King Frederik on commercial mission in Poland in first foreign trip as monarch
King Frederik X yesterday went to Poland for his first foreign visit since becoming monarch, at the head of a commercial mission.
Two weeks after the surprise abdication by his mother Queen Margrethe, the new king was welcomed in Warsaw by President Andrzej Duda.
"The visit will be mainly economic and the principle topics will be security, energy, climate, food and agriculture," said Mieszko Pawlak, head of the international policy office for the Polish presidency.
"The King has come to Poland as part of an important commercial mission," he added, quoted by the PAP news agency.
Frederik was to meet with national and local lawmakers in Warsaw and the northwestern city of Szczecin, where he was to visit a NATO regional military headquarters.
Vocabulary: erhvervsrejse – business travel
Ferry departures to and from Norway cancelled due to weather
Storm Ingunn is currently causing significant disruption in Norway, and passengers hoping to take the ferry between North Jutland port Hirtshals and Larvik or Kristiansand in Norway are likely to face delays today.
Operator Color Line has postponed several departures between the two countries, it said early on Thursday. The departures were initially moved to later in the day.
The earliest scheduled departure is currently the service from Kristiansand to Hirtshals at 4:30pm.
Vocabulary: rykket til senere – moved to a later time
New mayor in Ringsted after sexual harassment accusations
Zealand town Ringsted has a new mayor – Klaus Hansen of the Liberal (Venstre) party – after predecessor and party colleague Henrik Hvidesten stepped down.
Hvidesten, who had been mayor since 2014, resigned on Monday after female colleagues said he had groped them at a national meeting of municipal leaders.
“I am extremely grateful that all the parties in the council majority agree to back me as new mayor for Ringsted Municipality,” Hansen told local media Sjællandske Nyheder.
Hansen had expressed “full confidence” in Hvidesten after the allegations against him first emerged last week.
Vocabulary: konstituerende partier – parties in local council who back candidate for mayor
Greenland 'absorbs more methane than it emits'
Greenland absorbs more of the greenhouse gas methane than it emits, according to a new study from the University of Copenhagen released yesterday.
"On average and since 2000, dry landscapes of the ice-free part of Greenland have consumed more than 65,000 tons of methane annually from the atmosphere, while 9,000 tons of methane have been released annually from its wet areas," the university said in a statement.
The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment, are encouraging because methane, the second-biggest contributor to global warming after CO2, is particularly harmful to the environment.
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