Swedish chef wins UK curry prize

The local, Published: 30 Nov 10 07:57 CET 
http://www.thelocal.se/30508/20101130/


Mohammed Razaul Karim, the head chef and owner of the prize-winningIndian Garden in Stockholm, has gained international recognition for the quality of his curries.


Karim heads to London on Tuesday to receive his Curry Life Award of Excellence Prize, the Dagens Nyheter (DN) daily reported.

Bangladesh-born Karim moved to Sweden from London in the mid-1990s after having learned his trade at his cousin's restaurant and he makes regular visits to the UK to keep abreast of what's new on the curry front, the newspaper reported.

It seems that the feeling is mutual, at least when it concerns Indian Garden's spicy fare, with one customer who was in London at the time, putting in a dinner order at his favourite Stockholm eatery.

”It was a British customer who lives in Stockholm, but was in the UK at the time. He had a friend who he asked to come by and pick up some food for him, when he was on his way to London," Hassan Mian at Indian Garden told The Local on Tuesday.

Indian Garden is located in the Södermalm area of central Stockholm and it is not the first time that its cuisine has been recognised. DN awarded the restaurant a Golden Dragon for the best restaurant in Stockholm, in 2004.

"It was like winning the Nobel Prize. The day after, there was a long queue outside on the street. Since then, it has been fully booked every day," Karim told DN.

The award gave Karim both an appetite and the possibility for expansion and a sister restaurant has been open closer to Medborgarplatsen. Furthermore, there are plans to open a New Indian Garden - a fine dining concept with around 200 places.

New Poker Champion Doesn’t Need A Finance Degree

by: Nathan Vardi, http://blogs.forbes.com/ Nov. 29 2010 

Source: Forbes.com

For Jonathan Duhamel, the road to riches meant dropping out of a finance degree program at the University of Quebec in Montreal to concentrate on playing poker. The move paid off recently when, at the age of 23, Duhamel won the World Series of Poker’s main event and the $8.9 million prize that went with it. Duhamel is the latest poker champ to highlight the connection between finance and poker. Hedge fund manager David Einhorn placed 18^th in the World Series of Poker’s main event in 2006. Aaron Brown, a former professional poker player, is now a risk manager at Cliff Asness’ big hedge fund firm AQR Capital Management. Chris Moneymaker, who helped launch the current popularity of poker when he won the World Series of Poker’s main event in 2003 as an amateur, was an accountant. Steven Begleiter, who used to head corporate strategy at Bear Stearns and now works at a private equity firm, made the final table at the main event in 2009. Chris “Jesus” Ferguson, who won the World Series main event in 2000, used to day trade at a proprietary trading firm. Billionaire banker Andrew Beal became a poker legend by challenging poker pros to some of the highest stakes games ever.

“Knowing finance helps because in poker there is a lot of math, lots of probabilities and percentages you need to calculate all the time,” says Duhamel. “There is that mathematical knowledge and then after that the psychological aspect of the game.”

Duhamel, who grew up in Boucherville, Quebec, says going for a finance degree was an obvious decision for him because he always excelled at math. Duhamel had ambitions at one time to become a trader or maybe start his own business. A decade ago, that probably would have been the direction his career path would have taken. Duhamel’s poker skills were developed in online poker rooms over the last five or so years.

After studying for one year at university, it was tough for Duhamel to tell his father, an engineer at United Technologies unit Pratt &Whitney, and his mother, a bank teller, that he was dropping out of school to travel and play poker. “At first my parents were not too happy—not too many parents would be happy, but I explained to them I was taking a year off,” says Duhamel.

Duhamel’s parents have now accepted his decision. So have his friends. One of them, who is studying to become a high school teacher, pulled off  a great trade by contributing $100 to Duhamel’s $10,000 entrance fee for the World Series of Poker. Duhamel recently paid his buddy his cut of the winnings: $90,000. PokerStars, the world’s biggest online poker site, also made a good bet by sponsoring Duhamel on the eve of the World Series of Poker.

Duhamel might finish that finance degree some day, but for now he says he is going to stick to playing professional poker.

Swedish parents jailed for spanking kids

thelocal.se, 28th november 


A Swedish court has jailed the parents of three children who were regularly beaten since the age of three in what they claimed was a method of discipline prescribed in the Bible.

The couple, from Karlstad in central Sweden, were imprisoned for nine months apiece, according to a Sveriges Television (SVT) report.

Corporal punishment, formally outlawed in Sweden in 1979, was a regular feature of three of the couple's four children's lives, the Värmland district court heard.

According to the court transcripts, the parents "explained that they had used, what they themselves described as spanking, physical punishment as part of their methods for raising the children."

The court heard that the couple had used a hairbrush, a wooden plank or a hand to punish their three eldest children, SVT reported.

The father explained that when the children did something wrong they were given a first warning and then a second and if they, for example, carried on cycling in the street without permission, they would then receive a physical punishment.

The court found that "despite the details of the case at hand" the parents "had a loving and caring relationship to their children", but that the systematic treatment metered out was in breach of the law and deserving of a custodial sentence.

The parents were furthermore order to pay damages of 25,000 kronor to each of the affected children.

Court affirms jail time for Pirate Bay founders

published on the local news paper, http://www.thelocal.se/30454/20101126/
Published: 26 Nov 10 14:04 CET,Updated: 26 Nov 10 20:17 CET

Three of the men behind The Pirate Bay file sharing site have had their convictions upheld by a Swedish court of appeal. "The Appeals Court, like the district court, finds that The Pirate Bay service makes possibly illegal filesharing in a way that entails a punishable offence for those who run the service," the court said in its ruling.

Fredrik Neij was sentenced to 10 months in prison, Peter Sunde to eight months and financial banker Carl Lundström to four months.

In addition, the court of appeal increased the compensation the defendants are required to pay up to 46 million kronor ($6.57 million). Lawyers for the entertainment industry had requested damages of 120 million kronor.