Denmark’s state-run postal service, PostNord, is to end all letter deliveries at the end of 2025, citing a 90% decline in letter volumes since the start of the century.

The decision brings to an end 400 years of the company’s letter service. Denmark’s 1,500 post boxes will start to disappear from the start of June.

Transport Minister Thomas Danielsen sought to reassure Danes, saying letters would still be sent and received as “there is a free market for both letters and parcels”.

Postal services across Europe are grappling with the decline in letter volumes. Germany’s Deutsche Post said on Thursday it was axing 8,000 jobs, in what it called a “socially responsible manner”.

Deutsche Post has 187,000 employees and staff representatives said they feared more cuts were to come.

Denmark had a universal postal service for 400 years until the end of 2023, but as digital mail services have taken hold, the use of letters has fallen dramatically.

Fifteen hundred workers facing losing their jobs, out of a workforce of 4,600.

“It’s a super sad day. Not just for our department, but for the 1,500 who face an uncertain future,” employee Anders Raun Mikkelsen told Danish broadcaster DR.

Denmark ranks as one of the world’s most digitalised countries.

There’s an app for almost everything: few people use cash, and Danes even carry drivers’ licences and health cards on their smartphones.

Bank statements, bills, and correspondence from local authorities are all sent electronically.

Public services send communications via a Digital Post app or other platforms and PostNord Denmark says the letter market is no longer profitable.

Letter numbers have fallen since the start of the century from 1.4 billion to 110 million last year.

Decline in letters in Denmark

The decision will affect elderly people most. Although 95% of Danes use the Digital Post service, a reported 271,000 people still rely on physical mail.

“There are many who are very dependent on letters being delivered regularly. These include hospital appointments, vaccinations or decisions regarding home care,” Marlene Rishoj Cordes, from Aeldre Sagen (DaneAge) told Denmark’s TV2.

PostNord has weathered years of financial struggles and last year was running a deficit.

Danish MP Pelle Dragsted blamed privatisation for the move and complained the move would disadvantage people living in remote areas.

The introduction of a new Postal Act in 2024 opened up the letter market to competition from private firms and mail is no longer exempted from VAT, resulting in higher postage costs.

“When a letter costs 29 Danish krone (£3.35; $4.20) there will be fewer letters,” PostNord Denmark’s Managing Director, Kim Pedersen, told local media.

He said Danes had become increasingly digital and the decline in letter volumes had become so pronounced that it had fallen by as much as 30% in the past year alone.

The company said it would switch its focus to parcel deliveries and that any postage stamps bought this year or in 2024 could be refunded for a limited period in 2026.

PostNord also operates in Sweden. It is 40% Danish-owned and 60% Swedish-owned.

(BBC News)

Citizenship of Nauru, an island nation spanning just 8 square miles in the southwest Pacific Ocean, can be yours for $105,000. The tiny, low-lying island has launched a “golden passport” initiative with the aim of raising money to fund climate action.

Nauru faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion as the planet warms. But the world’s third smallest country lacks the resources to protect itself from a climate crisis disproportionately driven by wealthy countries.

The government says selling citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan to move 90% of the island’s around 12,500-strong population onto higher ground and build an entirely new community.

Golden passports are not new but they are controversial; history is littered with examples of them being exploited for criminal actions. Yet as developing countries struggle to get the money they need to deal with escalating climate impacts — a funding gap likely to be exacerbated by the US withdrawal from global climate action — they are being forced to find new ways to raise cash.

“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation’s future,” Nauru’s President David Adeang told CNN.

The passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal histories. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Few of these new passport holders are likely to ever even visit remote Nauru, but citizenship allows people to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be particularly useful for those with more restrictive passports, she told CNN.

For Nauru, this program is being pitched as a chance to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult, dark history.

Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.

It has left around 80% of the island uninhabitable, meaning most people now live clustered along the coastlines, exposed to sea level rise, which has been increasing here at a faster rate than global average.

Once the phosphate ran out, Nauru looked for new revenue sources. Since the early 2000s, it has served as an offshore detention site for refugees and migrants attempting to settle in Australia — a program scaled back after detainee deaths.

Now, the island is at the center of a controversial plan to mine the deep sea for materials for the green transition.

Nauru was even in the sights of now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who floated a plan to buy the island and build a bunker to survive an apocalypse, according to 2023 filings in a lawsuit against him.

