His critique was based on classic journalism paradoxes, such as having access to the inner circle without becoming part of it and building trust without misleading ones sources about ones motives. It did however show a glaring lack of understanding of digital social tools. I chalked it up to a generational digital divide. The people I went to college with were the first generation in Norway to grow up with the Internet.

Recently he has been criticized for his critique of Twitter, which is prevalent among Norwegian journalists. This week he finally relented and joined the social network. Within two days he has reached almost 1,000 users, although he is only following about 80 at this point. The first fumbling tweets were thoughtful and provocative, but still reflective of his bully pulpit. The second day on Twitter, he started joining the conversation and tweeting people back. The bully pulpit was gone, without losing sight of his role as the grand old man.

In my opinion, social media have two primary benefits for journalists. 1. It levels the playing field so people who usually don’t have access can reach the reporter. 2. It provides a transparency to the social network of the reporter. Transparency and access are essential to representative community reporting. I hope Kokkvold will experience this first-hand as he continues his Twitter experiment.

And for the record, it is good to get his thought provoking admonitions every morning. Now that I freelance, there is no newsroom staff meeting at 10 a.m. where we bounce ideas and advice off each other. It is me, my phone, and my laptop. My old editor Tom Warhover will probably always be a voice in my head, but it is good to get fresh material once in a while. So welcome to the digital age Per Edgar Kokkvold, us youngens appreciate having you here.

I came across this headline in New Scientist this morning: “Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile”.

The story details a longitudinal study that has was started in 1948, which looks at various physiological traits, such as height, weight, hearth health, number of children, etc.

“Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later“

This is a compelling study for natural selection by reproduction. That shorter, plumper women have more kids is news, but that natural selection selects for fertility should hardly end up in the headline. Reproductive success IS natural selection for crying out loud.

End of rant mode.

Norwegian reactions to Obama’s Nobel make it unequivocal to me that the President is being used for personal and political purposes. My story places the responsibility for this on the new committee chair, Thorbjørn Jagland. This is his first year on the committee and he has ambitions that far outweigh his abilities. His political track record shows him to be a klutz, at least in public. He is probably a great behind the scenes kind of guy, also judging by his political career.

Anyway here is my lede:

“Most of the world, including President Barack Obama, woke up last Friday to quite a surprise. But the real story is that Thorbjørn Jagland, the new committee chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, wanted to start his tenure with a splash. He had promised insiders a winner that would gain international recognition.”

Read the rest of the story at Reason.

“One person that did predict this result was Gerhard Helskog, an experienced reporter covering the foreign desk for TV2, the largest private newsnetwork in Norway. He said the new committee chair, Torbjørn Jagland like to think big, and Obama was big in Jagland’s eyes.” Read the whole thing.

Yes, I can assure you that Norwegian’s are as incredulous about this as everyone else. I am sorry Obama had to be “thorbjorned” as Yoni Brenner write in the New York Times Saturday. Yes, another new Norwegian lending word was added to English to accompany words like Quisling and ombudsmann.

Thorbjorned: When sycophants that think the help you completely side rails you.

We are staying at my mother-in-law’s while our landlord is rebuilding the kitchen, which means I have to cook kosher and use kosher products. Most of the lunch meats and such that I would like to eat are not kosher, so I am either stuck with sweet quick lunches like cereals, or my new invention:

Pirogies are a stuffed pasta filled with a potato filling. My favorite is the onion and potato pierogi. My beloved prefers to fry his pierogi in lots of butter, but I prefer mine steamed in a broth. This quick and easy lunch is half a can of kosher chicken broth with four pierogies and a drizzle of fresh parsley on top.

It does not get quicker and easier than this! Now I am ready for my afternoon working session.

Armed with cameras, the four set out to achieve what the U.S. and all of its allies has been unable to do; bring wanted criminals from the war on terror to justice. This is done in a ridiculous blend of an action movie narrative paired with documentary style content. The result is an uneasy blend of reality TV that undermines the original message. Lets call it a dramamentary.

