Briefly

SWEDEN

Parliament endorses country joining NATO

Sweden's lawmakers overwhelmingly voted on Wednesday in favor of the country joining the NATO. The vote was 269 in favor and 37 against. Forty-three lawmakers were absent. Hungary and Turkiye remain the last two holdouts among the military bloc's 30 members to ratify the accession of Sweden and Finland to the military alliance. Also on Wednesday, a proposal tabled by the Left Party and the Green Party to outlaw nuclear weapons on Sweden's territory in both peace and wartime was voted down in the Parliament, or Riksdag. Sweden and Finland dropped their decadeslong policies of military nonalignment and applied to join NATO last May.

UNITED STATES

Video thrusts brutality back in the spotlight

Disturbing video footage released on Tuesday shows the death of a 28-year-old black man as he was being admitted to a mental hospital, where he was forcibly restrained by as many as 10 police officers and hospital security guards. Irvo Otieno's March 6 death in Virginia has already drawn murder charges against the officers and guards involved, thrusting the spotlight back on US law enforcement brutality and the treatment of mental health patients in particular. The Washington Post published a nine-minute video, drawn from 27 minutes of hospital surveillance footage of the incident.

SOUTH KOREA

Only half of citizens see marriage as a must

Only half of South Koreans saw marriage as a must, reflecting the changed perception of marriage, statistical office data showed on Thursday. According to Statistics Korea's report on the country's social indicators in 2022, 50 percent of South Korean people aged 13 and higher said they should get married. The percentage of those regarding marriage as essential has been on the decline from 64.7 percent in 2010 to 56.8 percent in 2014, 48.1 percent in 2018 and 51.2 percent in 2020. The country's younger generation chose to opt out of marriage and childbirth due to economic difficulties such as high housing prices, high education costs and stubborn youth unemployment.

Xinhua - Agencies