Wallander does 'Doktor Glas'
Krister Henriksson, the great Swedish actor, is mostly known abroad as Wallander in the television series. But now he can be seen on stage as Doktor Glas in a one-man show adapted from the 1905 novel by Hjalmar Söderberg. And in London’s West End no less. “Maybe it’s silly to do but at least it’s brave,” says Henriksson in an interview with the BBC. “I’ve had a long career as an actor in Sweden and this is the right point for me to do something very risky and challenging.” The Söderberg novel, familiar to most Swedes, tells the story of a 19th century physician who falls madly in love with a patient—the unhappily married wife of a clergyman. Henriksson says the book had a great impact on him, when he read it as a teenager. "It's a crime story but at the same time it asks philosophical and existential questions.” And it was while filming his first Wallander series in 2005, that Henriksson returned to Söderberg’s novel. "In Sweden we have something we call 'hotel death,'" he explains. "If you live too long at a hotel you will die! I was growing fatter and going to the bar, so I thought I must rescue myself and find something meaningful to do in my free time.” Henriksson remembers seeing actor Allan Edwall, his idol, do Doktor Glas and telling Henriksson that one day he ought to do the part as well. In Stockholm, he did and to great success. So when British producer Martin Witts wanted to bring Doktor Glas to London in order to tap into the British passion for Scandinavian culture (what with Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, the Danish television series “The Killing” and the Norwegian film “Headhunters” based on a novel by Jo Nesbo), Henriksson said yes. Though at first he wanted to do it in English, he realized he was better off doing it in his native Swedish with subtitles. "You become deaf to the beauty of your own language because you speak it all the time. It's like Shakespeare—you can translate it but you lose the poetry." The Telegraph gives Henriksson good reviews: “His pacing is exquisite—a series of crises of longing and revulsion, punctuated by moments of black comedy, which culminate in an eerily calm conclusion.” As does The Upcoming: “This intense and brilliantly acted one-man-show still manages to captivate with the English subtitles. They do, however, take some getting used to, mainly because you don’t want to take your eyes off Krister Henriksson.” For more information and tickets: www.drglas.com

Social Democrats suggest summer school
In their spring budget motion, the Social Democrats suggest mandatory summer school (lasting up to 20 days) for 9th grade students who fail to qualify for senior high school. This according to Magdalena Andersson, the party’s economic spokesperson. The Social Democrats also propose a possibility for a summer senior high school for those students who have yet to fulfill the demands for examination. These proposals are estimated to cost 90 million SEK ($13,619,462). The party also wants to allocate 100 million SEK ($15,061,102) to those municipalities that are most ambitious in offering summer jobs for young people.

New fat cell cure for obesity
Swedish scientists have found a new type of fat cell in humans that is extra effective in turning fat into heat. This opens the door to new treatments for obesity and type 2 diabetes. The discovery has to do with the body’s brown fat cells, which unlike the white fat cells can burn energy and turn it into heat. It was previously thought that humans had only one type of brown fat cells, but the Swedish research team has discovered yet another, called “beige adipose tissue.” “With the results we’ve had, we should in the long run be able to develop methods to stimulate the brown adipose tissue, so that some of the excess energy we have as adipose tissue can be transformed into heat,” says Sven Enerbäck, who has led the study conducted at the Sahlgrenska Academy in collaboration with Linköping University. Though such a treatment lies far in the future, it could eventually prevent obesity as well as lessen the risk of developing obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes. “We already know today that those of us who have more beige adipose tissue have less of a risk in developing type 2 diabetes,” says Enerbäck in a press release. The findings were published in Nature Medicine.

Gay-friendly mosque to open?
Poet Mohamed Omar wants to create Sweden’s first gay-friendly mosque. “Many Moslems are open and modern, but not organized. The Moslem organizations in Sweden are conservative,” he writes on his blog. “Me and my friends have decided to open Sweden’s first gay-friendly mosque in Uppsala. It is also actively going to promote equal rights for men and women. No gender segregation.” Omar says there’s a low ceiling in the mosques in Sweden. “There’s so much you cannot talk about,” he says to Metro.se “Like relationships outside marriage, boy- and girlfriends, and homosexuality.” He continues to explain that young Moslems in Sweden don’t feel welcome in the conservative organization’s values, and that he hopes the new mosque will put forth feminist and modern interpretations of Islam. “It’s oftentimes too little culture, poetry and debate. In the mosques today there’s almost always an imam preaching. Young people don’t feel at home there.” Soon Omar and ten others will start an organization working for the new mosque, but when it will open is yet not clear. The leader for the organization Homan, Ardeshir Bibakabadi, has said he wanted to start a gay mosque in Göteborg. His idea comes from, among other places, Paris, where a gay-friendly mosque has already opened. And progressive mosques in Europe also inspire Mohamed Omar. “It’s great that they are on a roll in Göteborg also. But we would of course like to be the first ones out. It’s a chance to write history,” he says.

Meteorite made hole in lawn
One February morning, Bo Palm in Vadensjö, outside Landskrona, woke up to a bang in his backyard. When he went outside to check, he saw smoke coming out of a 20-centimeters (almost 8 inches) deep hole in his lawn. Donning a pair of gloves, he picked up a nearly boiling hot stone, which smelled like sulfur and weighed about 1 kilo (2.2 pounds). Bengt Rosengren, a doctoral candidate in astronomy, has classified the stone as a meteorite. “I thought it might be the tail of the meteorite rain in Russia,” says Palm to Helsingborgs Dagblad. However, Rosengren sees no such connection: “These sort of meteorites hit randomly several times during a 24 hour period, all over the globe,” he says to the same newspaper. “But the chance of it hitting a residential neighborhood is extremely small.” Palm hasn’t yet decided what to do with the stone, he is thinking about selling it. For an astronomical sum of course.