Eideard

Call centre workers in Norway are protesting against a hi-tech surveillance system that triggers an alarm if they spend more than eight minutes per day in the lavatory. Managers are alerted by flashing lights if an employee is away from their desk for a loo break or other “personal activities” beyond the allotted time.

But unions and workplace inspectors have branded the practice at insurance company DNB as “highly intrusive” and a potential breach of their human rights.

Norway’s privacy regulator called Datatilsynet has now written to DNB telling them the monitoring system is “a major violation of privacy”. It said: “Each individual worker has different needs and these kinds of strict controls deprive the employees of all freedoms over the course of their working day.”

The employees union Finansforbundet described the rules as unacceptable…

A spokesman added: “Surveying staff to limit lavatory visits, cigarette breaks, personal phone calls and other personal needs to a total of eight minutes per day is highly restrictive and intrusive and must be stopped.”

The firm said the aim of the checks was not to measure the breaks taken by individual workers but to assess staffing needs to ensure all calls from customers were answered and it would now be reviewing the policy. Hogwash!

It is the latest example of lavatory rules in Norwegian companies.

Last year the country’s workplace ombudsman said one firm was reported for making women workers wear a red bracelet when they were having their period to justify more frequent trips to the loo.

Another company made staff sign a lavatory “visitors book” while a third issued employees with an electronic key card to gain access to the lavatories so they could monitor breaks.

Norway’s chief workplace ombudsman Bjorn Erik Thon said: “These are extreme cases of workplace monitoring, but they are real. Toilet codes relating to menstrual cycles are clear violations of privacy and is very insulting to the people concerned…”

Bosses who have a fascination with anything in an employee’s life – below the navel – really should be required to spend some time in therapy. Maybe get a life.

Is this a Norwegian thing? I’ve only had one supervisor in my life who seemed to have this sort of demented fixation on my life in the crapper. Harvey – are you still out there somewhere?

Norway’s holiday butter shortage leads to criminal solutions

Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.

The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.

“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.

“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit…

The arrests follow the seizure earlier this month of a 90kg consignment found stashed in the car of a Russian man at the Norwegian-Swedish border. The Norwegian police plan to destroy the confiscated butter.

They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system in New Mexico.

The setting midnight sun lights a massive arched iceberg from the Ilulissat Kangerlua Glacier

“Several of the shots remind me that I’m lucky to be alive. There was a massive arched iceberg in Greenland that captivated me,” says Paul. “The midnight sun lit the arch with this amazing orange light, but the only way to photograph it was to motor inside it. The berg was shaped like an enormous hollow molar, and I sucked up my courage to dash in with my boat, shooting the scene as fast as I could. The light was fading fast and I was pretty worried that the whole thing could collapse, roll over, dump me in the ocean. I kept listening for the thunderclap that would mean the end for me. A tour boat from the nearby village motored past and watched in disbelief. I could hear the guide telling them how very, very dangerous this was. When I was done, I yelled across to them, “Please don’t tell my mom!“

While I’ve never cared to work at being a professional photographer, I’ve known a few. Specialists in everything from food to motorsports. Truly tempting way to earn a living recording truth, beauty – or seemingly unimportant moments.

Talent like Paul Souder’s deserves a special level of recognition.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

The rally, particularly huge in a nation of fewer than five million people, took place hours after Anders Behring Breivik appeared in a closed court charged with the murders.

The rose is the symbol of the Norwegian Labour party, whose youth camp members were cut down in Breivik’s gun rampage on Utoya island on Friday.

Prime minister Jens Stoltenberg told the crowd: ‘We will not let fear break us. The warmth of response from people in Norway and from the whole world makes me sure of this one thing – evil can kill a single person but never defeat a whole people…’

Earlier, a scheduled minute’s silence stretched on for five minutes in Oslo, while similar tributes were held not only across the country but in neighbouring Sweden and Denmark. Flags flew at half-mast across the capital, where a sea of bouquets is growing around the cathedral.

Mechanic Sven-Erik Fredheim, 36, said: ‘This is a tragic event to see all these young people dying due to one man’s craziness.

