In some quarters in the States, it’s thought that in Europe, daycare for kids is plentiful, state-provided and thus inexpensive, one of the positive side effects of high taxes. That may be true somewhere, but it’s certainly not the case in Munich.

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My daughter’s school broke the law yesterday. I don’t mind too much, though, as the law in question is stupid and ought to be abolished.

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Under German law, religious [...]

Last night I was in the downtown bookstore to pick up some stuff for travel planning, and I glanced over at their bestseller rack. Number one was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In English. The German edition won’t come out until October.
The best-selling book in the store is in a foreign language. That’s some [...]

The nazis marched today in Frankfurt. But it must have been rather frustrating for them. Their numbers were disappointing, they were relegated to the periphery of the city, and a thick wall of police ensured that they would not offend decent people’s eyes or ears.

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Hessia’s education minister Karin Wolff has recently drawn attention for proposing that school biology lessons include the biblical creation story. Now she has drawn attention by outing herself as gay. All too many politicians pander to creationists; and some out themselves. But it’s pretty rare, I’d think, that the same politician does both.
Wolff will have [...]

Eurozone Watch has two articles about Germany and Italy that offer support for an optimistic view of the European economy. For a start, Sebastian Dullein argues that a comparison of Germany today and the US after the early 90s recession shows that Germany might be on the brink of a productivity surge. Dullein argues that [...]

I was recently fiddling with the German Federal Railways’ on-line European timetables, when I noticed something very strange. They have the best cross-European timetable, no doubt about it, but some odd things happen if you’re heading too far east. For example, when I asked it for a route from Paris to Tallinn, everything went a [...]

Though creationism does rear its ugly head from time to time in Europe, it is largely a fringe phenomenon. Unlike in America, even most religious Europeans accept evolution as an obvious fact, viewing the biblical creation stories (yes, there’s more than one) as, at most, poetic metaphor. So it’s easy for us over here to [...]

Germany has tossed a Holocaust denier into prison, and the American Christianist right is all outraged about it. Or so PZ Myers tells me; it’s telling that I had to learn about this from him, as this hasn’t been a big story here at all.
As you probably know, it is illegal in Germany to deny [...]

The dismal weather notwithstanding, the family and I headed out to the Waldstadion this weekend to take in a football match. Now how on earth, you’ll have asked yourself straight away, could we have seen a football match at this time of year? The answer is simply: it wasn’t football, it was ‘football’.

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