Stockholm Rammings

A truck has rammed into a large crowd of people at a department store at a mall in Stockholm killing at least three people.

Witnesses say the large vehicle drove into people in the shopping district of Drottninggata in the Swedish capital.

There are reports of another ramming and gunfire elsewhere in Stickholm.

Drottninggatta = Queen's Way or Queen's Road.

Police said a number of people had been hurt in the incident, which comes after trucks were used in terror attacks in Nice and Berlin last year.

Gunshots were heard, bloodied bodies are seen in early coverage, and hundreds of people ran from the scene.

It is a fluid breaking news story.

Friday's Swedish Terrorist Attack

You look at what’s happening. We’ve got to keep our country safe. You look at what’s happening in Germany, you look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this? Sweden. They took in large numbers. They’re having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening in Brussels. You look at what’s happening all over the world. Take a look at Nice. Take a look at Paris. We’ve allowed thousands and thousands of people into our country and there was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. There was no nothing. So we’re going to keep our country safe. 

~ President Donald J. Trump, Melbourne, Florida, Saturday, February 18, 2017.

First there was the historical noting of the "Bowling Green Massacre," and then came the recalling of the "Atlanta Attack." Now there's a call for us to "look at what’s happening last night in Sweden." 

The list of "alternative reality" events grows.

Are we to consider that there is an alternative parallel universe where recent terrorist attacks have occurred in Bowling Green, Atlanta, and Sweden? What if those locations are now on the short list of potential targets of the future? What if a room of comedians and political cartoons are making all of this up? If 2016's word of the year was "surreal," what word can describe 2017?

The source of Trump’s remark is unclear and the attempts to explain it have already begun. But the working solution appears to be linked to Fox News' Carlson Turner airing an interview on Friday, February 17, 2017, with filmmaker Ami Horowitz, whose new documentary examines whether high crime rates in Sweden are related to its previous open-door policy on people fleeing war and persecution. No "real" Swedish terrorist attacks happened on Friday, although a President or someone on his staff watching Fox News seems to have thought so.

We have been down this road in the recent past.

U.K.'s The Guardian detailed the growing list of non-existent terrorist attacks issuing from the Trump administration, as partially quoted here:

Trump’s comments come after Kellyanne Conway, one of his senior advisers, was ridiculed for blaming two Iraqi refugees for a massacre that never happened.
At the start of February Conway cited the fictitious “Bowling Green massacre” in an interview backing the travel ban imposed on visitors from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Two Iraqi men living in Bowling Green, Kentucky, were arrested in 2011 over a failed attempt to send money and weapons to al-Qaida in Iraq. They are currently serving life sentences for federal terrorism offences, but there was no massacre, nor were they accused of planning one.
On 29 January, the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, referred three times to an attack in Atlanta – where a string of bombings were carried out in 1996 and 1997.
Later, in an email to ABC News, he wrote that he “clearly meant Orlando”.
Forty-nine people were killed and more injured in the attack at Pulse, a gay nightclub in the Floridian city in June. It was carried out by Omar Mateen, a US citizen born in New York to Afghan parents. Afghanistan is not on the list of countries under Trump’s travel ban.
Trump has repeatedly accused what he described as the “dishonest media” of producing “fake news”. He repeated the attack on Saturday stating: “When the media lies to people I will never ever let them get away with it.”
He added: “We are not going to let the fake news tell us what to do, how to live and what to believe,” he said. “We are free, independent people and we will make our own choices.”
After Trump’s remarks in Florida, the Swedish news outlet Aftonbladet posted a story about crime that really had occurred in Sweden on Friday. Non-fake news it ran included: “Due to harsh weather in northern parts of Sweden the road E10 was closed between Katterjakk and Riksgransen” and “a man died in hospital, after an accident in the workplace earlier that day”.
Source.

Trollhättan Attack: Man in Darth Vader-Type Mask Kills Two

A masked man (in his 20s) with a sword has attacked the Kronan school cafe in Trollhättan, Sweden. One teacher and one young male student are dead. Several students are injured, with at least two originally taken to the hospital. Health officials initially said the two seriously injured students were 11 and 15 years old, but apparently one of those two has died.  

The suspect, who is 21 and from Trollhättan, was shot and received medical attention. He later died at the hospital.

The media is reporting the attacker wore a Star Wars mask. USA Today noted: "the perpetrator was wearing a Darth Vader-like mask from Star Wars and that students initially thought it was a Halloween joke. The attacker even posed for pictures with two students before going on a rampage."

