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"A woman who filmed while her husband raped their teenage daughter has been sentenced to two years imprisonment by Helsingborg district court. The woman was found guilty of being an accessory to child rape and sexual exploitation of a child. "

Benefits agency closes 309 offices The Swedish Social Insurance Administration, which handles all Swedish pension and sick benefit payments, plans to close 309 of its 330 offices. Customers are to be encouraged to use the Internet and telephone to communicate with the organization. "Many of our customers have been dissatisfied with long telephone waiting times and long waits for their cases to be dealt with," said Maivor Isaksson, production director at the organization, known in Swedish as Försäkringskassan. It is planned for Försäkringskassan to cooperate with other state authorities in many 280 communities in Sweden, in order to provide some...

"Swedish glam pop star Ola Salo rubbed Washington up the wrong way when performing at the gala opening of Sweden's new US embassy on Sunday. When The Ark's lead singer caught sight of some planes preparing to land at the nearby airport, he decided to remind the audience of the events of 9/11. "In this country, you don't know where those planes are headed," he said. According to Expressen Salo then added: "I hope they fly into the White House rather than here". "

Swedish centre-right alliance wins wafer-thin election victory Sweden's centre-right opposition secured a narrow victory in yesterday's general election, ending 12 years of rule by the Social Democrats, who have governed for 65 of the last 74 years. Fredrik Reinfeldt, the next prime minister, declared victory shortly before 11pm after a nail-biting finish which gave his four-party Alliance for Sweden a wafer-thin parliamentary majority. His group was on course to win 178 seats in the 349-seat parliament - seven ahead of the Social Democrats and its allies on the left. With 99.7% of Sweden's districts counted, Mr Reinfeldt's alliance led with...

Alliance wins - Persson concedes Fredrik Reinfeldt is to be Sweden's new prime minister. He has declared victory, Göran Persson has said he will resign as prime minister and as leader of the Social Democrats. Reinfeldt claimed victory in his first adress to the crowds gathered at the Moderates' election party. Arriving on stage at 10.50 to a rousing first-name chorus, chants and flag-waving. It was an emphatic speech where he did all but declare himself as Sweden's new Prime Minister. "The Swedish people have voted," he began. "We have won as the new Moderates; we dared to challenge ourselves,...

Sweden's centre-right opposition bloc has defeated the ruling Social Democrat party in the country's closest-fought general election for decades. Moderate party leader Fredrik Reinfeldt gave a jubilant declaration of victory as near-complete results gave him a 1% lead. Prime Minister Goran Persson conceded defeat, saying he and his government would resign. The Social Democrat party has ruled for all but 10 of the past 89 years.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) Sweden's center-right opposition alliance has declared victory after nearly complete official results show it narrowly defeating the governing Social Democrats.

Exit poll: Alliance on the path to victory Exit polls released by Swedish TV companies predict that the centre-right Alliance is on its way to power, ending Göran Persson's 12-year period as prime minister SVT's poll gave the Alliance the bigger lead, with 49.7 percent against 45.6 percent for the Social Democrats' and allies. TV4's poll showed the Social Democrats and allies slightly closer behind the Alliance, with figures at 48.6 against 46.7 percent. "This sounds fantastic, and it's a result of a strong campaign which we are proud of. The way things look, it could well be that the...

A young, right-wing politician emerges from nowhere, captures the centre ground and ousts a discredited government after more than a decade in power. On Sunday, the dream of every conservative may be realised, not in Britain but in Sweden. The land of Volvo, Ikea and the much-vaunted Swedish social model may be on the threshold of a political earthquake. For the past 10 years, Göran Persson has been Prime Minister, leading one of the most formidable vote-winning machines in democratic politics. But opinion polls show Sunday's election is on a knife-edge. The remodelled, centrist, Swedish conservative party, known as the...

STOCKHOLM, Sweden - The letter 'W' has entered the mainstream of the Swedish language, getting its own section for the first time in the country's most respected dictionary. While 'W' has long been a letter in its own right in other Nordic languages, Swedish linguists have always viewed it as a lesser sibling of the letter 'V,' as the two letters are pronounced identically in Swedish. The few Swedish words that use 'W' have generally been borrowed from other languages — such as "watt," "walkie-talkie" and the "World Wide Web" — and have so far always been lumped under the...

Swedish automobiles have long been known as safe and steady, not fast and furious. It's no accident you've never heard the phrase "Swede speed." Right now, you're thinking about boxy, safe Volvo wagons, handy in the snow and adept with the kids and groceries, not high performance roadsters. Enter Christian von Koenigsegg, a 33-year-old Swede with fast dreams. And he's got a former fighter jet assembly plant to bring them to life. Clocking in at 245 miles per hour, Koenigsegg Automotive broke the world speed record for a production car last year with the Koenigsegg CCR. Since the first production...

