Noruega (Continuación)

EuropaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

«Soy un caballero templario, masón. Llamo a hacer la guerra contra los marxistas y los islamistas…». Esta breve declaración que Anders Behring Breivik difundió por las redes sociales horas antes de acometer su masacre en la isla de Utoya y en el centro de Oslo, podría esconder el hilo maestro del que tirar si queremos comprender su verdadera personalidad. Estamos ante un temperamento de hielo, elaborado sobre el convencimiento de que su fin -la liberación de Europa de la «guerra demográfica» islámica y lo que él llama la permisiva cultura marxista- ha justificado la muerte de más de 90 personas, la mayoría jóvenes de entre 14 y 19 años.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

“Isn't it kind of scary that one man could wreak this kind of hell?” Timothy J. McVeigh said of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people. Indeed, it is.

Automatic weapons and potent bombs allow the deranged and begrudged to slaughter scores of innocents in mere seconds. Witness the shootings at the University of Texas in 1966 (14 killed), Columbine High School in 1999 (13 killed), Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 killed), or, for those with a sense of history, see Bath School disaster of 1927 in which an angry school board member blew up 38 children and 6 adults in Michigan.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

¿Qué tipo de trastorno mental y moral lleva a un joven a acabar con el corazón de la vida política de una nación pacífica y a ejecutar una matanza de más de 90 personas en un campamento juvenil? Un psicólogo amigo me comentó, cuando el horror todavía estaba teniendo lugar, que «esto parece algo así como un parricidio final, el modo de proceder de alguien que se ha sentido traicionado por las autoridades de su infancia y que ha desarrollado un odio extremo hacia todo tipo de autoridades». En estos momentos, ya se han filtrado las últimas noticias acerca de la «autoridad de su infancia»: su padre recibió la noticia de los crímenes de su hijo cuando leía noticias en internet en su casa del sur de Francia.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaInternacionalTerrorismo Internacional,

Like every other citizen of Oslo, I have walked in the streets and buildings that have been blown away. I have even spent time on the island where young political activists were massacred. I share the fear and pain of my country. But the question is always why, and this violence was not blind.

The terror of Norway has not come from Islamic extremists. Nor has it come from the far left, even though both these groups have been accused time after time of being the inner threat to our "way of living". Up to and including the terrifying hours in the afternoon of 22 July, the little terror my country has experienced has come from the far right.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaAmpliación

Norway has seen two referendums on EU membership, the first one in 1972, the second in 1994. Both times, the people said no. My own experience, I think, was fairly representative. 1972 was two years before I was born, but in 1994 I was studying at the University of Bergen, and working day and night for the "no" movement. I don't think saying "yes" ever seriously entered my mind at the time; turning your back on the European Union was just part of being part of the left. The way I saw it then, any progressive cause I could think of – defending democracy and the welfare state, fighting global inequalities, saving the planet – was better served by saying no to what I regarded as an essentially neoliberal order.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Today the leaders of the five Nordic states are meeting to discuss the possibility of creating a Nordic federal state. Ever since the Kalmar Union of the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – reaching to Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Shetland and Orkney – collapsed in 1523, the idea of reinstating some sort of a supra-national Nordic state regularly crops up. Now this old idea has resurfaced in a book the Swedish history professor Gunnar Wetterberg submitted to the Nordic Council in Reykjavik today.

Wetterberg argues that together the Nordics (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, with the three micro territories the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Aland), will be stronger and more stable and prosperous than they are on their own.…  Seguir leyendo »

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¡Salarios iguales ya! ¡Salarios iguales ya!", se oían los gritos desde la ventana de mi hotel en Oslo, mientras los huelguistas y sus partidarios se manifestaban ante el Parlamento noruego. ¿Cómo era posible? ¿Hay huelgas hasta en el paraíso?

Noruega es, de acuerdo con casi todos los parámetros, algo muy parecido a un paraíso terrenal. En renta per cápita es uno de los países más ricos del mundo. Es también uno de los más igualitarios. Posee un sistema de bienestar que es la envidia de todos los socialdemócratas. Las madres tienen 10 meses de permiso de maternidad con el sueldo completo.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfricaEuropaInternacionalONU, ,

A proud nation of peace, Norway has traditionally been one of the staunchest supporters of UN peacekeeping. But this is now turning, as Norway may pull the plug on the entire UN peacekeeping commitment in Chad. By recalling the entire Norwegian medical contingent starting on 15 May, the fate of nearly a 250,000 refugees – many from the Darfur region – will be left uncertain.

The UN force in Chad is essential for the stability of the Darfur region. In eastern Chad on the border with Darfur, the famine would be greater and the violence no doubt more extensive without the many escorts and patrols of UN peacekeepers.…  Seguir leyendo »

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In the struggle to reveal details of the waste dumping in Ivory Coast, the Guardian and the BBC are not alone in attracting the attentions of Trafigura's lawyers brandishing gags. Here in Norway, at the national broadcaster, we too were issued with stern legal warnings. And so we published.

Norway has an important, if little reported, role in the Trafigura scandal. Back in 2006, as the Probo Koala tanker ship delivered waste to Ivory Coast, her sister ship, Probo Emu, was preparing for the same journey. But when controversy emerged in the west African state, Trafigura redirected the vessel to a tank facility in Norway.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaAmpliación

Jens Stoltenberg, the recently re-elected Prime Minister of Norway, could not have been more frank. Asked if entry into the European Union was on his government’s agenda, he replied — almost with pride — that Norway was the only country that had twice rejected Brussels’ embrace. There were, he said, no plans to hold a third referendum. “I was there the last time it was defeated . . . and I don’t seek new defeats.”

