Heavy rain along to interrupt sunny summer weather 

The last few days have seen dry, sunny weather with temperatures in the mid-20s in Celsius, but that will be interrupted by a cooler day today with possible thunder and rain.

National Met office DMI has issued an alert for heavy rain and localised “cloudbursts” or skybrud in southwestern Jutland. The alert applies from 3pm to 11pm.

That rain will move north during the afternoon, forecasts state. Copenhagen and the rest of Zealand is less likely to be affected.

The criteria for “heavy rain” is over 24 millimetres in 6 hours. A “cloudburst” is defined as 15 millimetres in 30 minutes.

Vocabulary: køligere – cooler

Energy company buys out supermarket chain Coop 

The Coop supermarket chain is to receive a cash injection after energy company OK announced it would be buying an approximately 50 percent stake in the company.

The buyout was announced by Denmark’s Competition and Consumer Authority, which had to approve the deal.

Until now Coop has a cooperative ownership structure in which its members – some 1.9 million people in Denmark – are also owners. It appoints a chairperson who effectively takes a CEO role.

With the buyout, OK will have a say in how the company is run alongside the membership-owned company Coop Danmark. In return, Coop receives a 2 billion kroner cash injection, newswire Ritzau writes.

The chairperson of Coop, Pernille Skipper, welcomed the deal in a statement.

“Turning around the situation in Coop Danmark and making the company profitable again has been an urgent matter,” she said.

Coop’s stores include Kvickly, SuperBrugsen and 365discount.

Vocabulary: lønsom – profitable

Danish job site says Google has breached its copyright protection

Jobs portal Jobindex has filed a suit against Google, claiming the tech giant is breaching copyright and marketing laws by making job ads posted to Jobindex available on the Google for Jobs service without permission.

“It’s like if you sell counterfeit goods, you have a responsibility to not just say ‘I bought it from someone else’,” the CEO of Jobindex Kaare Danielsen said at Denmark’s commercial court Sø- og Handelsretten, in comments reported by Ritzau.

“Google has not respected our copyright. We have been doing this for 28 years without any problems, then Google comes along and won’t respect it,” he said.

Jobindex is happy to be included in Google search results but objects to its ads being copied, Danielsen stressed.

Vocabulary: kopivarer – counterfeit goods

New law against flying foreign flags

Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard has tabled a bill which would make it illegal to fly foreign flags in Denmark under a new law.

Hummelgaard wants the Danish flag to have special status and other flags – such as the Ukrainian flag currently – to only be permitted in extraordinary circumstances.

The new ban will make it illegal to raise almost all other countries’ flags, including the Stars and Stripes, but will not apply to Nordic flags or the Greenlandic, Faroese or German flags.

A 2023 Supreme Court ruling found that a private individual had not breached a century-old directive against flying foreign flags when he displayed the flag of the United States at his home.

In the ruling, the Supreme Court said the directive was closely related to the situation before and during the First World War. It also noted that raising a flag may be protected by free speech rights.

As such, raising foreign nations’ flags in Denmark cannot generally be considered an offence under the directive, it concluded.

That meant the legal basis used for banning foreign flags no longer applied, so parliament revoked the First World War-era directive and has now drawn up a new bill.

Vocabulary: at flage – to fly/raise a flag