On Thursday The Pirate Bay pledged its support joining in the protest against the Swedish Post- and Telecoms Authority (PTS).   The list has since started growing by hundreds of names per hour. It is run by the web host Binero to protest against the PTS decision to subject all Swedish se-domain names containing the word “bank” to an inspection prior to registration.

The big concern isn’t specifically about the word bank so much as it sets a precedent for other words in the future. The Swedish Bankers’ Association have lobbied for restrictions on domain names for a long time on the basis of an interpretation of the Swedish law which mandates that anyone using “Bank” as a name in their business must fulfill the requirements of one.

All countries have the same problem and lobby groups like big banks. The big risk is that this form of net censorship might spread if Sweden does it.

In an interview with Sweden’s English paper, The Local, Sven Rollenhagen of the Youth Care Foundation touts his position as one that helps young Swedish people to recognize and manage computer gaming addiction.

Already ahead of the curve by “daring” to view gaming addiction as something distinct from other common problems facing young people, Sweden’s Youth Care Foundation has put the country on the map as a leader in developing strategies for coping with the issue.

“Sweden has long been at the forefront of efforts to battle addiction,” he said, adding that there are very few, if any, experts elsewhere in the world who have dedicated their work completely to the study and management of gaming addiction.

“If you extrapolate from the number of calls we received or simply from the millions of games that are sold around the world each year, you start to see how big the pool of potential addicts is,” he said.

The Swedish Moderna Museet in Stockholm said the settlement was reached when a European art collector agreed to buy German expressionist Emil Nolde’s “Blumengarten (Utenwarf)” from the heirs of Otto Nathan Deutsch. The name of the buyer and the amount were not disclosed.

The painting is estimated to be worth between $4 million-$6 million.  Under the deal, the heirs will return compensation paid by Germany in 1961 for the lost artwork, which will remain temporarily at Moderna on loan.

The artwork, painted in 1917, depicts a garden with brightly colored flowers. It vanished at the onset of WWII as Deutsch fled Germany to the Netherlands. The artwork wasn’t seen again until the early 1960′s, when it was featured in a German gallery catalog and later reappeared in a Swiss art gallery. The Swedish museum says it bought it in good faith from the Roman Norbert Ketterer gallery in Lugano in 1967 and it has been in the hands of Moderna ever since.

When fourteen-year-old Zhiwar Naeimiakbar wondered if you can survive in space “without clothes” if you have access to air, it appeared the American space agency might not approve his question.

NASA explained they would not run the question if it included the words “without clothes” (“utan kläder”) and instead changed it to “without a spacesuit.”

Naeimiakbar was thrilled to have his question answered.

“It feels unbelievable. Sure, you talk on the telephone with your best friends, but this here was a totally different feeling, even if it was just for a few minutes, a few seconds, it felt wonderful,” he said.

Seven-year-old Cawo Ali asked Fuglesang how it felt to come back to earth after a period of weightlessness.

“It feels heavy, I can tell you. Your legs are heavy on the first day and your balance is slightly off,” wrote the Swedish astronaut, who returns to planet earth on Friday night, Swedish time.

At 5:40 am on Monday, Fuglesang and his colleague Danny Olivas wrapped up the mission’s third and final space walk. Fuglesang became the first astronaut from a country other than the US or Russia to complete more than three space walks.

Käppala school on Lidingö outside of the Swedish capital will also meet Fuglesang. One of the school’s eighth grade classes participated in a competition and were drawn as a winner during a broadcast on Swedish Television (SVT).

The Swing Inn, a Swedish night club in Malmo with a policy of excluding women with tattoos, had permitted the women entrance on other occasions during the past few years one of the women said last week.

“They told us that they don’t let in women with visible tattoos. But if we put on a sweater it would be alright,” Jessica Brotherton said, referring to herself and her Swedish friend.

The Swing Inn has a longstanding policy against tattoos, said Gabrielle Holst, the club manager.

“We want to have a well-groomed clientele with neat clothing. We think that tattoos look distasteful,” Holst said, adding the policy only applies to visible tattoos, as the management cannot ask patrons to remove their clothes.

Mathematics has once again proved to be the major stumbling block, with In 8.5 percent of pupils unable able to achieve a passing grade in the subject, although a higher proportion of those that did pass achieved distinctions.

