway's collective fortune rose by $300 billion or more at a stroke. Most of the realized proceeds will flow for several decades to a public "oil fund" that subsidizes pensions and government  budgets -- a fund composed of stocks, bonds and property holdings already worth $547 billion, or more than $100,000 per living Norwegian. Check out the Reuters story by Joachim Dagenborg and me here.

16 Aug. 2011
The man in the cellar: More than three weeks have passed since Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and mass shooting that stunned this small, open nation. Seduced by right-wing scare talk, Breivik imagined he was striking a blow for historical Europe against "Eurabia." So far his deeds have had the opposite effect, reminding us to love our neighbors. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered to hold roses aloft as imams and Lutheran ministers embraced. Does one man's insanity suggest Europe is nearing some breaking point on immigration? Governments may indeed have to slow the pace soon, but Europe opened its doors and windows for many good reasons -- economic, demographic, moral. Culture must unfold into the light. More than any threat from abroad, Breivik reminded us what lurks in the dark below.

16 Dec. 2010
Nobel-winner says "activism" can rescue U.S. economy:
Peter Diamond, a 2010 Nobel laureate in economics whose nomination to serve on the Federal Reserve board is in political trouble, said Thursday the United States can crack stubbornly high unemployment by using every available tool. "The recipe is activism," he told Reuters in Oslo. Fears that more fiscal and monetary stimulus could trigger runaway inflation are overblown in the face of a jobless rate that has been 9.5 percent or higher for 16 months, he said, adding: "Right now, I worry about doing too little."

11 Dec. 2010
Jailed Chinese dissident awarded Nobel: Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo on Friday was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he has dedicated from prison to the "lost souls" of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. China called the award in Oslo a "political farce." President Barack Obama, a Peace Prize laureate last year, called for the prompt release of 54-year-old Liu, who was jailed last year for for subversion.

3 Dec. 2010
Empty chair to mark Nobel winner's absence:  An empty chair will represent jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo at next Friday's awards ceremony and symbolize China's policies to isolate and repress dissidents. The gesture comes amid heightened rhetoric from Beijing, which has pressured international diplomats to boycott the ceremony and denounced the Norwegian Nobel Committee for giving one of the world's top accolades to a human rights activist serving an 11-year sentence in China.

28 Nov. 2010
Will China lash out or join elite Nobel club gracefully?  Two weeks before Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo receives the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia, Norwegians are looking warily east, wondering what the world's most populous mercantile power will do to them for honouring the jailed co-author of a pro-democracy manifesto. At least half a dozen countries appear to have buckled under Chinese pressure to stay away from the Dec. 10 award ceremony in Oslo. But before China lets the next shoe drop (possibly killing a free-trade deal with Norway) it ought to realize that the Nobel committee has elevated it to a club that includes the United States, Russia and Germany. Those countries all had to deal with peace-prize-winning dissidents who questioned national claims to superpowerdom. Without openly addressing the laments of King, Sakharov and Ossietzky, those countries would lack the global legitimacy they now enjoy -- frayed as it may be.  

6 Oct. 2010
Former U.S. diplomat nears payday: As I report today for Reuters, Norwegian oil company DNO International estimated on Wednesday it will have to pay $55-75 million to former U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith and a Yemeni firm for their stakes in a contentious deal that brought DNO to Iraq. Galbraith has acknowledged helping DNO obtain exploration and production rights from the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq in June 2004. The award stems from a contractual dispute over the terms of that deal and highlights the role of senior Western politicial figures helping oil companies gain access to Iraq's oil riches.

30 Sept. 2010
That Viking spirit: A new laddie magazine in Norway sent a reporter to Afghanistan and came back  quoting a Norwegian soldier who thought killing Taliban soldiers was better than sex. Since Norway's government has been claiming that its mission in Afghanistan is to build schools and clinics, the account of rowdy Viking youths firing guns has caused a political furor just over a week before the Nobel Peace Prize is announced here. A little perspective was gained yesterday with reports of American soldiers on trial for killing random Afghans and collecting body parts as trophies. Time, perhaps, to bring the boys home?

21 Sept. 2010
Sweden skids to the right: Sweden's politics have swung too far right for the comfort of center-right Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. After last weekend's parliamentary election the Moderate Party leader will almost certainly keep his No. 1 title but will have to look over his shoulder at the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats. They won enough seats to march into the Riksdagen as potential kingmakers. Reinfeldt will try to ignore them but may have to acknowledge their electoral due if the Greens refuse his entreaties across the center divide. After a decade of heavy immigration and culture clashes, Sweden turns out to be like the rest of Europe: hospitable, up to a point.  

