Free Republic

Firefighters in Malmö in southern Sweden are demanding police escorts on calls. The firefighters have had enough of threats and violence in some of the city's rougher areas. After being attacked by stones on a recent call, they are threatening not to take calls to Rosengård without a police escort. They are also demanding shatterproof windows and surveillance cameras on their vehicles. Bertil Ahlgren, a spokesman at Jägersros fire station where two of the men worked, told TT that their work situation was "completely unacceptable". The firemen were attacked twice last week during calls in the city's Rosengård suburb. In...

"Plans to shut down the senior part of Hermodsdal school in Malmö have prompted the Liberals to request an extra parliamentary debate on the problem of discipline in Swedish schools. "In Malmö a gang of troublemakers has dictated the decision. It's unacceptable," said the Liberal Party's Jan Björklund. The proposal to close the high school with 200 students, which was put forward during the Easter break, was due to "lack of security, vandalism and poor study results". The school has been vandalised several times and in January part of it was damaged in an arson attack." ... "It's the first...

Swedish girls Malin and Amanda were on their way to a party on New Year's Eve when they were assaulted, raped and beaten half to death by four Somali immigrants. Sweden's largest newspaper has presented the perpetrators as "two men from Sweden, one from Finland and one from Somalia", a testimony as to how bad the informal censorship is in stories related to immigration in Sweden. Similar incidents are reported with shocking frequency, to the point where some observers fear that law and order is completely breaking down in the country. The number of rape charges in Sweden has tripled...

STOCKHOLM - A 39-year-old Swede accused of terrorism by the United States has been arrested in Prague, Swedish tabloid Expressen reported. The man, who was not identified, is wanted by the US Central Intelligence Agency spy agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which accuse him of being terror mastermind Osama bin Laden's "man in Sweden", Expressen wrote. The US has tried to obtain his extradition for several years, accusing him of setting up Al-Qaeda training camps in the US state of Oregon in 1999, but Sweden has refused to hand him over, the paper said. The man was on...

STOCKHOLM, June 20, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – Swedish imams have went public with calls for the government to teat them on equal footing with priests in terms of financial assistance and salaries. The demand highlights the miserable living conditions Muslim preachers suffer, forcing them to take up jobs unsuitable for their religious status, to say the least. "The government should allocate salaries to imams, as it does with priests," Ammar Abdous, chairman of the imams' committee in northern Sweden, told IslamOnline.net. "The government should realize that imams play a major role in helping the process of integration, solving family problems for...