He might have added that half of his “coalition of workers, farmers and dreamers” was against membership in principle and that, since Norway benefits from an agreement with the EU that provides the benefits of free trade without the threat of federalism, only diehards want to argue about going right in or staying right out.…  Seguir leyendo »

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La Norvège est généralement connue comme un pays où prévalent la cohésion sociale et le consensus autour de valeurs telles que la solidarité et le refus de l’exclusion. Pourtant, lors des dernières élections législatives, un parti populiste, sinon d’extrême droite, le Parti du progrès, y a obtenu 22,9% des suffrages, ce qui en fait le deuxième parti norvégien, et ceci pour la deuxième fois consécutive. Ne faut-il pas attribuer ce résultat précisément à ce qui devait prémunir la Norvège contre toute poussée extrémiste : la constante préoccupation, non seulement des principaux acteurs politiques, mais de la société, d’éviter à tout prix les conflits ouverts, qu’ils soient publics ou privés ?…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaEuropa, , , , , ,

The drastic climatic changes in the Arctic, viewed first-hand this week by an ‘alarmed’ UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, are threatening to unleash not only environmental catastrophe on the rest of the world but a furious political struggle between competing regional governments.

The Arctic Five - the US, Russia, Norway, Canada and Denmark (Greenland) - are scrambling to secure territorial rights to disputed and hitherto unclaimed parts of the world’s last great wilderness. This is partly because the retreat of local sea ice is opening up to exploitation what many leading experts think could be massive reserves of petroleum- even as much as 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil and 30% of its undiscovered natural gas.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Como ya hiciera con el Kursaal de Rafael Moneo y el MUSAC de Mansilla y Tuñón, el premio Mies van der Rohe ha vuelto a reconocer la capacidad de la arquitectura, de un sólo edificio, para desplazar el centro de gravedad de una ciudad. La Ópera de Oslo firmada por el estudio Snøhetta es la primera pieza de una operación que transformará completamente la lectura y el uso de un enclave que quiere reivindicarse a sí mismo como Fijord city. Y es que, como tantas ciudades desarrolladas a espaldas del mar, Oslo depositó en las riberas de su fiordo las instalaciones portuarias cerrando a sus habitantes el contacto con el agua.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesSocialEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

One of my best friends is a Finn. She came to England at 16, but when it came to giving birth to her first baby 13 years later, there was no hesitation: she went home. When she returned, along with her stories of state of the art healthcare, she brought tangible evidence of the largesse of the Nordic welfare state: each new mother was given a box of exquisite new baby clothes and equipment. Everything was a perfect mint green and lavender. In contrast, when it was my turn several years later to give birth in the UK in an overcrowded, dirty hospital, a harassed nurse handed me a plastic bag stuffed with leaflets advertising baby products and a couple of free samples.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaEuropa, , , , ,

With the Arctic ice melting, anticipated increases in Arctic shipping, tourism and economic activity, and Russia’s flag-planting at the North Pole last summer, there has been much talk in the press about a “race to the Arctic” and even some calls for a new treaty to govern the “lawless” Arctic region.

We should all cool down. While there may be a need to expand cooperation in some areas, like search and rescue, there is already an extensive legal framework governing the region. The five countries bordering the Arctic Ocean — the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway and Russia — have made clear their commitment to observe these international legal rules.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Aboard Training Vessel Arctic Tern, off Newport, R.I.

Russia’s flag-planting caper at the North Pole last week captured the world’s attention. Harking back to the heady days of colonial imperialism and perhaps the success of Sputnik, a resurgent Russia dispatched from Murmansk a nuclear-powered icebreaker and a research vessel armed with two mini-submarines to stake a symbolic claim to the Arctic Ocean’s riches. Russia hopes that leaving its flag encased in titanium more than 13,200 feet beneath the frozen surface bolsters its 2001 claim that the Lomonosov Ridge is a geological extension of its continental shelf and thus the 460,000 square miles of resource-rich Arctic waters stretching from the North Pole to Eurasia fall under the Kremlin’s jurisdiction.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión EuropeaDefensa y SeguridadMundoOceaníaInternacionalOrden Mundial, , ,

La adaptación de las Fuerzas Armadas al nuevo entorno de seguridad. El caso de tres "potencias medias": Australia, Países Bajos y Noruega. Por Roger Cabrera, Universidad de Saint Andrews (REAL INSTITUTO ELCANO, 16/03/06):

Tema: Este documento ofrece una visión general de las políticas militares diseñadas e implementadas por tres países de tamaño medio en el contexto del actual entorno de seguridad internacional.

Resumen: La “transformación” de las fuerzas militares en herramientas modernas y eficaces para garantizar la seguridad en un mundo cambiante es una preocupación clave de Estados y organizaciones internacionales. Algunas “potencias medias”, con recursos limitados pero dispuestas a contribuir a la seguridad, están adaptando sus fuerzas armadas para hacer frente a nuevas y desafiantes amenazas y a las exigencias de una mayor cooperación en el seno de alianzas y coaliciones.…  Seguir leyendo »