14 Sept. 2010
"Nordic model" on jobs draws praise, and yawns:
When government ministers from around the world came to Oslo Monday to find a way out of the global unemployment mess, the first thing they noted was that there's no mess here. Norway's unemployment rate is about 3 percent -- well below its level before the financial crisis. Hundreds of participants including he prime ministers of incorrigible Spain and Greece heard that in Norway the labour groups, employers and government cooperate closely on wage settlements; that more than 50 percent of the workforce is unionized; that the public sector hires when the private sector cuts back; and that oil revenues flow to all. Everyone agreed that all that is wonderful -- and completely irrelevant to their own economies.

5 Sept. 2010
Historic Arctic ship voyage "over the top": The MV Nordic Barents set sail from Norway to China Saturday with 40,000 tonnes of iron ore. What's remarkable is the route. The ship is steaming through the Arctic Ocean, skirting what's left of the melting ice sheet. "We're pretty much going over the top," John Sanderson, CEO of the Norwegian mine whose ore was on board, told Reuters. The journey is described as the first non-stop transit of Russia's Northern Sea Route by a non-Russian commercial vessel. The Arctic short cut will shave about eight days and 5,000 nautical miles from the usual southerly route to Asia.

19 Aug. 2010
Sweden leading the European recovery: Sweden has leapt out of the post-crisis economic doldrums, reporting growth of 1.2 percent in the second quarter of 2010. It's expanding faster than every other EU country but Slovakia. Norway is shuffling by comparison but at least it too is headed the right way. Today it reported second-quarter GDP growth of 0.5 percent, not including its volatile oil sector. Even that weak rate beat analysts' expectations, as I reported here for Reuters. Denmark is expected to post its fourth consecutive quarter of recovery.

25 July 2010
Nordic air war heats up: Scandinavian Airlines, the semi-official air carrier of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, seems neither big enough nor flexible enough to resist market incursions by its scrappy competitor, Norwegian. Having taken the local market by storm, Norwegian’s colorful boss, an ex-fighter pilot named Bjørn Kjos, now intends to pick off long-distance stretches, like Oslo-New York, that Scandinavian (a.k.a. SAS) has neglected or overpriced. Analysts see a major threat to SAS despite partial ownership by the three governments. SAS chief Mats Jansson has even begun responding to Kjos’s frequent zingers in the media, including a claim that SAS’s fleet was decrepit. “Kjos seems more like he’s in the communication and entertainment industry than the airlines,” Jansson told DN.no. “Our fleet is up-to-date, and we have no need to buy new planes.”

22 July 2010
Who's bashful? Not the Americans: When it comes to the human body, Scandinavians are libertines and Americans are prudes. That’s been conventional knowledge at least since “I Am Curious (Yellow)” in 1967. But a new global survey by the travel search engine Skyscanner finds that 92 percent of Americans and 93 percent of Brits think topless sunbathing is fine, while only 82 percent of Scandinavians agree. A little sunshine heals all rifts.

14 July 2010
Scandinavian values: The currencies of Sweden and Norway have jumped in value against the euro as investors take note of the two countries’ speedy economic recovery and their relative insulation from the fiscal woes of Greece and several other unstable European Union countries. Local banking crises in the 1980s and 1990s spurred reforms that helped Sweden and Norway sail through the recent financial turmoil relatively unscathed, as reported in today’s Wall Street Journal, in an article headlined “Scandinavia Gains Currency.” Steve Barrow, an analyst at Standard Bank in London, told Dow Jones reporter Neil Shah: "If you're looking for a better currency to hold in Europe, the Scandinavians are probably the best.”

6 July 2010
Norway's conservatives surge: Support for Norway's Conservative Party has almost doubled since it was humbled by Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg's center-left coalition in the 2009 national elections. Now the Conservatives rank No. 1 when Norwegians are asked to name their favorite party, according to a survey conducted by TNS Gallup for TV2. That bodes well for the business-friendly party as it gears up for municipal and county elections in September.

28 June 2010
Small country, big sacrifice: The stunned outrage that Norwegians feel over the deaths of four of their servicemen in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan yesterday is about what you would expect in the United States if 260 or so American soldiers were killed in a single attack. That's the equivalent scale of loss when population is taken into account. And that makes yesterday's explosion a bigger event for Norwegians than the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American marines and prompted then-President Reagan to pull all U.S. troops out of war-torn Lebanon.  

18 June 2010
Boom times for the military: The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has added up all military spending on earth and concluded that the swooning of financial markets  had no effect on the world's appetite for missiles and tanks and bombers and AK-47s. Global military spending shot to $1.5 trillion in 2009, six percent higher than in 2008, with 14 of the top 15 spenders boosting their military budgets. And it's a long-term trend. Military spending worldwide rose almost 50 percent from 2000 to 2009. Weapons sales rose, too. Boom times for Lockheed Martin, but also for some Scandinavian defense contractors. Shares in Norway's Kongsberg Group have more than quintupled the past five years. Saab AB of Sweden, which can't seem to sell its Gripen fighter, has had a harder time of it. 


