“Isis appears to be focused on expanding its presence outside Syria and Iraq and on developing its international network,” Hassan Hassan writes.

The fascinating story of Europe’s oldest celebrity.

I remember reading about 5,000-year-old Ötzi in school. The mere fact that I could see the face of someone who lived that long ago sparked my imagination.

Sweden’s centre-left government has decided to launch mandatory identity checks on all trains from Denmark to Sweden. Scandinavia’s largest metropolitan area will thus be split in two, as thousands of commuters will face hours-long delays.

There has been no such border control between Denmark and Sweden since 1956, so this is a sad step in the wrong direction.

“A 17-year-old girl from Linköping in southern Sweden has been arrested in Austria,” The Local reports. “According to her family, she was heading to Syria to join the Isis extremist group.”

Horrific as this is, we must remember that violent extremists have always had an appeal on some young people in Europe. ISIS is not that different from IRA, ETA, RAF, and all other terrorist organisations Europe has had to deal with in the past decades. The main difference is that ISIS has more guns and claim a territory as their own state.

Europe has a history of problems with small groups of radicalised youth attracted to militant communism, fascism, neo-Nazism, and, now, Islamism.

Image: The logo of the Red Army Faction, often referred to as the “Baader-Meinhof Group”.

It’s sad to see a once brave and progressive feminist become an intolerant, überconservative arsehole.

“Swedish plans to try to further limit the number of asylum seekers arriving in the country are expected to be approved by parliament and would come into force on December 21st, just days before the Christmas holiday,” The Local reports. “Under the new plans, all Sweden-bound trains will be stopped at Copenhagen Airport (Kastrup Station) and passengers will be subjected to mandatory checks. The trains will be emptied at the airport platform and all passengers will need to enter the terminal to show their identification papers before being allowed to return to the platform and re-board the train.”

Stockholm’s Christmas gift to Malmö—complete chaos and frustration as a de facto wall is built right through Greater Copenhagen.

I love this lats part of the poem the best:

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

Quotation taken from the website All Poetry.

Plans for tougher identity checks on the Öresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark to stem the influx of refugees are set to come into force on 4 January 2016.

“About a month ago, a man was found with a mobile phone in his possession and punished with 45 lashes,” Fazel Hawramy, Shalaw Mohammed, and Kareem Shaheen of Guardian write. “As he was being whipped, he cried out, swearing at the Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and for that he was executed, according to locals in the city.”

Sweden’s tightened border controls on the Öresund bridge is a blow to growth in one of the country’s most vibrant regions, write Stefan Müchler and Per Tryding of the southern Swedish Chamber of Commerce.

I second that!

“After 20 years of fraught meetings, including the past two weeks spent in an exhibition hall on the outskirts of Paris, negotiators from nearly 200 countries signed on to a deal on Saturday evening that set ambitious goals to limit temperature rise and to hold governments to account for reaching those targets,” the Guardian reports.

Over the weekend I went through the contents of an old box. Amongst other things, I found this card for travel with Stockholm Public Transport. The young man looking at me seem foreign to the middle-aged man I am today. I remember being a teenager with poor self-esteem who felt out of touch with people my own age. Now I realise how very young I was in October 1991. I wonder what the future me will think of the man I am today.

“Firefighters in Osnabrück had to rescue two different men who found their ‘intimate rings’ a bit too tight for comfort on consecutive days last weekend,” The Local reports. OMG!!!

“Two Gothenburg men have been sentenced to life in prison after a court ruled that graphic video evidence showed the duo taking part in the beheading of another two people in Syria,” The Local reports.

“The Republican party is drowning in its own stupidity, and threatening the rest of us—especially Muslim Americans—with it,” Moustafa Bayoumi writes at the Guardian.

The billionaire businessman surges to 41% after releasing proposal to ban all Muslims from entering America.

“The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has won the right to marry couples in New Zealand,” Pink News reports.

In a series of video testimonials, eleven Hollywood personalities tell their personal stories of genocide.

“Sweden’s decision to impose controls at the border to Denmark has been criticised by the Danish prime minister, arguing that it will undo years of expensive marketing for the cross-border region,” The Local reports.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen is right.

“Two Muslim migrants in Sweden have been charged with the hate crime murder of a gay man after they allegedly battered the victim to death before dressing him up in women’s clothing and wrapping a snake around his neck,” Paul Joseph Watson of Infowars reports.

I don’t like the article’s focus on ethnicity. It’s not the nationality or religion that makes one a homophobic murderer.

One of the great things about living in a city—even a fairly small one like Malmö—is that you always have new things to discover. Today, when I walked home from my annual dentist appointment, I ran into the Dutch consulate. I had no idea there was one here. It’s fascinating that I found the consulate now, only a week before my New Year trip to Amsterdam.

The decision by Sweden’s centre-left government to enforce mandatory identity checks on commuter trains between Copenhagen and Malmö has resulted in a wall-like fence being built at the airport. I suggest we name it after Sweden’s Prime Minister Stefan Löfven. In this attempt to halt the influx of asylum seekers, Löfven’s government is prepared to crush the economy of Scandinavia’s largest metropolitan area. The wall is a great symbol of his manifestation of centralised power.

Image: A section of the so-called Iron Curtain that split Europe in two halves for most of the twentieth century.

“Moscow’s City Court has thrown a lawsuit which claimed emojis showing smiling same-sex couples was a violation of the law that prohibits ‘gay propaganda’,” Pink News reports.

“Twitter is giving its users new powers to block internet trolls amid claims abusive behaviour is hampering the social media site from catching up with Facebook,” Tom Morgan of the Telegraph reports. “Bruce Daisley, the head of Twitter in Europe, said the site would give its 320 millions users new tools to protect them from trolls and expose the worst offenders by encouraging people to share lists of blocked users.”

It’s a revolution—at least on Facebook.

“The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with US lawmakers and American-Jewish groups,” Adam Entous and Danny Yadron of the Wall Street Journal report.

Nothing is private in this era of mass surveillance.

In a few hours, it’s time for my annual New Year’s trip to Amsterdam. Normally, I bring along my laptop wherever I’m travelling, but this year I’ve decided to go old school. Blogging doesn’t seem as important as it once was, and perhaps I’ve finally realised that the world goes on even without my take on the latest events. I’m not saying that I’ll give up blogging—that in itself is so cliché these days. What I’m saying is that the days when I felt complied to post something every single day are in the past. That’s my only New Year’s resolution. Happy New Year!