This is probably not what Francois Hollande wanted on the first day of his presidency:

After a succession of rain-drenched and pomp-filled ceremonial inauguration events, Hollande took off in a Falcon 7X aircraft for Berlin. The plane was hit by lightning shortly afterward, and returned to the Villacoublay air base outside Paris as a precaution for inspection, Defense Ministry spokesman Gerard Gachet said.

Defense officials say the president and his entourage were transferred to another aircraft, a Falcon 900, and left shortly thereafter. That made Hollande about an hour and a half late for his first meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A new FP slideshow compares Hollande's inauguration with Vladimir Putin's somewhat grander affair. 

One of the most unfortunate neologisms of the European financial crisis has to be "Grexit," the now-ubiquitous term referring to a possible Greek exit from the eurozone. (I'm pretty fond of PIIGS, on other hand.) I was curious about who had first used the term. This FT Alphavillle post from Feb. 7 would seem to have the answer:  

Grexit being, of course, a Greek exit from the eurozone. (Also, an app for archiving and sharing Gmail threads. Bummer for them.)

The term comes from Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari at Citi, who are now leaning towards the “let them leave” argument:

First, we raise our estimate of the likelihood of Greek exit from the eurozone (or ‘Grexit’) to 50% over the next 18 months from earlier estimates of ours which put it at 25-30%. Second, we argue that the implications of Grexit for the rest of the EA and the world would be negative, but moderate, as exit fear contagion would likely be contained by policy action, notably from the ECB.

So it appears Citibank is to blame. On the other hand, maybe an unpleasant sounding word is appropriate for that scenario. 

For the first time, EU forces are attacking pirate bases within Somali territory:

European helicopter gunships attacked a pirate base on the Somali coast on Tuesday, destroying five speedboats, in the first such airborne strike on land by the anti-piracy force.

The Somali-based pirates responded by threatening to kill crew being held on more than a dozen hijacked vessels if they were attacked again.

The EU Naval Force (EU Navfor) said it had carried out the overnight raid on pirate targets using helicopters and surveillance aircraft with the agreement of the beleaguered, Western-backed Somali government.

There are concerns that this new tactic could put the more than 300 hostages being held in Somalia at risk, or drive the pirates to more desperate tactics. I also wonder, if this becomes a regular thing, whether it will have larger security implications. Frequent European bombing raids on Somali territory with the consent of the Western-backed government in Mogadishu, no matter the intended target, seem like something a group like Al Shabaab could easily exploit for propaganda value.

EU Observer looks at a new report, set to be endorsed by Europe's finance ministers tomorrow, that looks beyond the the ramifications of the "Grexit" to a longer-term threat to the continent's prosperity:

With an increase of some five percent, the total EU population is to reach 526 million in 2040. Not counted in the statistics are potential further enlargements to populous countries such as Turkey.

The largest chunk of the population will continue to be the age group 15-64, but it will decrease from 67 percent in 2010 to 56 percent in 2060. "Those aged 65 and over will become a much larger share (rising from 17% to 30% of the population), and those aged 80 and over (rising from 5% to 12%) will almost become as numerous as the young population in 2060," the report predicts.

The labour force is going to to up slightly until 2020 as more women are joining the workforce, but after that a decline of almost 12 percent will be recorded by 2060, or 27.7 million less.

Statistics vary widely across the bloc - from a 25 percent increase in Ireland to a 38.5 drop in Romania over the same period up to 2060.

As women across the bloc are having on average less than two children, which is the natural replacement rate for a society and as life expectancy is going up, the pensioner-to-worker ratio will rise from 39 percent in 2010 to 71 percent in 2060. The lowest rate - 55 percent - is projected in Denmark, the UK and Ireland, while the highest rates - over 90 percent are to be hit in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Romania in 2060.

Meanwhile, economic growth is projected to remain low, around 1.5 percent up to 2020 and 1.6 percent in 2021-2030 followed by a slow-down to 1.3 percent by 2060, as labour productivity will increase in the poorer states.

The aging of the developed world is the subtext of a lot of the generous maternity benefits I wrote about in this mother's day list and the fertility promotion programs I discussed in the Sex Issue. Singapore's government matchmaking service and Russia "Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia Day" contest might seem goofy, but there demographic trends behind them are a quite real

The Dalai Lama made a pretty startling claim in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph yesterday:

"We received some sort of information from Tibet," he said. "Some Chinese agents training some Tibetans, especially women, you see, using poison – the hair poisoned, and the scarf poisoned – they were supposed to seek blessing from me, and my hand touch."

It was Leipzig-born Friedrich Nietzche who wrote that "God is dead" in the 1880s. As far as his fellow East Germans are concerned, he may have been on to something.

A recent study by University of Chicago sociologist Tom Smith looks at survey data on belief in God in 30 countries between 1991 and 2008. The citizens of the former German Democratic Republic have by far the highest rate of atheism at 52.1 percent. The Czech Republic is the most atheist currently existing country at 39.9 percent. They're followed by the French (23.3 percent), the Dutch (19.7 percent), and the Swedes (19.3 percent). Japan is the country with the lowest percentage of people who say they "know god really exists and have no doubts about it."  (4.3 percent.)

The most religious country in the survey was the Philippines, where 83.6 percent of people are sure God exists and only 0.7 percent are atheists. The United States is pretty godly as well, with only a 3 percent rate of atheism and 60.6 percent sure that he exists. 

East Germany has gotten less religious since the fall of communism -- and young people are less religious than their parents --  a trend that doesn't hold for other members of the Eastern Bloc. Russia, for instance, saw an 11.7 percent decline in atheism since 1991 and a 17.3 percent increase in belief in God. Israel saw the largest increase in belief in God (23 percent), possibly due to the influx of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The rate of atheism in the United States increased very slightly. Generally speaking, belief in God declined modestly in the 30 countries in the survey, nearly all of them in the developed world.

Die Welt digs in to the German findings: 

Researchers found other reasons for atheism in the former East Germany, not least the deep mark left by the National Socialists and the Communists. But they also point to the fact that many Slavic and non-Orthodox communities present in the area since the Middle Ages were nonreligious; that the secularization movements during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933) were particularly strong in the states of Thuringia and Saxony; that the resistance of most DDR dissidents to the church was not seen, unlike the way it was perceived in Catholic Poland, as specifically religiously motivated.

The present study shows that Germany as a whole occupies a middle position on the atheism scale, as the belief in God in West Germany is still very strong – much more so than in neighboring countries like the Czech Republic or France, for example.

East Germans' general indifference to religion doesn't seem to apply to Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told a meeting of her Christian Democratic Union party in 2010, "We don’t have too much Islam; we have too little Christianity."

It will also be interesting to see whether long-term economic distress will have any effect on religious belief in countires like Greece, Italy, and Spain.