Thousands join Malmö protest against Israel’s Eurovision entry

Thousands of people marched through Malmö to protest Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest over the Gaza war.

Singer Eden Golan performed her song “Hurricane” in Thursday’s second semi-final without incident in front of 9,000 spectators at the Malmö Arena and booked her place in Saturday’s final after a televote.

Earlier in the day, more than 10,000 people including climate activist Greta Thunberg gathered in Malmö’s main square before marching through the southern Swedish city’s central pedestrian shopping street, according to police estimates.

In a separate demonstration, about 100 counter-protesters gathered under police protection to express their support for Israel.

According to police, nine people in total on Thursday were held for breaching public order and one person on suspicion of carrying a knife, but otherwise police described the protests and day in general as calm considering the thousands of people who participated.

Swedish vocabulary: calm – lugn

Spotify concerned foreign talent will reject Sweden over taxes, schools and housing 

High taxes on share payouts, low-quality schools and Stockholm’s housing shortage are the main factors making it harder for Spotify to recruit foreign talent to Sweden, the streaming giant’s HR boss, Katarina Berg, told Swedish news agency TT in an interview.

She called it a “skills exodus” which pushes even Swedes to move abroad, she argued. 

Stockholm remains the company’s HQ, but today it employs more people in New York, where there’s a greater pool of engineers, who make up around 50 percent of staff. Berg said Sweden’s high taxes on Spotify’s share-based rewards programme for employees turns people off. 

“Depending on where in the world you work, you could get taxed 17 percent, 33 percent – or 56 percent, like in Sweden. Of course that could determine where an employee wants to work. You don’t choose Sweden then,” she said.

Housing and good schools, in particular senior high schools, are also key factors, Berg argued.

“We get a lot of families who come here. They settle down. They want to stay here. They like the Swedish philosophy, with quite a lot of parental leave, another type of holidays and balance in life. But then when their children get so big that they need their grades to apply to a university somewhere, perhaps a US college, our Swedish schools are not up to scratch,” she said.

Swedish vocabulary: up to scratch – hålla måttet

Low confidence in Swedish media’s Gaza coverage in troubled suburbs

Swedes with foreign backgrounds in vulnerable areas don’t trust Swedish media’s ability to cover the Gaza war correctly, according to a new survey by Järvaveckan Research, the research branch of the Järvaveckan political festival, which is held every year in northern Stockholm.

Twenty-one percent of the group told the survey that they had fairly or very great confidence in Swedish news media’s ability to provide accurate and unbiased coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas. The corresponding figure for the rest of Sweden is 43 percent.

Forty-eight percent said they had little confidence in Swedish media’s Gaza coverage, compared to 26 percent of the overall population.

Swedish vocabulary: to have confidence in – att ha förtroende för