The new statistics show minor changes on the corresponding figures for 2008 with 88.8 percent of school pupils achieving the passing grades required for high school (gymnasium) entry in the core subjects of Maths, Swedish and English.

“The figure, over 11 percent, would appear high but has largely remained the same for the past decade,” Helena Svensson at the board told The Local on Wednesday.

“Over the longer term there has been some decline. Before it was little under ten percent, now it is a little over.”

In English 7.1 percent of pupils did not make the grade while in Swedish the figure was 4.1 percent. In Swedish as a second language the figure was 27.5 percent.

The new report is based on preliminary statistics compiled from estimates produced by Statistics Sweden (SCB). Final grades will be published in November.

The board writes that the national statistics hide significant variations between and among school and local municipalities.

“Schools and municipalities are supposed to ensure that pupils are given the support that they need. They get this support, but may be it is not always the right kind of support,” Helena Svensson explained.

Gross domestic product contracted an annual, work-day adjusted 6.2 percent, from a decline of 6.5 percent in the previous quarter, Statistics Sweden said in a statement today. The median forecast of 14 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 6.7 percent contraction. GDP was unchanged from the first quarter after contracting 0.9 percent in the first three months.

“Longer term this shows the Swedish economy is stabilizing,” Nordea Bank AB economist Johanna Jeansson said in an e-mail. “We will see early signs of recovery in the second half of the year.” Jeansson expects the krona to gain against the euro in the “medium term.”

Riksbank Governor Stefan Ingves has eased policy more than his counterparts in Norway and Frankfurt, cutting the key rate to a record 0.25 percent as he struggles to jolt the economy out of recession. That’s underpinning the effect of government stimulus measures, with Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt pledging to spend 45 billion kronor ($6 billion) this year to revive growth.

Such internet activity as propelled the country into the biggest political debate for 20 years. At its heart is a controversial law passed in parliament last year. Known as the FRA Law, in honour of the Swedish electronic intelligence agency, it permits the monitoring of international phone calls, e-mail and internet traffic.

Some of the world’s most powerful computers will scan all cross-border e-traffic in real time for a quarter of a million trigger words and phrases that the security services believe warrant further investigation.

While Finland has Nokia, Sweden gave us Ericsson. Swedes enjoy some of the highest – and fastest – rates of connectivity in the world, a development that has been spurred by necessity because of the country’s sparsely populated geography, and a key factor in driving the discussion around the new law.  Cultural differences also play a part, for example Sweden’s liberal culture, part of which is the principle of Allemansratten.

Allemansratten means everyone’s right to roam and it’s an important part of Swedish culture and identity and a major factor dividing people for and against the new law.

The winning performance by Martin Norberg marked the first time in the 15-year history of the Årets Näck (‘Water Fairy of the Year’) competition that a saxophonist, or a musician playing anything other than a violin, had taken top honours.

The mesmerizing horn player almost missed the competition altogether, however, making his victory all the more unexpected.

According to legend, a water fairy is a supernatural being that takes the form of a naked man playing the violin on the shores of Swedish lakes and streams.  The creature’s captivating music supposedly holds magical powers which tempt people to into the water, causing them to drown.

The competition started in 1995 as a way to put a twist on a more traditional gathering of Swedish folk musicians.  The 2009 competition, which was held in front of a crowd of more than 400 spectators on Thursday, featured five participants, including the reigning Water Fairy of the Year, violinist Ross Campbell.

Nowhere is the crayfish so ardently worshipped as in Sweden. Eating of crayfish has expanded into a ritual meal surrounded by all manner of accessories, preferably with an authentic full moon thrown in. The decorations consist mostly of colored paper lanterns in the form of smiling moon-faces suspended over the table.

A hundred years ago, the catching of crayfish was forbidden except for a couple of months every autumn. At one time the lakes of central Sweden teemed with this black gold, which was exported to the high-class restaurants of Paris, London and Berlin, but over-fishing was threatening to annihilate them.

In 1907 the Swedish crayfish enthusiasts were struck by a disaster: the “crayfish plague” which was a lethal parasitic mould, which eliminated rare crayfish from most of Sweden’s fishing waters. The Swedes imported crayfish, first from Turkey and then from Spain and today from the US. making Sweden the world’s biggest crayfish importer.

Eating crayfish the Swedish way is not easy, but the experience of a crayfish party can very well modify the myth of Swedish uprightness.