German Chancellor Angela Merkel may have a reputation for foreign policy soft power savvy (inter-nation talks, climate change, etc.) but she's starting to flounder on hard issues like troops in Afghanistan and engaging the challenge of an ascendant China. Judy Dempsey writes in the IHT that Merkel is playing aloof about hot button issues, seemingly in the hope that not talking about them will make them go away. "It should be Merkel's job to explain why Germany has 3,300 troops based in Afghanistan. But she rarely does. She has not given a single speech devoted to Afghanistan to the Bundestag, or Parliament. She missed an ideal chance last Friday during a parliamentary debate over renewing the mandates for the German troops based there. But she left the explanation to her not terribly persuasive defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung."

Slate looks at the run-away German pop phenom Tokio Hotel, an emo-looking boy band that thanks to it's massive popularity with 14-year-old girls, has almost single-handedly rescued Universal Germany. French girls are learning German. Next stop: songs in English. Now all they have to do is learn the language.

Berlin is fretting about what namesake to grant its new unified airport: Einstein, Dietrich, Willy Brandt or von Stauffenberg? (Why don't they just call it Heinrich Heine and be done with it?)

EBay's top two global markets are in the United States and Germany, two countries of avid auctioners. The company, though, might have made a mistake buying Skpe for USD 2.6 billion three years ago. Then again, Skype profits are up by 96% in the quarter to USD 98 million. Time might show it as visionary move after all.

Alex Koppelman reviews the new book by Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin about Curveball, the code-name of the "con man" who defected from Iraq to Germany and whose fake intelligence was used to launch the war in Iraq. "After 9/11 his story suddenly was literally plucked out of a safe at the CIA, and within weeks the official CIA analysis of Saddam's threat from biological weapons changed quite dramatically. This is in 2001. And by the time we get to the fall of 2002 and the real run-up to the war, his information is so dominant at the CIA that they virtually hang all of the biological weapons information on him, despite the fact that they had never met him and didn't even know his name. All the information was coming from the Germans."