A new survey shows UK men are shirking the chores. Not so in Nordic nations, where family-friendly policies have changed the landscapeAnd lo! As we all return to school it turns out that women in Britain are still doing more housework than men. The new British social attitudes survey has just been published, and it reveals that although a majority of Britons agree that adult couples sharing a home should do equal amounts of housework, two-thirds of them admitted that women ended up doing much more. Italian and Spanish women have it worse (Mi dispiace/Lo siento). But my adopted Nordic homeland is – apparently – winning, and there’s much that Brits can learn from the way things are done here.Since moving to Denmark in 2013, I’ve noticed a rhythm to Danish life that’s more conducive to the equal division of labour. Both sexes work and get paid a decent wage. And from the age of 10 months, all children go to tax-subsidised, state-run daycare. Most daycare institutions and offices are open from 8am until 4pm, and this has defined the way Danes work. So even the CEO of a company is allowed to say in a meeting at 4pm, “I have to leave to pick up the kids and make dinner.” And they go home to eat as a family. Continue reading…

Jens Haaning must return about 532,000 krone lent by Kunsten Museum in Aalborg, court saysA Danish artist who pocketed large sums of money lent to him by a museum – and submitted empty frames as his artwork – has been ordered by a court to repay the funds.Jens Haaning, a conceptual artist whose work focuses on power and inequality, was commissioned in 2021 by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, northern Denmark, to recreate two earlier works that used scores of banknotes to represent average incomes. Continue reading…

Passengers in isolation with virus as Ocean Explorer remains stuck in Alpefjord national parkGet our morning and afternoon news emails, free app or daily news podcastThree people on board a cruise ship run aground in Greenland’s Alpefjord national park have Covid-19, the ship’s operator, Australia-based Aurora Expeditions, has confirmed, but a passenger aboard says everybody remains in “good spirits”.The Australian-operated Ocean Explorer, which is carrying 206 passengers and crew, ran aground while touring the national park on Monday, around 1,400km north-east of Greenland’s capital Nuuk. Continue reading…

There are no reports of injuries on the Ocean Explorer, which was grounded in the remote Northeast Greenland National ParkA cruise ship with 206 passengers and crew onboard has run aground in north-west Greenland, and remained stuck even after high tide.Cmdr Brian Jensen of Denmark’s Joint Arctic Command said that nobody on board was in danger and that no damage has been reported, but added that officials “take this incident very seriously”. Continue reading…

The Danish author on her new hybrid novel about maternal ambivalence, her debt to Doris Lessing, and attempting to read Freud aged 10Danish author Olga Ravn, 36, made the International Booker shortlist in 2021 with her first book to be translated into English, The Employees, an experimental novel about a partly humanoid space crew. Fans include Max Porter and Mark Haddon; a French critic called it Alien as told by Samuel Beckett. Her new novel, My Work, is her second book to be translated into English. Mixing fiction, essay and poetry, it follows Anna, an isolated young writer navigating pregnancy and motherhood as well as mental illness and the medical system. Ravn spoke from her home in Copenhagen, where she was born and raised.Where did My Work begin?I started writing it on my phone late at night in hospital after giving birth to my first child in a very complicated delivery. I became obsessed with documenting what was happening – I was really weirded out and writing was the only place I felt a little like myself. Later, I realised I had postpartum depression and I asked myself how, from an artistic point of view, I could stay true to the experience; it was important to me that readers who had experienced something similar would feel I had respected it. When strangers ask me how much of the book is true, I don’t know how to answer. I wanted the reader to have an experience of extreme intimacy, to feel that everything is being shown – but that’s not autobiography, it’s technique.What drew you to the book’s hybrid form?In writing school I’d been taught that a great novel is a third-person psychological portrait of an individual who learns something and either perishes or is victorious. This novel is published every day; I tried to write one and it felt dead on the page. Reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook at night when the baby slept changed everything. It was like a lifejacket. She’s struggling with linearity; one response to that could be fragmentation, but that’s a broken form, and she’s interested in something more holistic. She takes seriously how the experience of motherhood might influence a novel’s form. Continue reading…