Last year I wrote an article about how Swedish society is disintegrating and is in danger of collapsing, at least in certain areas and regions. The country that gave us Bergman, ABBA and Volvo could become known as the Bosnia of northern Europe. The “Swedish model” would no longer refer to a stable and peaceful state with an advanced economy, but to a Eurabian horror story of utopian multiculturalism, socialist mismanagement and runaway immigration. Some thought I was exaggerating, and that talk of the possibility of a future civil war in Sweden was pure paranoia. Was it? In a new...

WILMINGTON, N.Y. - Swedish snowboarder Jonatan Johansson died Sunday after falling during a snowboardcross run down Whiteface Mountain in the Adirondacks. The 26-year-old Turin Olympics competitor lost control on one of his jumps during training for an International Ski Federation World Cup competition, according to U.S. Ski and Snowboarding Association spokesman Tom Kelly. A state police report said Johansson tried to correct himself but landed hard. An autopsy found the cause of death to be multiple internal injuries. Officials said Johansson landed within the course boundaries and was wearing a helmet. Olympic Regional Development Authority spokesman Sandy Caligiore said he...

DAMASCUS, Syria - Thousands of Syrians enraged by caricatures of Islam's revered prophet torched the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus on Saturday — the most violent in days of furious protests by Muslims in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In Gaza, Palestinians marched through the streets, storming European buildings and burning German and Danish flags. Protesters smashed the windows of the German cultural center and threw stones at the European Commission building, police said. Iraqis rallying by the hundreds demanded an apology from the European Union, and the leader of the Palestinian group Hamas called the cartoons "an...

The Swedish parliament ceased all bilateral contacts with the Iranian parliament Tuesday, The Jerusalem Post has learned. The move follows a letter Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin sent asking parliaments worldwide to express their support for Israel. The letter, which was sent to more than 80 parliaments, called for an international response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call in October to "wipe Israel off the map." "In recent years Iran has not merely settled for verbal attacks on Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people. It has been unrelenting in its efforts to achieve nuclear military capability and has funded, supplied and...

"A 39-year-old Swede accused of terrorism by the United States has been arrested in Prague, Swedish tabloid Expressen reported on Tuesday. The man, who was not identified, is wanted by the US CIA spy agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which accuse him of being terror mastermind Osama Bin Laden's "man in Sweden", Expressen wrote. The US has tried to obtain his extradition for several years, accusing him of setting up Al Qaeda training camps in the US state of Oregon in 1999, but Sweden has refused to hand him over, the paper said. The man was on a...

One of four Swedish peacekeepers wounded in a bomb explosion in Afghanistan has died of his injuries, the Swedish military said late on Friday. The four Swedish troops, two of whom were said to be seriously injured in Friday's explosion in Mazar-i-Sharif, were from the NATO-led ISAF, which was set up in 2001, and were part of a British provincial reconstruction team. "Shortly after midnight local time (2100 Stockholm time) ISAF's military hospital in Kabul announced that one of the two seriously injured Swedes had died," the statement said. "The soldier was seriously injured in a bomb attack in Mazar-i-Sharif...

Swedish girls design anti-rape belt A group of Swedish teenage girls has designed a belt that requires two hands to remove and which they hope will deter would-be rapists, one of the creators told AFP on Tuesday. "It's like a reverse chastity belt," one of the creators, 19-year-old Nadja Björk, told AFP, meaning that the wearer is in control, instead of being controlled. The military-style buckle has a latch that the wearer has to move through a labyrinth into the correct position in order to unlock the belt. "You need two hands to open it, so the rapist can't hold...

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2005 with one half to Roy J. Glauber Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence" and one half jointly to John L. Hall JILA, University of Colorado and National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, CO, USA and Theodor W. Hänsch Max-Planck-Institut für Quantenoptik, Garching and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique". New light on modern optics As long as humans have populated...

"In what he thought was private chat with a colleague on Monday evening, Sweden's Deputy Prime Minister, Bosse Ringholm, called the country's police force "so bloody idle". "I apologise," he later told news agency TT. The frank statement about the police came after a telephone interview with the programme Nyheterna on the theme of illegal gambling machines. During the interview itself, Ringholm said that the police are doing what they can in the fight against illegal gambling. After the interview Ringholm let slip a somewhat different view of the Swedish police. " and... "The opposition parties also leapt upon Ringholm's...