At some point during the rampage, he posed for a picture taken by a female pupil who thought the incident was a Halloween stunt, according to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

The attacker was holding his weapon, which was covered in blood, but the pupil did not realize the blood was real, she said.

The weapon used was a katana. Historically, katana were one of the traditionally made Japanese swords (日本刀) that were used by the Samurai of feudal Japan.
Local police have confirmed that they are investigating reports that the suspect held far right beliefs.

Marty McFly: Silence, Earthling. My name is Darth Vader. I am an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan! ~ Back to the Future (1985), in which the time travel date of significance is October 21, 2015.

School attacks are rare in Sweden. This is the first since a shooting at a school in Kungalv near Gothenburg in 1961, which killed one person and injured six others.

"Columbine Goes International: After Littleton, the copycat effect involving school shootings went global." ~ The Copycat Effect, 2004.

Photo credit: EPA.

Kronan is Swedish for "king's crown," and the school uses a stylized crown as their symbol.

Troll sign credit

The name Trollhättan is translated as "troll's bonnet." The latter part "hätta" could also mean mountain top.

Trolls are generally associated, during our modern era, with Internet mischief makers and small beings. But traditionally, in Scandinava, trolls are ogres who are said to be man-sized to gigantic.

"Some traditions of 'wild men' tell of man-like beings that exceeded human beings in height, but at their greatest heights were not more than around 7 feet tall. We would identify them as Trolls and possible descendants of Neandertals. Descendants of both those distinctive and hairy near-men are known to have survived into recent times." ~ True Giants (Anomalist Books, 2010).

Immigration Matters: Ikea, Malmö, and Malm

The Øresund Bridge is symbolic of the background to recent stories of violence in Sweden.

Two people were killed in an Ikea store on August 10, 2015. Another man was wounded. 

Two men were arrested. Authories have not identified the men, but said that they are Eritrean asylum-seekers who were living in a home for refugees in Vasteras.

Only hours earlier, violence flared again in southern Malmö, Sweden's troubled gateway to Europe. Home to the Øresund bridge and consequently the first city most of Sweden’s immigrants arrive at, the city is stalked by terrorist-like event. Yet another grenade, presumably like the others following the human trafficking route through Europe to be smuggled into the nation over the bridge, exploded on August 10, 2015, around eleven o’clock local time.

Grenade attacks in Malmö have been another form of violence linked to immigration. The southern Swedish city of Malmö has seen a string of startling explosive attacks in recent months. The pattern of targets – from flats to offices and one building housing a Ramadan celebration – appears random. The best guess, experts say, is a gang turf war that could easily see fatalities as tit-for-tat attacks spiral. But why that?

In more than a dozen attacks involving everything thing from Balkan grenades to bombs placed in cars and parks, explosions have wounded two people so far this year in Malmö. No one has been killed but not one has been arrested, either.

With a population of just 300,000, Malmö has long been a smuggling hub due its closeness to Denmark, with which it has been connected by a bridge to Copenhagen since 2000.

Around a third of the city's population are immigrants - double the national average, and nearly one in three is unemployed. Among young immigrants, the rate is nearly 40 percent - Somalis, Iraqis, Bosnians and Iranians squeezed into concrete tenement blocks.

The Øresund or Øresund Bridge (Danish: Øresundsbroen, Swedish: Öresundsbron, joint hybrid name: Øresundsbron) is a double-track railway and motorway bridge across the Øresund strait between Scania (southernmost Sweden) and Denmark. The bridge runs nearly 8 kilometres (5 miles) from the Swedish coast to the artificial island of Peberholm, which lies in the middle of the strait. The crossing of the strait is completed by a 4 km (2.5-mile) underwater tunnel, called the Drogden Tunnel, from Peberholm to the Danish island of Amager. The term Øresund Bridge often includes this tunnel.

The Øresund Bridge is the longest combined road and rail bridge in Europe, and connects two major metropolitan areas: Copenhagen, the Danish capital city, and the major Swedish city of Malmö.

