A shooting outside a Copenhagen mosque after prayers to mark the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan has left one person dead and at least two people injured, police said today.

One naturally imagines that the Scandinavians are a civilised bunch, and that Denmark's population would not be prone to prurience. Yet, according to the FT, it has been obliquely suggested by a number of Danish newspapers that the front-runner in the country's forthcoming elections would have an even better chance of becoming Prime Minister if she took her clothes off. Social Democrat leader Helle Thorning-Schmidt, 44, is best known in the UK as Neil Kinnock's daughter-in-law (she's married to his son, Stephen). A Danish news agency has now produced a widely reported study claiming that the word most Googled next to Ms Thorning-Schmidt's name is "naked" – which means, presumably, that many Danish web users are keen to see her in her birthday suit. This column has conducted its own thoroughly unscientific survey to discover the terms Googled alongside our own leading women politicians, and I'm happy to report no such unseemliness. "Theresa May" yields nothing dirtier than "shoes"; "Baroness Warsi" the more abstract "egged"; and Labour deputy leader "Harriet Harman" is sought alongside the stiflingly dull "surgery" (presumably as in "constituency", not "cosmetic").

Double Olympic champion Rebecca Adlington will need to dig deep into all her talent and experience if she is to come near to replicating her bronze medal of two years ago after she scraped into the 400metres freestyle final on the first day of action at the World Championships in Shanghai.

There are holes in our sense of the past, places where the average person's knowledge does a jump-cut - from Alfred building his kingdom to Ethelred paying the Danes to go away to Canute and the waves and then the Norman Conquest. There is a lot to be said for historical fiction as a way of filling in those gaps, providing us with a sense of events and progression and giving them a human face. After travel books and novels in which Justin Hill dealt with the matter of China, writing about the forging of England must have seemed not only a challenge but a way of coming home: of writing about the landscapes of Sussex and the North before a millennium of agricultural revolutions, and about a very different and more dangerous Britain.

So, in 1983, I was 12, and my parents took me to see an actor who had been in 'Star Wars', performing in York Theatre Royal. I felt a little self-conscious as the lights went down, a harpist plucked out a strange tune, and then a single man, in fur and cloak, appeared under a lone spotlight. "Hear," he said, "Listen!" So Julian Glover began his rendition of 'Beowulf'.

The danish paints group Hempel has bought Crown Paints from the private equity firm Endless.

The 2011 Uefa European Under-21 Championship in Denmark gets underway this weekend with eight teams hoping to be crowned champions of Europe.

More than half of applicants for London 2012 Olympics tickets did not receive any in the ballot.

Rambert, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this year, is in very good shape for its birthday. Work is about to start on a new purpose-built home on London's South Bank, while this triple bill brings a handsome staging of a classic and a strong new work. The dancing is splendid.

The Danish government can't decide whether they love or hate the British spread.

The European Union is warning Denmark its plans for customs checks may violate EU law and the Schengen free travel agreement.

The Swedes have had it all their own way for too long in the crime-fiction stakes. The Danes are coming, with the television hit The Killing in the lead. Brandishing the most imposing literary axe is Jussi Adler-Olsen, whose novel Mercy is already a phenomenal success in various languages.