Norway Busts Butter Smugglers

Norwegian authorities are cracking down on Swedes churning cash out of Norway's butter shortage. Enterprising bootleggers have been selling cross-border butter to Norwegians desperate to do their Christmas baking. The going rate? More than $40 per packet, the Telegraph reports. Two men with more than 500 pounds of butter in their van were busted by a police patrol after they had made just one delivery.

While some Swedes are cashing in, the Danes—long irked by Norwegian butter import tariffs of $2 a pound—are gleefully offering charity to their oil-rich neighbors: A Danish morning show handed out packets of butter on the streets of Oslo. Authorities at Norway's butter monopoly blame the shortage on bad weather and the popularity of a high-fat, Atkins-style diet, but the nation's angry and butter-less citizens accuse the monopoly of being arrogant and incompetent. (More butter stories.)