Novo Nordisk, the maker of the blockbuster obesity injection, has singlehandedly saved the country from a recessionIn the leafy middle-class suburb of Bagsværd, near a lake north-west of Copenhagen, the drugmaker Novo Nordisk’s white circular headquarters rise from the ground like a giant flying saucer. The building looks like a sci-fi film set made by Lego, another stalwart of the Danish economy.Thanks to booming demand for its weight loss treatment Wegovy, the Danish business last week became Europe’s biggest company by stock market value, overtaking the previous holder of that title, French luxury group LVMH. Novo Nordisk’s stock market value of £340bn now exceeds Denmark’s entire economic output, estimated at £323bn this year. Continue reading…

Launch of weight-loss drug in UK helps Danish firm to market value of $428bnThe success of the weightloss drug Wegovy has helped its Danish manufacturer to overtake the French luxury group LVMH as Europe’s most valuable company.After Novo Nordisk, which specialises in diabetes and weight loss treatments, launched Wegovy in the UK on Monday, its share price rose 0.7% to Danish kroner 1,310.80 (£150). Continue reading…

A proposed ban on abuse of religious objects only helps to silence critics and dissentersShould governments ban the “improper treatment of objects of significant religious importance to a religious community”? That is what the Danish government is suggesting in a new law it announced last week that could see offenders imprisoned for two years. The proposed ban comes after a spate of incidents in Sweden and Denmark in which Qur’ans have been publicly burned, provoking an outcry across the Muslim world.The answer to the question is both simple and complex. It is simple because any law outlawing any kind of blasphemy is unacceptable and should be opposed. Having abolished its blasphemy law in 2017, for Denmark to seek to reintroduce it in a new form is retrogressive.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk Continue reading…

Museum-goers to be transported back to 1450BC by odours of oils, resins and beeswax with which noblewoman, Senetnay, embalmedMuseum-goers are to be transported back more than 3,500 years in a sniff after researchers identified and recreated the scent of balms used in the mummification of an ancient Egyptian noblewoman.While mummification may conjure up scenes of bandages and jars, the process was a fragrant affair in which the body and organs were embalmed to preserve them for the afterlife. Continue reading…

Almost £7bn wiped off value of world’s largest offshore wind company over possible £1.8bn write-downShares in the world’s largest offshore wind company have tumbled by nearly a quarter after it said it may have to write down the value of its US portfolio by nearly £2bn.Ørsted said it had been hit by a flurry of setbacks in its American business, triggering a rapid sell-off in its shares, listed in Copenhagen. Continue reading…

Film-maker criticises Danish PM for donating F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine and posing with Volodymyr ZelenskiyDanish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.“Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country. Continue reading…

Ukrainian president also meets leaders of Serbia and Croatia in bid to broaden support baseRussia-Ukraine war – latest news updatesVolodymyr Zelenskiy’s high-speed tour of Europe’s smaller countries continued in Athens on Tuesday, where he obtained further military and diplomatic support after securing a long-awaited commitment on the provision of F-16s at the weekend.The Ukrainian president met Serbia’s president and Croatia’s prime minister at a Balkans summit in the Greek capital, while a day earlier Greece’s prime minister had said his country would help train Ukrainian pilots to fly F-16 jets. Continue reading…

Danish PM says country will provide 19 in stages when pilot training is completed as Dutch counterpart pledges up to 42 planesThe Netherlands and Denmark have announced they will donate up to 61 F-16 fighter jets between them to Ukraine once pilot training has been satisfactorily completed, as Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited both countries after months of entreaties to bolster the Ukrainian air force.Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said her country would provide 19 jets – “hopefully” six around new year, eight more next year and the remaining five in 2025. “Please take this donation as a token of Denmark’s unwavering support for your country’s fight for freedom,” Frederiksen said. Continue reading…

Collaborative ‘series of bites’ to be served up as Noma looks to a future without its celebrated Copenhagen restaurantNoma, the three-Michelin-star Danish restaurant that shocked foodies by announcing it would close at the end of 2024, is coming to London – for one day only – as it rolls out a series of spin-off ventures that could include its own seaweed farm on a remote fjord.The Copenhagen restaurant, which charges 3,950 Danish kroner (£453) a person for a tasting menu of mostly foraged vegetables, will next month collaborate with a Mexican restaurant in Marylebone and a cocktail bar in Sea Containers House on the South Bank. Continue reading…