For the people who live there, however, Nauru feels anything but future-proofed.

“A lot of people residing on the coast have already lost land — some have had their entire houses engulfed by king tides and they have lost everything,” Tyrone Deiye, a Nauruan national and a researcher at Monash Business School in Australia, said in a statement.

Selling citizenship has the potential to make “an absolutely enormous” economic impact for micro-states like Nauru, LSE’s Surak said.

Nauru expects to make around $5.6 million from the program in its first year, eventually scaling that to around $42 million a year. It will be built up gradually “as we assess for any unintended consequences or negative impact,” said Edward Clark, CEO of Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program. Ultimately they hope the program will make up 19% of total government revenue.

The success of the program will depend on how “revenues are channeled into the country, and what they are used to do,” Surak said. That means vetting and transparency on where the funds go, and preventing people who would otherwise be prohibited from being granted passports from paying officials off the books to get one, she added.

An earlier program to sell citizenship in the mid-1990s was mired in scandal, including the 2003 arrest in Malaysia of two alleged Al Qaida terrorists carrying Nauru passports.

The government says the program’s vetting will be stringent and exclude those from countries designated as high risk by the United Nations, including Russia and North Korea. Partnerships with international organizations including the World Bank will provide “expertise and oversight,” said President Adeang.

Nauru is not the first country to look to fund climate action by selling passports. The Caribbean nation of Dominica, which has been selling citizenship since 1993, recently said it was using some of the proceeds to fund its “commitment to be the world’s first climate resilient country by 2030.”

It may be a route other countries consider as the burden of dealing with the costs of climate change far outweigh their economic resources, all while international climate funding appears to be drying up.

“Nauru highlights the opportunities for climate vulnerable countries to become testing grounds for climate innovation,” Clark said.

(CNN)

An Indian woman who worked as a domestic helper in the United Arab Emirates has been executed after she was convicted of killing her employers’ baby.

Shahzadi Khan, who worked for an Indian couple, was executed last month, according to the Indian government.

According to Abu Dhabi court documents, Khan asphyxiated the boy, but a doctor who testified at the trial could not confirm this as he had not been allowed to perform a post-mortem.

Khan’s family maintain she was innocent and say the four-month-old died from an incorrect vaccination on the day of his death. They said Khan did not get “adequate representation” during her trial. The BBC contacted UAE authorities for comment.

The execution was carried out on 15 February, but the news was only confirmed by Indian authorities on 3 March after Khan’s parents petitioned the Delhi High Court seeking information about their daughter.

The secrecy surrounding the execution has made headlines in India, which has close ties with United Arab Emirates. Hundreds of thousands of Indians live and work in the country.

According to the petition filed by Khan’s family, she had moved to Abu Dhabi in December 2021 to work for the Indian family as a caregiver.

She was entrusted to look after the baby, who was born in August the following year. According to Khan’s father, she would often call her family back in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and show them the baby over video calls.

But the calls stopped after his death – and the family later learnt that Khan was in jail. According to Khan’s family, the baby died on 7 December 2022, just hours after he received a vaccine.

Police arrested Khan two months later. She insisted that a video recording showing her confessing to killing the baby had been forced, and that she had not received proper legal support in court.

She was sentenced to death in July 2023. Her appeal was rejected in February 2024.

Khan’s family said they last heard from her on 13 February this year when she called from prison, saying that she might be executed the next day.

“She kept crying and said she was put in a separate cell, and that she would not come out alive and that it might be her last call,” her father Shabbir Khan told the BBC.

When Khan’s family did not hear from her after that, they filed a petition with the Delhi High Court, seeking information from the Indian government on whether she had been executed.

Khan’s family said they felt she did not have “adequate representation” which resulted in her receiving the death sentence.

In an interview with the Press Trust of India, her father Shabbir Khan said: “She didn’t get justice. I have tried everywhere, running around since last year. But I didn’t have money to go there [Abu Dhabi] to hire a lawyer.”

In an earlier statement released to BBC Hindi following her conviction, Khan’s employer said: “Shahzadi brutally and intentionally killed my son which is already proven by the United Arab Emirates authorities in the light of all the evidence.

“Misleading information has been provided to media and other authorities to gain [their] sympathy and shift the focus from the actual crime which she committed.”

In February, the Indian government informed parliament that a total of 54 Indians were on death row in foreign countries, including 29 in the UAE.

(BBC News)