Jacob Christensen

The numbers were announced this Friday. As quoted in Politiken:

Copenhagen (Political Science)

213 admitted – 21 on stand-by – 670 applications of which 375 first priority

Århus (Political Science)

235 admitted – 20 on stand-by – 605 applications of which 333 first priority

Odense (Political Science)

82 admitted – 15 on stand-by – 281 applications of which 106 first priority

Ålborg (Public Administration)

122 admitted – 0 on stand-by – 257 applications of which 114 first priority

Roskilde (Social Science)

505 admitted – 42 on stand-by – 1099 applications of which 524 first priority (National programme)

125 admitted – 8 on stand-by – 406 applications of which 142 first priority (International programme)

Note that the numbers for Roskilde cover all social science, students specialise in various subject during their education.

Worth noting is also that Economics at all universities have vacancies.

1. It’s official: Le Tour de France 2007 will be announced as “The Medical Mystery Tour”.

2. The Danes are very, very angry with the Swedes. The reason? Sweden has minimized admissions to medical schools and as a consequence hopeful young Swedes now cram Danish medical schools. Or in other words: Denmark pays for the education of Swedish doctors. (As does Sweden’s rich neighbour Poland).

The Swedish government does not recognise this as a problem.

Update: Swedish Radio has covered the subject.

3. Contrary to her earlier statements, Marianne Jelved does not endorse Margrethe Vestager as her successor. Not at the moment, at least.

Similarly, Naser Khader does not want to be Marianne Jelved’s successor. At the moment.

I’ll be on vacation during the coming weeks and will be blogging very lightly – if at all.

Unless something really unexpected happens, the Next Big Thing will be the Swedish election campaign.

The controversy surrounding Norbert Röttgen’s (also: Wikipedia in German) on-off career move is worth mentioning even if I only have the time to write a short post.

The short version is that Röttgen while being seen as one of the younger coming men of the CDU and a close ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, decided to take up a post at the Federation of German Industries. In many other countries this exchange between political and organisational careers are part of modern politics, but in Germany there still is an expectation that people will only have one career.

At the same time, critics of Chancellor Merkel could claim that Röttgen followed the lead of Friedrich Merz who were effectively pushed out of office by Merkel.
So, Röttgen’s move was interpreted as yet another sign of internal unease in the CDU.

At the same time, Röttgen was heavily criticised for wanting to keep his seat in parliament and thus sit on two chairs simultaneously: As parlamentarian and as lobbyist. In the end, he decided not to take up his post at the BDI but what effects this will have on Röttgen’s political career in the short and in the long run remains to be seen.

Yesterday Floyd Landis exploded, had un jour sans, died, lost any – any! – chance of winning this year’s Tour de France. In terms of the TdF ’06, Landis was a has-been.

And today he tore the race apart and won the stage. Emphatically.

Is it because of the doping raids which eliminated all of the favourites that this year’s Tour de France is the most exciting since 1996?

This July hasn’t seen too much action in terms of the usual summer test balloons. With regard to Sweden the most obvious explanation is that all parties are saving their forces for the electoral campaign which is due to start in earnest sometime during August. And maybe the heat and the draught has something to do with it as well.

In Denmark, the biggest piece of news so far is that Social Liberal MP Naser Khader in a radio interview called for a vote among all members of the party when the next political leader of the party is elected. Marianne Jelved has no known plans to retire but she has made her support for the former party chairman and minister of education Margrethe Vestager clear.

One problem for Khader is that the Social Liberal Party always has divided political and organisational offices: The parliamentary group has chosen – in a more or less formal way – the political leader while the annual party conference has elected the party chairman. On the other hand, Khader may be able to benefit from a conflict within the party with regard to what parliamentary strategy – stay close to the Social Democrats or act independently – the party should follow.

In Germany, there is a really fascinating story about attempts by Chancellor Angela Merkel to persuade the Prime Minister of Hesse, Roland Koch, to exchange his present post in favour of the post as federal Minister for Trade and Industry. Koch would be slated to replace CSU’s Michel Glos who is being described as the German government’s problem bear.

Koch is one of Germany’s shrewdest politicians and while it is easy to see why Merkel – to quote the former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson – would prefer having Koch inside the tent pissing out instead of outside the tent pissing in, I have a hard time seeing Koch moving to Berlin for any other reason than to become Federal Chancellor.

A modern classic: Are boys falling behind in the modern educational system?The Education Sector has a skeptical analysis based on U.S. data. The basic message is: No, both sexes are progressing but girls have advanced more than boys.Some of the fall-out can be followed through a post on the Education Sector’s blog – The Boys and Girls Debate Rages On – and a thread on Crooked Timber – The Truth about Boys and Girls.One noteworthy quote from the Education Sector site:

There’s no doubt that some groups of boys—particularly Hispanic and black boys and boys from low-income homes—are in real trouble. But the predominant issues for them are race and class, not gender. Closing racial and economic gaps would help poor and minority boys more than closing gender gaps, and focusing on gender gaps may distract attention from the bigger problems facing these youngsters.

So, it’s back to class.

It’s official: For the first time in six months, I no longer have a backlog of issues of Die Zeit lying around.

The war between Israel and Lebanon has become an issue in Danish domestic politics. On Tuesday the foreign policy spokesman of the Danish People’s Party, Søren Espersen, called for an investigation into the economic status of the Danish citizens that have been or are waiting to be evacuated from Lebanon.

In the press release and in an interview with the Danish newspaper Politiken, Espersen implies (of cause without stating it openly – he is too experienced with political propaganda to do that) that a large proportion of the Danish citizens who were in Lebanon at the time illegally received unemployment benefits or other forms of public support.

In shrewd political move, the Liberal Minister of Employment Claus Hjorth Frederiksen said that this kind of investigation couldn’t be performed by the state but was the business of unemployment funds and local authorities. Frederiksen nevertheless welcomed such an investigation.

According to the Danish Foreign Office, around 4.100 Danish citizens had been evacuated to Damascus from the beginning of the crisis until Tuesday.

It is a reasonable guess that a large majority of these have a background as Palestinian refugees or descendants of refugees who came to Denmark during the late 1980s.

Nick (and Alyona) Aylott have a blog.