[In a name game "coincidence," Ikea has been under fire in recent weeks because of their chest of drawers that have tipped over and injured and killed children. The name of the chest of drawers: Malm. Fourteen reports of Malm chest of drawers have been reported causing four injuries. Three deaths since 1989 have been attributed to other Ikea chests and dressers. But the two highly publicized Ikea Malm deaths happened in 2014. In February 2014, a 2-year old boy from West Chester, Pennsylvania, died after an Ikea Malm six-drawer chest, measuring 48⅜ inches high, tipped over and pinned him between the drawers and his bed. In June 2014, a 23-month old child from Snohomish, Washington, died after a 30¾ inch Malm chest of three drawers tipped over onto the child.]

In terms of violence in Sweden, the most shocking attack came in the industrial port city of Gothenburg in March when two masked gunmen entered a bar and sprayed a crowd with bullets during a soccer game. Two men — one reportedly tied to a local gang — were killed in the shootout and at least 10 other people were injured.Immigration, in particular, has become a touchy subject in Sweden, a country that has long prided itself on its tolerance. Germany, France and Sweden have combined to adopt a majority of the asylum-seekers flooding into Europe from Africa and the Middle East.

The Malmo's most infamous killer was Swedish-born - Peter Mangs was arrested in 2010 for three murders and 13 attempted murders over a seven-year period, a string of shootings in Malmo targeting immigrants. Mangs even plotted to kill Swedish soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic, whose parents immigrated from Bosnia, because he displayed “typically Balkan behavior.”

Although Sweden has largely escaped acts of terrorism, the country has seen more than 300 citizens leave to fight in Iraq or Syria as well as roughly 30 neo-Nazis join fighting in the Ukraine.

The knife attack at IKEA in Vasteras and the grenade attack, shootings, and more in Malmö are indirectly related to a string of items, predicted by futurists in the 1980s. The global food shortages cause turmoil, and more governments will then be in distress. Immigrant stress, governmental distress, and other internal/external distrust tends to result in regional conflicts and migrations causing resulting difficulties in the aslymn countries. Violent and mobile reactions from repressive regimes and rightwing factions are predictable. 

The droughts around the globe do have an impact. The Arab Spring revolutions swept the Middle East, and did have a foundation cause in the worldwide shortage of food and the resulting poverty. One futurist, Iben Browning specifically predicted all of this. Because Americans and other developed countries are isolated from food shortages, the effect is somewhat lessened. But it can come home to roost in other ways.

Iben Browning told us what we would be seeing unfold on our cable news channels. He was the ultimate cultural futurist. He predicted many things that have come to pass. Behind it all are the volcanoes, weather pattern disruptions, food shortages, poverty, feelings of discontent, immigration and wars. Connecting the dots involves more that the event to event copycat effect.

Iben Browning died from a heart attack on July 18, 1991.

IKEA Attack Leaves Two Dead

As I noted in "IKEA Even Set The Clock At 2:37," the store is very aware of the Stanley Kubrick syncs and twilight language messages.

Today, an attack (after 1:00 pm local time) at a Swedish IKEA store brings the notion of "Redrum" (murder) home. (See also, "Kubrick Red: Redrum, Redrug and More.")

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Two people, a man and woman, were killed at the Ikea location. Another man, 35, was seriously injured in the knife attack at an Ikea store in Vasteras, Sweden, on August 10, 2015. The victims were "ordinary shoppers" in the kitchen accessory section, Mattias Johansson, the store manager said.

Two suspects (unnamed thus far) were arrested. One of the suspects was apprehended at the scene and the second, who was seriously injured, was picked up at a hospital a few hours later, commanding police officer Per Agren said at a press conference. How he was injured was not clear.

The suspects were two men born in 1992 and 1979 who probably knew each other, Agren said. They had no connection with the victims and the motive for the attack was not known, he said.

The Erikslund shopping center containing the store had been closed. The Ikea store in Vasteras, which is about 70 miles (115km) west of the capital Stockholm, is one of the largest in the country.

Local police said they had been called to the store around 1300 CET (0700 ET).

Västerås is one of the oldest cities in Sweden and Northern Europe. The name originates from Västra Aros, which refers to the river mouth of Svartån. The area has been populated since the Nordic Viking Age, before 1000 AD. In the beginning of the 11th century it was the second largest city in Sweden, and by the 12th century had become the seat of the bishop.

Anundshög is located just outside the City of Västerås. Anundshög is Sweden's largest burial mound. "Hög" is derived from the Old Norse word haugr meaning mound or barrow. It was built about 500 AD and is over 74 yards wide and is almost 10 yards high.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the growing of cucumber became popular, and Västerås received the nickname Gurkstaden (the Cucumber City), which it still retains today.