‘It is important to have this minute of silence so that all the victims and the parents of the families know that people are thinking about them.’

The turnout was so great the scheduled “march” had to be canceled. The whole of downtown Oslo was already filled with mourners leaving no room for a march route.

Anders Behring Breivik is a conservative Christian who enjoys classical music and the video game World of Warcraft.

Breivik has been named by several Norwegian media outlets as the suspected shooter at a youth camp in Oslo, where 10 80 people were killed Friday and he may be linked to a bombing near the prime minister’s residence that killed seven others.

On his Facebook page, which appears to only have been started July 17, Breivik mostly posted music videos and said his interests include hunting and bodybuilding…

His profile also says he’s a director at a company called Breivik Geofarm.

He lists himself as single and has five profile photos – four of which are headshots…

A Twitter account is also being linked to Breivik, although there is just one tweet on July 17.

“One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests,” he wrote.

The television station TV 2 in Norway reported Breivik had right-wing extremist tendancies and had two guns registered under his name.

The headline is from some unnamed official who was asked about “international” terrorism.

“Money is not the problem,” the union leader tells me brightly — and for a moment I feel far from debt-stricken, austerity-obsessed Europe…

“Women,” says the union leader, Mie Opjordsmoen of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade, a mother of two. “Norwegian women work, pay taxes and have babies. That’s our secret.”

I am touring one of the world’s last functioning welfare states and finding preconceptions shattered one by one. Unions here peg their wage demands to the needs of the export industry. Employers lobby for longer parental leave for fathers. Parties win elections promising not to cut taxes.

And gender equality is treated as a competitive advantage: By law, 40 percent of Norwegian boardroom seats are filled with women. Two male cabinet members, Knut Storberget, the justice minister, and Audun Lysbakken, the minister of equality (yes, this position exists), recently took three and four months off, respectively, to look after their latest offspring. The cost of full-time toddler child care is capped at the equivalent of about two Big Macs a day thanks to state subsidies…

“One Norwegian lesson,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said from his modestly sized office one afternoon, “is that if you can raise female participation, it helps the economy, birth rates and the budget…”

All told, family policy, including a system of child care from a guaranteed place for 1-year-olds to after-school and vacation care, costs the Norwegian government 2.8 percent of gross domestic product. “These policies are expensive, but their cost is offset by the return in terms of female labor supply and tax revenues,” says Danielle Venn, a labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even excluding oil, Oslo’s deficit of 5.4 percent of G.D.P. is a percentage point below the E.U. average…

Every two years, her union calculates wage demands by closely examining the cost base and demand situation of Norway’s export industries and then working back from that. “We negotiate for exporters first. No other industry gets more,” she explained…

Economically literate unions and employers may be necessary ingredients of a 21st-century welfare state. But nothing works without an electorate willing to pay taxes, the prime minister notes. Tax revenue accounts for 42 percent of G.D.P. here, compared with a 35 percent O.E.C.D. average.

“Many European countries have been trying to achieve the tax level of the U.S. and the welfare level of Scandinavia. That’s not possible,” said Mr. Stoltenberg. “We won two elections promising not to lower taxes. Voters know: Tax cuts mean welfare cuts.”

Entirely too rational for the average American voter – illiterate in history and economics. And our Congress and the Christian right wing would shriek with claims of the imminent anti-Christ. Collecting taxes from all for the common good, education and opportunity would make our hypocrite puritans hide under the bed.

Worn out by a fast-paced life and faster-paced television shows but lack a vacation budget? Take a five-day cruise along Norway’s scenic fjords, all free and streamed live on Norwegian public television.

For 8,040 minutes straight — including all the boring bits — viewers can follow the Hurtigruten MMS Nordnorge cruise ship and its roughly 670 passengers and crew as the vessel steams north along Norway’s jagged coastline.

The “minute-by-minute” coverage started on Thursday and includes all on-board announcements and views from 11 cameras focusing on the spectacular fjords, boat traffic around the ship, officers on the bridge and the mostly elderly passengers strolling the decks and taking in the scenery.

