It is by now well known that the main hope for developed societies subject to rapid population ageing who wish to maintain their relative standard of living lies in increasing their collective productivity more rapidly than they increase their dependency ratio via-a-vis the older age groups. Now in the comments thread on the recent ‘Reform [...]

Who was the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany? Diagramme his family tree (paternal and maternal) back to the 14th century.
Germans have been shocked lately to discover that a lot of their schools suck.
The schools in question are typically Hauptschulen, the lowest in the tripartite German division of secondary schools (the others are [...]

In comments to an earlier post on neonazi electoral gains in eastern Germany, I noted that Germany’s mainstream right wing Union parties normally respond to this sort of thing with a rightward lurch of their own. And indeed, they are right on schedule.

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The European Commission has recommended that accession talks for Turkey should begin, but hasn’t laid out any dates for the process:
Commission officials are reporting on the progress Turkey has already made, along with Bulgaria and Romania.
The final decision on Turkey rests with the leaders of all 25 EU member states in December - with accession [...]

Now here’s an interesting one. (And please note that in keeping with recent Fistful tradition - as identified by Ms T - I am putting a question mark before the title). Pascal Lamy is reportedly considering a discussion paper which proposes allowing countries to impose import bans on products from other countries that do not [...]

Following Scotts recent post in the mailbox we have Amitai Etzioni drawing our attention to a piece he wrote on the same topic in the International Herald Tribune. His key point seems to be that it is important to “utterly reject the multicultural notion that we should abolish societal identities to accommodate the sensibilities [...]

When I first came to Belgium, one of the things that genuinely surprised me is how people seem to think Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a children’s programme. Admittedly, the title doesn’t exactly say “socially relevant drama”, but I doubt that the show’s success on American TV would have been possible without the age [...]