An Iraqi man who staged Quran burnings in Sweden was shot dead hours before he was set to receive a verdict on Thursday in a trial tied to the desecrations of Islam’s holy book that drew worldwide uproar, authorities said.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, said in 2023 that Sweden had gone into “battle-array for war on the Muslim world” by supporting “the criminal”, and that “all Islamic scholars agree that those who desecrate the Koran deserved the most severe punishment”.

For the first time since officially becoming a NATO member in March 2024, Sweden has taken a major step in its international military role. On January 18, 2025, Sweden deployed a mechanized battalion to Latvia,

Salwan Momika was set to stand trial over hate incitement charges on Thursday.

Russia is "the main actor" in hybrid attacks on the alliance, said a senior NATO official following a spate of incidents.

The Nordic country has opened an investigation into the damage, just weeks after NATO stepped up its military presence in the area following a series of similar incidents.

An extraordinary ship has joined NATO's Standing Naval Maritime Group 1 (SNMG1). The Swedish Visby-class corvette, designed for stealth, is now part of NATO forces and will guard the Baltic Sea during the Baltic Sentry mission,

Sweden has opened a preliminary investigation into suspected aggravated “sabotage” and ordered the detention of a vessel in the Baltic Sea suspected of damaging an underwater fiber optic cable connecting Latvia and the Swedish island of Gotland earlier that day.

Swedish authorities have seized a ship over the “aggravated sabotage” of an undersea fibre-optic cable linking Latvia with a strategically important island in Sweden.

In 2023, Mads Petersen, owner of Greenland-based startup Arctic Unmanned, sat in a car to keep warm while he tested a small drone at minus 43 degrees Celsius (minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit). The cold soon drained the drone's power.

An Iraqi living in Sweden who faced threats after burning the Koran in Stockholm in 2023 died in a shooting Wednesday, shortly before a verdict in his trial was about to be revealed.