Archive for April, 2012

‘Racist’ cake controversy puts The Local front and centre

Miscellaneous: April 19th, 2012 by OG

Thanks in no small part to reporting by The Local, the whole world seems to talking about Sweden’s minister of culture and her cutting of a ‘racist’ cake.

Indeed, a scroll through articles about the incident listed on Google News shows that major media outlets the world over caught wind of the story via The Local.

Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, National Public Radio, ABC News, The Huffington Post, MSNBC all quote The Local in their reporting about the incident.

Of course, this comes as no surprise to those of us at The Local or our regular readers who are accustomed to reading stories about Sweden on The Local a day or two before they hit the international press.

Click here for at a look at a gallery of a five other stories that made headlines around the world after first appearing as a headline on The Local.

The Local reaches 20,000+ Facebook fans

Miscellaneous: April 13th, 2012 by OG

Well, that didn’t take long!

We’re proud to announce that we’ve reached the milestone of 20,000 “likes” on Facebook.

This news came after 60 new followers jumped to the cause after we announced we were nearly there on Wednesday.

60 new followers in two days… suppose that means 50, 000 is just around the corner.

If you’re one of the 20K, thanks for your support!

If not (yet), please click “like” here to keep up to date with Sweden’s news in English (and Germany, Switzerland, Norway and France’s news too!)

And have a nice weekend.

20,000 Facebook fans… almost!

Miscellaneous: April 10th, 2012 by OG

The number of “fans” on our Facebook page has grown to almost 20,000.

In fact, as this is being typed, the figure stands at 19,952.

Will you be the lucky person who takes us over the hump??

If you’re not already a fan, click here, “like” the page, and enjoy the highlights of the news (from all our five European sites).

What are you waiting for?

New Word of the Week – revealed!

Miscellaneous: April 2nd, 2012 by OG

So, did you guess the word of the week this week? Here at The Local, we were fairly gobsmacked that no-one clued on…

You’ll kick yourself when you hear it…

It was…

Gobsmacked

We did have one reader who correctly guessed it, however that was three weeks ago after we slipped a “gobsmacked” in as a red-herring.

So once again, The Local takes home the cake and the scoreboard now reads TL: 5 – Readers: 0

In case you missed them, the articles containing the word in question were:

• Stockholm iPad ‘magic’ a surprise YouTube hit
• 87-year-old woman discovers she is ‘dead’
• Pot growers plead not guilty for ‘organic’ weed
• Sweden mulls shaving products ban for minors

One of these was an April Fools’ story, too.

According to dictionary.com, gobsmacked is defined as an adjective meaning astounded or astonished, springing from British slang.

According to Tyda.se, gobsmacked can be translated into Swedish with the word “chockad”.

As for next week, keep an eagle eye out and you may become the first to guess The Local’s Word of The Week correctly. Simply email us or tweet to us @thelocalsweden – with a #tlwow hashtag.

Perhaps we’ll make this one even easier for you…

Good luck!