Storting

Mm-hmm.

Uh, medicine is decided by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, literature is the Swedish Academy, and finally, the Peace Prize is the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which is composed of five members that are appointed by the Storting, which is the Norwegian parliament.

Interestingly, in Nobel's will, he did not give a reasoning why the Peace Prize was-

Was randomly Norway?

So it also has some very striking differences too.

And today we were able to see some of those differences up close because we went into the Storting, their parliament here in the centre of Oslo, And watched ministerial questions.

Now, the obvious point to say at first is that we didn't really know what was going on with absolute certainty in that they were speaking, of course, in Norwegian.

My Norwegian is non-existent, to put it mildly.

And there are ministers receiving questions and then providing answers to them.

But in lots of ways, that's where the similarities actually stop.

Because in the Storting, which is this beautiful red chamber, which is in the bay window, for want of a better description, of the Storting building.

If you Google the Storting, if you've not seen it, and if you look at it, there's this great curved structure on the front and in the middle.

... knowns.

You used the Norwegian Parliament renovation, which went from about 70 million kroner to 2.3 billion k- kroner, as a case study.

Yes.

What was the exact moment that project, in your opinion, became politically impossible to stop?

At the moment, Lee and I are in Norway.

We're doing a research project about the Storting, the Norwegian parliament.

And Although we're finding Norwegian politics very interesting, it isn't our usual wheelhouse.

And so through the Queen Mary Library, I ordered as part of our research this Oxford Handbook of Norwegian Politics.

So we were happy about that.

At 3:25 PM in Oslo, an explosion ravaged the tower block which is home to the Norwegian Parliament.

By chance, the Norwegian Prime Minister was absent.

I was in my residence working on the speech I was going to deliver at Utøya the day after.

But this is the first indication that the Mecca Agreement could be more than symbolic.

Headline three, the Norwegian Parliament is considering a proposal to create an independent list of designated terrorist organizations.

Right now, Norway just relies on the UN's list, which, shock to no one, is sorely inadequate.

The UN has yet to blacklist Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

A trip to the park, a day at the beach, a workout session at the gym, all in public spaces where smart glasses can snap photos, record conversations, or stream video online without people in the line of their lenses and microphones knowing about it.

Norway's government wants to get a handle on both the promise and the peril of AI glasses and is proposing the parliament enact a temporary ban on them in some places.

It's the latest sign of growing concerns in many countries about new technologies that are fundamentally changing the way people live.

Some governments have banned the use of social media by children and young teens.

Someone say Silicon Valley.

California's governor last week vetoed legislation that would have penalized the use of smart glasses to record people without their permission in places like changing rooms, doctor's offices, and other spaces generally considered private.

Now, why would Gavin Newsom veto that? What? Why would he veto a law that basically said what the law already is, that you can't record somebody without their knowledge in a private place? Norway's government said the proposal for the temporary ban would be made by parliament or to parliament, the Storting, as soon as possible.

Somebody, Mikkelsen, the Norwegian minister of digitalization.