Sweden has no plans to change hate law to ban Quran burnings, minister says
Sweden's government has said it has no plans to extend its hate law to include an explicit ban on burning or desecrating the Quran as the country's prime minister insisted he was working "day and night" to remedy the crisis.
"There are no current plans to change the Law on Agitation against an Ethnic Group," Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer said.
"That would mean changing the constitutional laws on free expression and our starting point is that this should take place within the framework of today's constitutional protection for free expression."
One possibility, Strömmer said, would be to extend the emergency powers the government has under the Public Order Act to stop demonstrations.
"Today it says 'in times of war or in danger of war', the question is whether risk of a terror attack should also be included."
But he conceded that changing the Public Order Act would require first launching a government inquiry, which would take at least a year to make its recommendations, meaning that the government's short-term response to the current crisis would need to be carried out using existing legislation.
Swedish vocabulary: yttrandefrihet - freedom of expression
Germany's Uniper 'will not build new nuclear in Sweden'
The German power generator Uniper, which operates Sweden's biggest nuclear reactor, has said that it has no plans to invest in new nuclear plants in Sweden, dealing a blow to the government's plans for a new reactors.
The company's chief executive, Michael Lewis, said that the company was neither interested in building a full scale conventional nuclear power plant nor one of the small modular reactors which Sweden's state generator Vattenfall and Finland's Fortum are looking into.
Instead, he said, the company was looking at prioritising renewable electricity generation and gas-fired power.
Swedish vocabulary: förnybar - renewable
Swedish weather for August expected to stay cold and rainy
The temperatures and rain seen in July across Sweden are expected to continue into August, Sweden's meteorological institute SMHI predicts. The cooler weather last month was due to a low pressure front, with no weather station in the country recording a temperature above 30 degrees.
This low pressure front also produced a lot of rain, with Borås - the rainiest town in Sweden last month - experiencing the most rainy July since 1939, according to SMHI's monthly report.
On July 12th, Säffle saw 93.7 millimetres of rain, the highest daily figure in the country, while the driest areas were Gotland, Öland and the southern Baltic coastline, according to SMHI.
In northwest Norrland and the Lapland mountains, however, it was the hottest July since 2018, and it was also fairly dry. The coldest temperature was measured at Sweden's northernmost temperature station Naimakka, which hit -2 degrees on one night in the beginning of July.
The forecast for August doesn't look promising, although SMHI were only willing to predict the first ten days.
"The weather will remain unstable and we don't really have any high pressure fronts in sight. There's a low pressure front which will bring with it lower temperatures and a lot of rain," SMHI meteorologist Linnea Rehn Wittskog told TT.
Swedish vocabulary: ostadigt - changeable
Swedish roads 'among world's safest'
Sweden has been ranked as having among the safest roads in the world, sharing third place in a new ranking with Estonia, after the Netherlands and Norway.
The ranking, put together by the car leasing company FINN, looked at road quality, traffic behaviour, road fatalities, and other metrics.
Iceland ranked as having the lowest number of traffic fatalities, followed by Norway and Switzerland, with Sweden coming in fifth place.
Sweden fell behind on the number of alcohol-related accidents, and also on the quality of its roads.
Swedish vocabulary: dödsolyckor - fatal accidents
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