Love seats in Denmark

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A curious news story out of Denmark kicks off our Geo Quiz today. A public bus company in Copenhagen came up with a way to spice up the ride. It’s designated a couple of so-called “love seats” on more than a 100 of its buses. It’s supposed to encourage people to … ahem … get to know each other better. Download MP3

Baltic Island seals

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Geo Quiz takes us out to sea. If you travel clockwise around the Baltic Sea, you can visit any of the Baltic countries: Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Poland, Germany, and finally Denmark. Download MP3

See photos of the grey seals

Entire program – December 21, 2009

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Today on The World: The funeral of one of Iran’s most influential dissident voices stirs new protests from opposition supporters; Also, nations point fingers at each other after the failure to reach a binding agreement at the Copenhagen climate summit; Plus a video game in which the Russians are the bad guys, gains popularity in Russia.

Talking Travel: Copenhagen and holiday travel

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Pity the poor delegates to the Climate Conference in Copenhagen. They’re all stuck inside that conference hall. That’s too bad, because Copenhagen and Denmark have a lot to offer a tourist. In our Talking Travel podcast with Lonely Planet, we’ll tell you about some of those tourist spots. We’ll also discuss holiday travel, which sometimes, as you’ll hear, involves spiders in Burma. (Photo: Christer Frederiksson for Lonely Planet)

• Download this Talking Travel Podcast
• Email us with your holiday travel stories
• Subscribe to Talking Travel via RSS
• Lonely Planet’s Denmark Page

Geo answer

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For today’s Geo Quiz we’re looking for one of the world’s bicycling capitals. The answer is Copenhagen. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Assaf Biderman of MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, who’s in Copenhagen today, about a new bicycle wheel that his team designed. It’s called the Copenhagen Wheel.

Free speech around the world

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After Joe Wilson’s “you lie!”, after Kanye West at the MTV awards, after Serena Williams’ outburst at the US Open, you may think: enough already with nasty speech. Well, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. In this week’s World in Words podcast, a report on some really offensive Dutch cartoons. Also, a South African gadfly-journalist upsets just about everyone. And the Danish tourist bureau stages a faux one night stand.

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Denmark pulls ‘promiscuous’ video

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A video promoting tourism in Denmark has been removed from YouTube after complaints it promoted promiscuity. The three-minute clip shows a young blond woman trying to find a man whom she had a one night stand with, who fathered her child “August.”
We hear more about the video, and the controversy, from Danish radio journalist Anders Lindemann.

• Watch the video
• BBC Coverage
• Copenhagen Post editorial

Denmark angry over tourism web ad

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A web video produced by Denmark’s Tourism bureau was supposed to lure tourists to the Scandinavian country. Instead, it’s drawn the ire of Danes. Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Anders Lindemann, a Danish Broadcasting journalist who’s been following the story.