Mink breeders may have received too much compensation 

A political decision to compensate mink fur breeders 333 kroner for each skin they lost due to the industry’s Covid-era shutdown is likely to have been an overestimate that cost the government billions, media Zetland reports.

The figure comes from previously unseen information from accountancy firm Ernst & Young, which concludes that the average price of a mink skin in the relevant period was 234 kroner, 99 kroner per skin less than the price set by politicians.

The state could have saved 10 billion kroner if it had chosen the skin price which Ernst and Young found to have been the most probable sale price, Zetland writes.

Vocabulary: skind – skin / fur

Mild but changeable spring weather this week

After a weekend that switched between glorious spring sunshine and pouring rain, this week is forecast to bring similarly mild but unpredictable weather, according to meteorologist Klaus Larsen of national Met office DMI.

“Monday will start a bit cloudy with some rain over the southeastern part of Denmark. During the morning it will clear up and become dry with some sun,” he told newswire Ritzau.

Temperatures ranging from 12 to 17 degrees Celsius are forecast today, with winds also settling as the day goes on.

Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are all likely to bring rainy spells and will likely be cooler than Monday, while Friday could be the best day of the week in terms of weather, current forecasts predict.

Residents of Christiania pull up Pusher Street stone by stone

Christianites gathered together on Saturday morning to pull up the hippy enclave’s notorious Pusher Street cobble stone by cobble stone, with participants asked to take stones home as souvenirs.

The idea was that by digging up all the cobblestones on Pusher Street, a symbolic end would be brought to the drug trade that has long plagued the street in Christiania, a former army barracks that has since 1971 housed an inner city hippy community. 

A Christianite, as residents of the enclave are called, began the excavation of Pusher Street on Saturday morning by removing the first cobblestone, with the crowd erupting into cheers when it was removed at around 10am.

READ ALSO: Why Denmark’s hippy Christiania is closing down its open drug market

Activists hold ‘funeral’ for polluted fjord

Vejle Fjord received last rites on Saturday from a group of local activists in an effort to draw attention to the poor health of the country’s coastal waters.

About a thousand people gathered alongside the fjord to celebrate an open-air “funeral” for the inlet on the east coast of Jutland, which has been asphyxiated by industrial agricultural run-offs.

“We mark this as a sorrowful event. Last year, we had the most heavy deoxygenation in 25 years in Denmark,” Christian Fromberg, who organised the event for Greenpeace, told news agency AFP.

A report in 2022 by the University of Southern Denmark concluded the 22-kilometre (14-mile) fjord was in a “poor environmental condition” because of high levels of nitrogen run-off from fertiliser use on farms.

READ ALSO: Denmark holds ‘funeral’ for a polluted fjord