Leaders of international coalition thank US for green light but it is still unclear when any F-16 transfers could take placeRussia-Ukraine war – latest news updatesDenmark and the Netherlands have said the US has cleared the way to allow F-16 fighters to be re-exported to Ukraine after some of its pilots are trained to fly them, helping restore momentum to a process that appeared to be stalling.Ministers from both countries, the leaders of an international coalition to help Ukraine obtain the jets, thanked Washington for the green light, although it remains unclear when any F-16 transfers could take place. Continue reading…

Whether intended as a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy or not this tale of boorish nihilists announced von Trier as a consummate provocateurLars von Trier’s film from 1998 is re-released as part of the ongoing retrospective dedicated to this director, a film pioneeringly shot on digital video according to the minimalist guidelines of the Dogme 95 collective, which undoubtedly helped create an affordability-revolution in indie film-making. After a quarter of a century, The Idiots looks as cheerfully shallow, smug and manipulative as anything he has ever done, yet revisiting this needlingly insistent and epically tiresome film does bring into focus the way in which the debate around disability representation has changed, and also the subversive prank aesthetic that has to some degree governed the entire career of this unique film-maker.The Idiots is about people playing tricks, gigglingly pretending to have cerebral palsy or some form of learning disability in order to freak out the uptight bourgeois in their restaurants and workplaces – and, of course, the cinema auditorium. They callously call it “spassing”, or use the English phrase “mentally retarded”. Karen (Bodil Jørgensen) is a deeply unhappy woman, in shock after a tragedy in her life which is explained only at the very end. Dining alone in a restaurant one day, she is intrigued at what appears to be a group of disabled adults there, minimally controlled by their carer and embarrassing the other diners, whose fastidious politeness prevents them from expressing their obvious disapproval and disgust. Karen goes back with these people to their house, where she finds they are simply pretending: a commune-cult led by the charismatic Stoffer (Jens Albinus) whose wealthy uncle owns their HQ and believes his nephew to be house-sitting the property prior to it being sold off. Continue reading…

North of continent records unusually wet and windy summer conditions while Portugal and Spain battle flamesFloods struck northern and central Europe last week. Some areas of Slovenia recorded more than 200mm of rain in 12 hours on Thursday and Friday, causing extensive flooding across two-thirds of the country. Many buildings and roads were damaged, at an estimated cost of €500m (£432m), and six deaths were reported.Storm Hans hit the Baltic region a few days later. Hans originated as an area of low pressure over eastern Europe, but quickly deepened as it travelled northwards towards the Baltic Sea. The low was unusually deep for a summer storm, and led to daily rainfall totals of 80 to 100mm in parts of southern Norway and Sweden earlier this week. Continue reading…

Electric ships, hydrogen, ‘air lubrication’ and even good old wind power are reducing emissions, but campaigners say true change will ‘take guts’The passenger ferry MV Sea Change is due this month to make its maiden voyage across San Francisco Bay. But it won’t be the usual hour-long chug for the 75 passengers travelling north to Vallejo, California. Guests might notice how quiet the engine is – and they could even drink the emissions it releases.That’s because MV Sea Change is the first commercial ferry to be powered not by the usual diesel engine but entirely from hydrogen. Its only emission is pure water. Continue reading…

Acts such as the Qur’an burning protests were dragging Sweden into international conflicts, says Ulf KristerssonThe Swedish prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, has accused outsiders of exploiting the country’s freedom of expression laws and using them as “a stage for spreading hateful messages”, after a diplomatic crisis erupted over Qur’an burning protests.There have been a string of protests in Sweden and Denmark in recent weeks at which copies of the Qur’an were burned or otherwise damaged, prompting outrage in Muslim countries and demands that the Nordic governments put a stop to the burnings. Continue reading…

Government say such demonstrations play into hands of extremists and can have ‘significant negative consequences for Denmark’The Danish government has said it will explore legal means of stopping protests involving the burning of holy texts in certain circumstances, citing security concerns after a backlash over such incidents that saw the Qur’an desecrated in Denmark and Sweden.Noting that such protests played into the hands of extremists, the government wants to “explore” intervening in situations where “other countries, cultures and religions are being insulted, and where this could have significant negative consequences for Denmark, not least with regard to security”, it said in a statement from the foreign ministry. Continue reading…