“It feels horrible. There was blood and feathers everywhere.”

Left behind were the birds’ heads, claws, feathers, bones, blood and guts, as well as the unwashed saucepans, cutlery and a plate.

Curious? Check out the full story here.

Police have done the full CSI in this case.

Jönköping police have taken DNA samples from the used plate, and are labelling the crime as theft and vandalism.

What the flock?  Ritual sacrifice? Starving transient?  A plucky poacher?  A fed up neighbour ticked off by the pigeons? It's anybody's guess.

Bizarre doesn't begin to explain this. Creepy comes close.

Rats!

From the Local (Swedish mouse edition)

Gholam Hafezi was mystified when he didn't get a receipt for his 700 kronor ($104) withdrawal, but noticed instead what looked like a shoe lace hanging out of the machine, the local Västerbotten Folkblad newspaper reported.

Hafezi grabbed hold of it and to his amazement realized it was the tail of a mouse, with the head and the rest of the body stuck inside the machine.

[...]

Hafezi eventually got help from staff who were looking after trolleys, and together they managed to extract the rest of the rodent from the machine

“One of them pulled out the mouse, and its head was left intact, although it was a little bloody. Then I got out my receipt,” Hafezi told the paper.

Hell Hath No Fury, etc., etc.

Have you ever tried testicles?

Woman fined for crotch grab assault

A scorned Swedish woman who got back at her ex-husband by hijacking his Facebook account to indicate he was gay and then later attacked him by grabbing his testicles and biting him has been convicted for the assault by a court in southern Sweden.

The couple's 3-year marriage ended in the spring of 2011 after three years, prompting the woman to start a campaign of revenge against her ex-husband, who had quickly moved on to another woman, the local Skövde Nyheter daily reported.

In June, the man suspected his Facebook account had been hijacked after he discovered several contacts had been erased and his sexual preference had been changed to "interested in men".

[...]

However, the attacks didn't stop there.

When the man stood outside his new home with his new girlfriend later that summer, the upset ex-wife dropped by.

She walked up to her ex-husband and asked what they were doing, at the same time grabbing a firm hold of his testicles. [ed. - Yikes!]

I've heard they taste like nuts.

'Your baby looks like Saddam Hussein'

Must have been the Stalinesque mustache.

The Local (Swedish edition)

An administrator at the Swedish Migration Board (Migrationsverket) is facing disciplinary action after telling a family of Iraqi asylum seekers that their newborn baby looked like Saddam Hussein.

[...]

The comparison of the baby to the former Iraqi dictator came during an interview conducted last year between the employee and an asylum seeking couple from Iraq who brought their newborn infant along to the meeting.

“Who do you think he looks like?” one of the proud parents asked the Migration Board employee.

“Saddam Hussein,” the man replied.

But wait, there's more. This chap seems to have a slight miscalibration of his internal censor when it comes to veiled women too.

In other news, Sweden's unemployment rate over the past year has fluctuated between a high of 8.8% to a low of 6.6%

Most Unfortunate Headline of the Week

Football Head:  Gay Players Welcome

The Story from the Local (German edition)

The head of the German Football Association has called on gay football stars to come out of the closet and openly declare their homosexuality.

Players should have the “courage to declare themselves,” Theo Zwanziger said Tuesday during a public discussion on sexuality in elite sports at the Sportschule Hennef near Cologne. He said the situation for gay players in football was much better than it had been.

The comments come amid increasing criticism of star footballer Philipp Lahm over remarks he made earlier this week implying that Germany is not ready for gay athletes.

“Football is like earlier gladiatorial combat. Sure, politicians can now come out as homosexuals. But they don’t have to play in front of 60,000 spectators week after week,” Lahm said, according to the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.”

And so it goes.

Real people being real in the comments.

Quality of Sweden's Universities Called into Question

Sweden's Education Minister Jan Björklund explains to media just how cold it is outside.

Alright, not really.

Sweden's Education Minister is appalled at the declining standard of higher education. As reported in the Local:

“The quality of the knowledge that Swedish students have when they leave university is not enough to prepare them for adult life,” Björklund told Sverige Radio (SR), adding that too often, the quality of Swedish universities is often "too low".

“We need a much tougher and more stringent government inspection of Sweden’s higher education.”

The first proposal is bureaucratic streamlining at the top. Currently there are three government authorities overseeing universities. Björklund wants to blend those into just two.

Secondly, and more vaguely, Björklund wants to "get rid of all courses that are not up to scratch."

I would recommend re-evaluating all courses that originated from progressive hobby-horses and return to a classical liberal education comprising traditional humanities, sciences and maths; and a polytechnics education oriented around applied sciences (i.e. engineering, mining and metallurgy, meteorology, computer programming and software design, etc.).

However, this is progressive Sweden. So don't expect that this otherwise encouraging development automatically rings the death knell of Applied Marxist Social Justice and Transgendered Studies, or oceanography classes in Gay Wales Against Racism.

But it's a start. Would that we could begin the same process here. Then maybe all of the Occupy This Or That brats would be graduating with degrees that rendered them employable, and equipped them with skills that were broadly transferable. At the very least they might graduate with expectations that were grounded and realistic.

Best of luck, Mr. Björklund

Sarkozy wants France to be more like Germany

For the record, so did Marshal Philippe Pétain.  Just sayin'.

The real story from The Local.  (Hint:  it's really about strategic fiscal restructuring in the face of the European debt and currency crisis.  But you already knew that.)

Sarkozy occasionally has spats with his German counterpart Angela Merkel. They have had seriously different ideas on how to resolve the European debt crisis, for example, and Sarkozy has most recently irked Merkel by vowing to go it alone in introducing a financial transaction tax.

But the French leader clearly thinks his country has a lot to learn from a neighbour with which it has fought three wars in the past century and a half.

To be fair, you could do worse than to emulate the Germans on fiscal policy and industrial policy. If more European economies behaved like Germany, and fewer behaved like Greece, the Eurozone might have had a fighting chance -- honey-glazed though it was from the beginning by artificially low interest rates across the board irrespective of local/national economic situations.