The pilot features a man known as Mullah Krekar, who has been a hot potato for Norwegian politicians since his arrest at Schiphol Airport in 2002. Krekar was on his way back from one of his frequent trips to Kurdistan, where he belonged to the leadership of the terrorist group Ansar al Islam.

The U.S. State Department followed the rise of Ansar al Islam since Krekar founded it in 2001 because of local terrorist activities. These included assassination of elected government officials from competing parties, unlawful detention and torture of civilians, and outright terrorist attacks using suicide bombers and improvised explosive devices. Colin Powel identified the group as a link between Al Quaida and Saddam Hussein in a speech to the UN Security Council on February 5th, 2003.
The U.S. Treasury Department listed him as wanted for financing terrorist operations on December 7, 2006. The UN Security Council placed him on the list of most wanted terrorists later that same day.

Krekar originally came to Norway as a refugee in 1991. His wife and four children have been granted Norwegian citizenships, but his application was rejected. Since his return after the 4-month detention in the Netherlands, the Norwegian Supreme Court has deemed Krekar a national security threat, his visa has been revoked, and his passport and identification papers has been confiscated.

Major mosques in Norway have all stated that he is not welcome to speak there and there is no indication that he enjoys support among Norwegian Muslims. When he assured NBC’s team that “I am now also teaching jihad, you must know,” NBC failed to include that his only madrasah is Kurdish and Islamist chat rooms on the Internet.

The leadership of Ansar al Islam was transferred to Abu Abdullah al-Shafi’i in June of 2004 according to Norwegian journalist Kadafi Zaman. This information is questioned by U.S. intelligence briefing documents, but Zaman insists that Krekar is currently is toothless.

The issue of Krekar’s extradition is causing a headache for Norwegian politicians across the political spectrum. So far 3 ministers have tried to get him extradited.

Norway is a signatory to the European Rights Convention, which means the government cannot extradite someone to a country where they will be subject to torture or death penalty. The dramamentary brought the issue back onto the political agenda, less than six weeks before the general election in September.

The polls have been tight between the center-left and the center-right coalitions all summer. The biggest parties in each of the two blocks, Labor and the Progress Party, are fighting for the same blue-collar demographics using populist approaches to questions regarding immigration and integration issues.

Every third Norwegian watched the NBC program this week. A few hours before the show aired, Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jonas Gahr Støre (Labor) issued a statement that Krekar will be extradited as soon as the government receives a guarantee that he will not be tortured or executed. A regional government, not central Iraqi authorities, issued the letter the NBC team brought with them.

Siw Jensen, head of the Progress Party and one of the two politicians featured in The Wanted, issued a statement that she guaranteed Krekar would be extradited within 100 days after a Progress Party cabinet took office. Political commentators question this statement, as the legal wrangling over an extradition would keep the issue going well into the 2013 elections.

I found it immensely amusing that it sounded like the NBC team consistently called him “cracker” rather than Krekar, but that is just a minor issue with this dramamentary.  The narrative style makes the story appear a whole lot more dramatic than it actually is.

Krekar lives in an apartment in Grønland, in a central part of Oslo. NBC portrays this a dangerous area, and lives could be lost if they are discovered during the stakeout. I lived in Oslo for many years and Grønland is a part of Oslo where I, a woman, am comfortable walking alone after dark. I find it hard to believe that a former Green Beret and a former Navy SEAL should feel unsafe there during broad daylight.

The condominium Krekar lives in on Heimdalsgata is also quite familiar to me. I have friends who used to own a unit in that particular condominium. It is a light and friendly building where a lot of families with small children live. To hear the narrator refer to the building as a “compound” is just ridiculous.

They made a big deal about setting up a hidden camera in the apartment building’s back yard because “He is not the kind of guy you can just swing through town in 48 hours and get live footage on,” according to Glen Doherty, the Navy SEAL. The team was a bit shocked to find that Krekar is indeed a guy you can swing through town in 48 hours and get live footage on. Krekar gives interviews freely, including the three hour-long interview with the NBC team.

