The 650 Danish soldiers serving in Afghanistan's dangerous Helmand Province have been joined two weeks ahead of schedule by a company of heavy-weapons specialists from the Afghan army. Only 200 meters separate the two camps. Soon three additional Afghan infantry units will arrive. NATO's plan, after all, is not to chase the Taliban around by itself, but to help the Afghan government consolidate power, according to the Danish military command.

With thousands of Catholic priests around the world now outed for sexually abusing minors, church leaders in Denmark have spent the past week attacking the former bishop of Roskilde, Jan Lindhardt, for proposing a solution to the crisis. His proposal: let priests marry and have a normal sex life. That earned him the wrath of the bishop of Copenhagen, Czeslaw Kozon, who told Kristeligt Dagblad that celibacy must be OK because only a minority of priests are pedophiles.

With thousands of Catholic priests around the world now outed for sexually abusing minors, church leaders in Denmark have spent the past week attacking the former bishop of Roskilde, Jan Lindhardt, for proposing a solution to the crisis. His proposal: let priests marry and have a normal sex life. That earned him the wrath of the bishop of Copenhagen, Czeslaw Kozon, who told Kristeligt Dagblad that celibacy must be OK because only a minority of priests are pedophiles.

The child-sex scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church has expanded to Scandinavia, with disclosure here that the former bishop of Trondheim has admitted sexually abusing a boy younger than 10 years old. Georg Mueller served as the bishop of Trondheim from 1997 until he resigned suddenly last May with little explanation. The real reason he left, church officials now acknowledge, was that he admitted having sexual activity with an altar boy in the early 1990s while serving as a priest in Trondheim.

The publicly funded broadcaster Radio Sweden has announced it is cutting Albanian, Serbo-Croation and Assyrian from its web-radio programming languages. But 11 languages will remain on Radio Sweden's "choose a language" menu when the cut-back takes effect later this year. Arabic services will actually be beefed up. "It is important to strengthen the broadcasts for the listener groups who need it most, such as Somalis," said Ingemar Löfgren, the head of Radio Sweden's international programs.

Norwegian government slumping: Support for Norway's center-left government, which rose during the global financial crisis, has fallen back to pre-crisis levels. If this were an election season Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg would have to be worried, with only 42 percent of voters favoring his three-party coalition, according to an average of opinion polls conducted  in March. By comparison the Conservative and Progress parties, which make up the firmest opposition bloc, scored 46 percent. Election researcher Bernt Aardal produced the findings for Dagens Næringsliv.