TIME writes that Germans are gaga about about baby polar bears.

Paul Krugman [NYT] dubs Europe The Comeback Continent.

Liesl Schillinger reviews a pair of new German dealing-with-the-past novels recently translated into English, "Homecoming" by Bernhard Schlink ("The Reader") and "Night Train to Lisbon" by Pascal Mercier. The former is lauded as "sensitive and disturbing" while the latter is "long-winded and dull". Heller McAlpin in the LA Times also praises "Homecoming" as a "lean, meticulously structured, disquieting thought-provoker."

Newsweek gets a torrent of mail from European readers in response to its mid-November issue on the worldwide influence of the 1968 generation. One letter from Germany reads, "Sons, perhaps more than daughters, grew [after WWII] suspicious of what might lie behind their fathers' prolonged silence, taking it for complicity in the regime's innumerable crimes. In many ways, their history teachers at school weren't much help either, most of them having gone through traumatic wartime experiences but are still incapable of coming to terms with the past, let alone opening up about it. Hence the younger generation's often incredibly skewed assessment of contemporary politics and their conviction that the United States, after what had happened in Vietnam, was little better than Hitler and his barbarous henchmen."

The Economist columnist Charlemagne assesses the Germany's take on the US presidential campaigns. "It is striking that many Europeans skate over the political views of Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama and instead treat their fight as a simple Rorschach test of the health of the American dream. In fact, both Democratic frontrunners' policy platforms answer (at least superficially) some of the biggest European gripes about Mr Bush over the past eight years."

The United States and Germany officially recognize Kosovo's independence [IHT], though there is resistance from the other EU members: "The German Foreign Ministry said Thursday that no decision had been reached on when the EU would recognize Kosovo. It ruled out any suggestion that Germany and the United States alone would recognize Kosovo. Merkel has been lobbying the other 26 EU member states in order that the bloc will have a united stance over this issue."