A place marker is seen at the empty seat of German Education Minister Annette Schavan prior to the weekly German government cabinet meeting on February 6, 2013 in Berlin, Germany. The University of Dusseldorf retracted Schavan's doctoral degree on Tuesday evening after the institute decided that she plagiarized portions of it while a student 30 years ago, making her the latest in a series of German politicians in the past two years to lose such a degree due to insufficient annotation.