Last summer, the Danish state offered to sell a good chunk of the 80-odd-acre former military base at the edge of downtown Copenhagen to Christiania, the alternative community whose residents had been squatting there illegally for four decades. For the residents, who fundamentally reject the idea of landownership, this presented an ideological quandary.

“Christiania has offered to buy it,” said Risenga Manghezi, a spokesman for the community. “But Christiania doesn’t want to own it.”

To resolve the contradiction, Mr. Manghezi and a handful of others decided to start…

Denmark has introduced what is believed to be the world’s first fat tax – a surcharge on foods that are high in saturated fat. Butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food are now subject to the tax if they contain more than 2.3% saturated fat.

Some consumers began hoarding to beat the price rise, while some producers call the tax a bureaucratic nightmare.

Danish officials say they hope the new tax will help limit the population’s intake of fatty foods.

However, some scientists think saturated fat may be the wrong target. They say salt, sugar and refined carbohydrates are more detrimental to health and should be tackled instead.

French, Belgian and Dutch police have launched investigations after minor explosions struck IKEA [IKEA.UL] stores in each country late on Monday in what appears to have been a coordinated attack.

No one was seriously hurt in the blasts at the world’s biggest furniture retailer, although two workers in Belgium suffered minor injuries.

Rigged alarm clocks blew up in IKEA stores in Ghent in Belgium and Lille in France, and there was an explosion in a bin outside the IKEA store in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

The alarm clocks were linked to small amounts of gunpowder, and prosecutors said they did not think that the bombers had intended to cause significant injury.

“Federal police with dogs did a sweep of other stores but there was nothing suspect that was…

The Danish government on Friday won a legal battle against a freewheeling neighborhood that has remained largely self-governing since its creation by hippie squatters four decades ago.

The Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision from 2009 saying the roughly 900 residents of Christiania have no irrevocable right to use the former naval base as their home.

The decision ends a six-year legal standoff and means the government can go ahead with plans to “normalize” the neighborhood and tear down scores of ramshackle homes built at the site without permits.

Residents say they will resist any attempts to evict them from the neighborhood, which has become a major draw for tourists curious about its counterculture lifestyle and liberal attitude toward soft drugs.

“The court process is now finished,” Christiania spokesman Thomas Ertman said. “We have to now look to the future and need to sit down with the state and work…

Does the following analysis sound familiar?

“A weakening U.S. dollar is putting upward pressure on oil prices. The shock produced chaos in the West. In the United States, the retail price of a gallon of gasoline rose 50%, consumption dropped by 6.1% from September to February. Underscoring the interdependence of the world societies and economies, oil-importing nations in the noncommunist industrial world saw sudden inflation and economic recession. The energy crisis led to greater interest in renewable energy and spurred research in solar power and wind power as well as increased interest in mass transit.”

If you said it sounds like 2008, when it took $5.00/gallon gasoline to get Americans to agree to offshore drilling and give up their last Arctic Wilderness, you would be wrong.

It was 1973, when the Arab oil embargo and long gas lines got Americans to authorize the 800 mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline through some of…