Government to spend 80 billion kronor extra in election-year budget, Ismail ‘the strawberry’ Abdo held for new crimes, and other news from Sweden on Friday.
Government to spend 80 billion kronor extra in election-year budget, Ismail ‘the strawberry’ Abdo held for new crimes, and other news from Sweden on Friday.
Government to spend 80 billion kronor extra in election-year budget, Ismail ‘the strawberry’ Abdo held for new crimes, and other news from Sweden on Friday.
Government to spend 80 billion extra in election-year budget
Sweden’s government plans extra spending of 80 billion kronor next year, more than double the 34 billion spending room estimated by the National Institute of Economic Research, in an election-year budget aimed at reviving the sluggish economy.
Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson said there would be significant tax cuts directed at households and also to businesses.
“We are going to focus the most on families and hard-working people so they can have faith in the future,” she said.
Getting people to consume more, she said, was the key to sparking the economy back to life after a long drawn-out slump.
Mikael Damberg, finance spokesperson for the opposition Social Democrats, said that the big-spending budget “seems rather desperate”, arguing that the government had failed to get Sweden’s economy out of its slump and was now resorting to extreme measures.
Swedish vocabulary: tämligen – rather/quite
Man held after shooting south of Stockholm
A man was seized on Thursday night and later arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a shooting that took place on Wednesday night.
The shooting took place in the stairway of an apartment building in Flemingsberg, shortly before 8pm, with two people found in the stairway of whom one had been injured by the shooting.
The injured man was conscious and able to answer questions from the police on Thursday night.
Swedish vocabulary: talbar – capable of speech
Ismail ‘the strawberry’ Abdo held for new crime
The gang leader Ismail Abdo, known as jordgubben or ‘the strawberry’, is being held in pre-trial detention for a string of new crimes, including smuggling drugs to Norway, the prosecutor in the case, Daniel Jonsson, has told the Aftonbladet newspaper.
“They have looked for suspected crimes outside the country and have been able to work on them further, and have been able to see that he is a suspect in those cases. So that is why I am expanding the suspicions against him,” Jonsson told the newspaper.
Ismail Abdo has been held in pre-trial custody in Turkey since early July, where he was arrested in a major operation against criminal networks in cooperation with Swedish police. In Sweden, he has previously been detained in his absence on suspicion of serious crimes, including several drug offenses and instigation of attempted murder.
Sweden and Netherlands call for EU sanctions on Israel and Hamas
Sweden and the Netherlands have urged the EU to adopt sanctions on Israel and Hamas over the war in Gaza, including suspending the EU-Israel trade deal, according to a document seen by AFP on Thursday.
In a letter to European Union foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas, the Swedish and Dutch foreign ministers called for targeted sanctions on Israeli government ministers and Jewish settlers on Israeli-occupied Palestinian land, and new sanctions on the political leadership of Hamas.
They also demanded the suspension of the commercial section of an association accord between the EU and Israel that allows for free trade in several sectors, notably industry and agriculture.
The topic is to be discussed at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Copenhagen on Saturday.
The letter, dated August 27, “recalls the need to speedily … introduce targeted sanctions against extremist Israeli ministers who promote illegal settlement activities, and actively work against a negotiated two-state solution, and the need for additional sanctions against violent settlers”.
Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard has been calling since May for sanctions against far-right ministers in the Israeli cabinet who have pushed for the annexation of the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
Swedish vocabulary: sanktioner – sanctions