Instead of just getting the phone number from one of the local journalists, which is what they eventually did, they broke basic ethics rules for undercover reporting. Use of undercover methods are supposed to be limited to where it is strictly necessary in order to uncover the story. Taping Mullah Krekar welcome his daughter home is probably not sufficient to warrant a breach of reporting integrity. Pressens Faglige Utvalg, the ethics council of Norwegian Press is threatening TV2 with an investigation after the channel aired the dramamentary.

Both U.S. and Norwegian authorities has tried to try Krekar on a range of charges including sponsoring terrorism and racism against U.S. citizens. He has yet to be convicted of anything. Until he is extradited to Iraq to stand trial for the atrocities that Ansar al Islam has claimed responsibility for locally, he will continue to style himself as a warrior of Islam and accept any media attention he can get.

For the time being, he lives on welfare in a publicly owned apartment in central Oslo, only a few blocks away from where Norwegian intelligence is headquartered. The Norwegian foreign ministry continues to negotiate an extradition to Iraq, and Iraq wants him back so he can stand trial. The Norwegian government is in a better position that Obama, who has to find out what to do with prisoners from Guantanamo Bay that are not welcome back in the countries they came from.

This is unfortunately the best video option I could find if you want to see this for yourself. The poster felt it necessary to add his own personal comments to the video.

The first show in The Wanted proves that the terrorist hunters become useful idiots for a propagandist such as Krekar. The producers insist they seek justice. They had a compelling story about bureaucratic red tape preventing justice to be sought. They undermined that story with a stylistic narrative that did not fit the facts.

The show is the best example I have seen on Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death. He argued that the medium is the metaphor, and anything that is shown on television is and always will be entertainment, including hard news. I sincerely hope dramamentaries does not become the next big trend in television.

Until we find a suitable house in University City, we are staying with my mother in law in Cherry Hill, NJ. She is Jewish and keeps kosher, which has provided meat and cheese loving AJ with some challenges. I am however using the opportunity to indulge in fish and vegetables, as well and flavorful chickens OR pastas that may contain dairy.

The other day I took it all the way and made pan seared tuna with a very lush salad and a really garlicky yogurt parsley dressing. The salad consisted of red leaf lettuce, cored cucumbers, radish wedges, cherry tomatoes, green beans, button mushrooms, Miranda’s mom’s home pickled beets (Thanks Miranda, they were lovely! Yeah, I have killed off the jar you left me.), scallions, avocados, fresh corn off the cob, eggs, and it was all raw. I apologize for the lack of pictures, I guess I will have to start taking them if I am going to be adventurous with food.

My next project will be a granola, as I am wholly unsatisfied with the options available in the store. Share your recipes if you got them!

The cool thing about New Jersey/Philly is the availability of reasonably priced veggies and stuff I like to cook with. It is one of 100 little clues that Shane was right when he told me I was an East Coast girl. Shane was an American I worked with at the University of Oslo, and he told me this before I moved to America. I still feel like a Midwest girl, but I am starting to fall in love with Philly. This city is everything I love about America and everything I miss about Europe so far.

Now I just got to start writing again (and find a house in University City), and life will be tasty!

Oxidative stress is cell damage caused by oxidation, the same process that causes rust on iron and makes apples and avocados turn brown. Our ability to dispose of excess reactive oxygen is reduced as we age. The most famous of the reactive oxygens are so called free radicals, which should be familiar to anyone that uses anti-aging beauty products.

If the researchers are correct in this new hypothesis, an increase in antioxidants could help stave off Alzheimer’s. Antioxidants is the latest rage in so called smart foods and you will find claims of the benefits on any green tea product in the drinks aisle, as well as on beauty products containing vitamin C. The scientific conclusions on the best way to consume antioxidants however, is still hard to find. In the mean time, make sure you eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Alternative Ideas about Alzheimer’s