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SD staffer quits over email storm

An employee at Social Democrat HQ who distributed defamatory emails about Moderate leader Fredrik Reinfeldt has resigned, but the party is still refusing to reveal any details about the culprit’s identity.

Published: 24 February 2006 12:59 CET

Tommy Ohlström, human resources director of the Social Democrats, said the party first found out about the emails on Wednesday through media reports.

Cabinet minister Mona Sahlin had earlier called for the person reponsible for the emails to go:

“Whoever did this has abused the trust they had as a representative of the party. It is nasty, it is outrageous and I really hope it is possible to get to the bottom of it,” she said as she arrived at the HQ for a meeting of the party’s board.

Moderate Party press secretary Sven Otto Littorin says his party is not satisfied with the information it has received from the Social Democrats, in which they revealed only that the person responsible is a man who has worked for the party for a number of years and who did not have a position of authority.

“We want to know who he is so that we can judge the link he has to the party leadership,” Littorin told TT.

The Moderates reported the emails to the police on Wednesday. The party is deliberating on how to pursue the case now that the sender has been identified.

“We’ve got to think about what to do, and whether it’s worth taking this to court,” said Littorin.

TT/The Local

Climate protesters wrap Swedish parliament in giant red scarf

Responding to a call from the Mothers Rebellion movement (Rebellmammorna in Swedish), the women marched around the Riksdag with the scarf made of 3,000 smaller scarves, urging politicians to honour a commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

“I am here for my child Dinalo and for all the kids. I am angry and sad that politicians in Sweden are acting against the climate,” Katarina Utne, 41, a mother of a four-year-old and human resources coach, told AFP.

The women unfurled their scarves and marched for several hundred metres, singing and holding placards calling to “save the climate for the children’s future”.

“The previous government was acting too slowly. The current government is going in the wrong direction in terms of climate policy,” said psychologist Sara Nilsson Lööv, referring to a recent report on Swedish climate policy.

The government, led by the conservative Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and supported by the far-right Sweden Democrats, is in danger of failing to meet its 2030 climate targets, an agency tasked with evaluating climate policy recently reported.

According to the Swedish Climate Policy Council, the government has made decisions, including financial decisions, that will increase greenhouse gas emissions in the short term.

“Ordinary people have to step up. Sweden is not the worst country but has been better previously,” 67-year-old pensioner Charlotte Bellander said.

The global movement, Mothers Rebellion, was established by a group of mothers in Sweden, Germany, the USA, Zambia and Uganda.

It organises peaceful movements in public spaces by sitting and singing but does not engage in civil disobedience, unlike the Extinction Rebellion movement, which some of its organisers came from.

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