Daily Lemon: Expensive Coke, Estonia, Liberal Party, coke head athletes

Would you pay $ 10 for a can of Coke?
Thought not. But you have probably heard of people having been charged ridiculous prices for a simple hotel mini bar item like a Coke or a (very) small bag of potato chips? Perhaps you have been on the recieving end of a hotel mini bar rip-off yourself. I have, for sure, since I have a hard time resisting a cold beer in a hot tub after a hard day's work away from home. Well, here's some help in weeding out the worst scammers from the perhaps not-so-bad. (They're all ripping you off with the mini-bar and the telephone, don't you think otherwise.) The GridSkipper weblog has a piece on how you get ripped off every time you lift an item from the mini-fridge and on hotel mini-bar prices that mostly resembles extorsion. Read it, and be a victim no more. Via Bajo Coste (in Spanish).

7 October 2006

Estonia - 852 souls are still waiting for the truth.
The loss of the passenger ferry m/s Estonia in hard weather in the Baltic Sea on September 28, 1994 cost 852 lives (only 95 bodies have been recovered). About half of them were Swedes, the rest mostly Finns and Estonians. This was the worst disaster at sea in the Baltic since the sinking by a Soviet submarine of the steamer Wilhelm Gustloff on 30 January 1945, where some 9,000 German civilians, most of them children, and wounded troops fleeing the advancing Red Army in Eastern Prussia is believed to have drowned.

Sweden is a small country, and almost everyone know or know of someone who perished in the icy 13°C (55°F) waters that night. Estonia, being an even even smaller country, felt the impact of the shipwreck as something close to a national trauma. The ship, and the connection to the west it provided, was a matter of national pride in the young democracy recently liberated by the fall of the Soviet Union.

From the moment the Estonia settled on the bottom, there has been wild speculation as to the cause of the shipwreck, fueled by the swift joint Swedish-Finninsh-Estonian action to declare the site out of bounds for divers, decision not to raise the ship, to try and cover it up with concrete and gravel, and numerous refusals by several administrations to re-investigate the cause of the shipwreck. The investigations conducted have received wide criticism for not being thorough enough, and to neglecting to look into certain suspicious circumstances in the case.

Not long ago, a Swedish semi-military agency was implicated in having shipped ex-Soviet military technology from Tallinn to Stockholm on several occasions on the Estonia. These shipments were carefully orchestrated; with Swedish customs officers ordered to stay away from the cars involved. The shipments were made on the regular crossings of the Estonia two weeks before, and one week before, the shipwreck. If there was such a shipment on September 28, 1994 has not been determined, however. Supposing there was such a shipment on the Estonia, could someone have determined that the cargo was too sensitive to be allowed to reach Stockholm? What could have been worth killing a thousand people? Your guess is as good as mine.

The wreck lies on 59° 23' N, 21° 42' E, about 22 nautical miles 157° from the Finnish islands of Utö. It is at a depth of between 70 and 80 meters (230 - 260 feet). The ship's hull is 157 meters long (515 feet), which means that if it was to be stood on end, about 77 meters (252 feet) of it would be visible above the surface of the sea. There is a widely felt concern in Sweden that everything has not been investigated in the Estonia sinking. I would say everyone outside the present and past administrations would want to know exactly what happened that night. Those who lost children, spouses and loved ones would surely want to have closure. Of that I'm sure.

- - -

There's been a movie made on the Estonia disaster, Baltic Storm, featuring Donald Sutherland, Greta Scacchi and Jürgen Prochnow. The plot draws from the private investigations of German journailst Jutta Rabe, who thinks Russian nationalists sunk the Estonia to keep ex-Soviet miltary technology to reach Sweden and the US. The movie is USD 18:- on Amazon.

13 September 2006

Westerberg, Jakobsson, Jodenius, Lagerlöf, and Leijonborg. Can he stay?

Liberal party officials spy on opponent's intranet.
This is probably the Swedish political scandal of the century. Like a Swedish Watergate. Officials of Folkpartiet (the Swedish liberal party) are being investigated by police for spying on their political opponent Socialdemokraterna (the social democrat party) through logging in on Socialdemokraterna's internal computer network, where confidential reports and planning was stored. With the upcoming elections as close as September 17, this is of course pure political kryptonite with no end of the ripple effect in sight. The Social Democrats are indignant in the media, of course, but a guess is they are secretly rather pleased, since this may give them the extra push in the public opinion they need to win the election.

The spying was made possible when Liberal party officials got their hands on a Social Democrat party worker's login information. How this could happen is not clear at this point; the accused Liberal official, Per Jodenius, claims that the information was given to him by a member of the Social Democrat youth organization, a claim denied by the named person. Niklas Svensson, a reporter at the Expressen newspaper, is also being investigated after admitting to entering the intranet after having recieved the login information from Jodenius.

So far, any fallout among voters has not been detected, but several Liberal party officials have either been fired or decided to quit. Among them are Per Jodenius, press secretary of the liberal youth organization, who also has a political appointment as a justice (!) at the Stockholm district court, Johan Jakobsson, Liberal party secretary, Niki Westerberg, press manager, and Nicklas Lagerlöf, former district chariman. The leader of the Liberal party, Lars Leijonborg, has so far not been implicated, but I don't think we've seen the end of this story yet. If the upcoming elections prove to be less than a success for the Liberal party, more heads are likely to roll, and Lars Leijonborg's will probably be one of them.

6 September 2006

Löfgren finally confesses, too.
Patrik Löfgren, the third of the three Swedish athletes caught by police in Gothenburg in mid August and charged with posession and use of cocaine, has finally decided to come clean and confess, both to the police and publicly via a staement to the press. Why Löfgren waited three weeks to face the music, when his partners in crime Patrik Sjöberg (left) and Sven Nylander (right) admitted to use almost immediately, was not explained. Possibly he thought he could get away with it, but finally realized the evidence was too strong. All three are now awaiting trial and sentencing. Previous posts on the subject, here and here.

6 September 2006

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