“It is slow, it is very slow,” said Rune Moeklebust, the project manager for the show running on the NRK2 channel.

“It is the opposite to everything else on TV — that’s why it stands out and why, apparently, people want to watch.”

Preliminary viewing data is encouraging, Moeklebust told Reuters, with 1.3 million of Norway’s 4.9 million residents at least “stopping by” NRK2 between 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. on the first day…

“Some say it’s like watching paint dry but it’s so fun to sit in the master control room and mix the cameras,” said Moeklebust, adding that 22 NRK crew were aboard the vessel providing the non-stop coverage.

Moeklebust said the idea for the cruise livecast came after the success of his previous minute-by-minute coverage from a train making a 7-hour trip between Oslo and Bergen, which was viewed at least in part by 1.2 million people in 2009.

Just as “slow food” satisfies a need that much of today’s society ignores, this slow experience is especially enjoyable.

I used to record it so I wouldn’t miss an episode.

Afghanistan is the worst place in the world to be a mother and Norway is the best…

“Afghanistan has the highest lifetime risk of maternal mortality and the lowest female life expectancy in the world,” putting it at the bottom of the the Mothers’ Index, which has been compiled for the past 12 years by the nonprofit group Save the Children.

In Afghanistan and the nine other countries at the bottom of the index, an average of one in six kids dies before age five and one in three suffers from malnutrition, the report says.

Nearly half the population in the worst countries to raise kids lacks access to clean water, and only four girls for every five boys are enrolled in primary school.

Five Nordic nations and two in the southern hemisphere made up the top seven countries for mothers.

They were, in order, Norway, Australia, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand and Finland.

Three European nations — Belgium, the Netherlands and France — rounded out the top 10…

A gulf of differences, especially in health, separates top-ranked Norway from bottom-of-the-heap Afghanistan.
In Norway “skilled health personnel are present at virtually every birth,” greatly reducing the likelihood of the mother or baby dying, while in Afghanistan, only 14 percent of births are attended, the report says.

The average life expectancy for a Norwegian woman is 83 years; in Afghanistan, it is 45.

More than eight in 10 Norwegian women use a modern form of contraception, and only one in 175 lose a child before his or her fifth birthday.

In Afghanistan, meanwhile, less than one in six women use modern contraception, and one child in five dies before reaching the age of five.

“At this rate, every mother in Afghanistan is likely to suffer the loss of a child,” the report says.

RTFA to expand your understanding of what it means to be a mother – and where. To clarify for my American readers – an American child is twice as likely as a child in Finland, Greece, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, Norway, Slovenia, Singapore or Sweden to die before reaching age five.

You can get the whole report over here [.pdf].

The latest tests conducted by anthropologists at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have proven that the bacteria Yersinia pestis was indeed the causative agent behind the “Black Death” that raged across Europe in the Middle Ages.

The cause of the epidemic has always remained highly controversial and other pathogens were often named as possible causes, in particular for the northern European regions. Using DNA and protein analyses from skeletons of plague victims, an international team led by the scientists from Mainz has now conclusively shown that Yersinia pestis was responsible for the Black Death in the 14th century and the subsequent epidemics that continued to erupt throughout the European continent for the next 400 years. The tests conducted on genetic material from mass graves in five countries also identified at least two previously unknown types of Yersinia pestis that occurred as pathogens…

In their reconstruction, Stephanie Hänsch and Barbara Bramanti, show an infection path that runs from the initial transportation of the pathogen from Asia to Marseille in November 1347, through western France to northern France and over to England. Because a different type of Yersinia pestis was found in Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands, the two scientists believe that the South of the Netherlands was not directly infected from England or France, but rather from the North. This would indicate another infection route, which ran from Norway via Friesland and down to the Netherlands. Further investigations are required to uncover the complete route of the epidemic.

Who knows? If we continue to acquire enough nutballs whose fear and trepidation focuses on vaccination and other modern medical treatment, maybe the Black Death will make a comeback.

Can our society survive without Christians, Republicans and vegans?