10 June 2010
Sweden's stay-at-home dads: Katrin Bennhold of the International Herald Tribune is deeply impressed by Sweden's policy promoting lengthy male parental leave after childbirth, a state-funded benefit that 85 percent of fathers now use (to the chagrin of some employers). The takeaway from her 3,400-word opus with slide show has to be that a taxation level almost twice as high as that of the United States is not only sustainable but sexy in its effect on age-old family patterns: "Machos with dinosaur values don't make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women's magazines anymore," said Sweden's European affairs minister, Birgitta Ohlsson.

4 June 2010
Swedish business guru: Good times ahead: Kjell Nordtröm, the Swedish business affairs philosopher, is bullish on capitalism. He says the financial crisis of the past few years will be seen historically as a necessary course correction, and that successful businesses will reorient their product lines to capitalize on three global developments: the continued rise of women, reduction in family size and urbanization. Nordström told Norway’s Dagens Næringsliv that a reborn finance sector will better serve the economy: “I’m not sure Lehmann Sisters would have run their bank the way the Brothers did.”

26 May 2010:
Is U.S. welfare as generous as Sweden's? On the Freakonomics blog over at The New York Times we are told that, all things considered, the United States and the Nordic countries spend about the same on social welfare services. According to Price Fishback, an economics professor, the Nordic system is so inefficient that it seems more generous when it's just more obtrusive. When you consider that Nordic welfare recipients pay more in taxes (including that regressive 25% VAT) and live in a higher cost environment, they're supposedly no better off than the poor in Detroit. One problem with this analysis is that so many poor Americans fall through the net completely and don't get what the statistics suggest.


22 May 2010
Nordics in Afghanistan: Much longer? NATO's hope of stabilizing Afghanistan fortunately does not depend the Nordics, but their armed forces have made an impact. The Danes have been a spearhead in Helmand province, while the Norwegians and Swedes have shown their flags in the north. That solidarity may crumble if Sweden's center-right government  loses in this fall's election to the formidable "red-green" coalition, two of whose members have called for a pullout. Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, of the Moderates, wants Swedes to prepare instead for long years of continued engagement.

14 May 2010
Debt crisis bleeds the north: Everyone knows Greece's beggarly status. But the EU Commission counts Denmark among member countries that have run up unsustainable deficits. That has self-doubting Danes ("To be or not to be . . .") wondering if their luxuriant social policies are doomed. Under the headline "Farewell Welfare State," Berlingske Tidende's Poul Høi writes today: "It's not just the warm countries that have to cut back on their pensions and social services. The cold countries, too, have to make some cold calculations and reconsider their social model."

11 May 2010
Move over GM: Norwegian electric car maker Think Global plans to launch its vehicles in the United States this year and has raised $40 million from existing shareholders to fund operations, according to Reuters. The company plans to begin selling its Think City model in the United States in the fourth quarter of this year. The first cars sold will be built in Finland until production in Indiana gets under way in 2011.

9 May 2010
The Greeks: A threat to Nordic welfare? The southern European debt crisis could undermine the social agenda of the far north even though political leaders here are better at math. "Swedish taxpayers and other taxpayers should not have to pay so the Greeks can retire with a pension in their 40s,” said Anders Borg, the Swedish finance ministert. Jens Stoltenberg, the Norwegian prime minister, added, “The welfare model we’ve known in Europe for several decades is under pressure because many countries can’t pay for it."

4 May 2010
Mothers love it here: Save The Children says Norway is the best country in the world in which to be a mum. Australia is second, followed by Iceland, Sweden and Denmark. The United States, which celebrates Mother's Day on Sunday, comes in 28th. The charitable organization makes the rankings as part of its annual State of the World's Mothers report.

2 May 2010
Norway, Brazil team up on aluminium: A few hours ago the aluminium producer Hydro, Norway's second-largest industrial company, announced it will pay Vale S.A. about $5 billion in cash and stock for majority ownership of a vast bauxite mine and refinery in Brazil, ensuring Hydro access to raw materials for 100 years. Hydro is a Norwegian "champion," meaning its largest shareholder is the state, but this complex transaction will reduce the state's power. Hydro got its start generating electricity from Norway's countless waterfalls and rivers.

30 April 2010
Best restaurant in the world? Danish, of course: For decades the rap on Scandinavia has been as follows: rich, egalitarian, boring. Copenhagen has always had a bacchanalian streak, however, and now one of its restaurants, Noma, has climbed over the backs of Spain's El Bulli and England's The Fat Duck to claim the No. 1 spot in Restaurant Magazine's survey of the 50 best restaurants in the world. Famed Danish chef Bo Bech, who runs the rival restaurant Paustian, told Jyllands-Posten: "I hope people will wake up now. Everyone knows there's good food in Spain, England and France, but the best now comes from Scandinavia. Let's appreciate that."