Free Republic

A Belgian insurance company has refused to insure a Jewish kindergarten in Brussels. The company claimed the risk of a terror attack on the European Jewish Association-run institution was too high. EJA General Director Rabbi Menachem Margolin called on all European governments and heads of European Union institutions to provide security to all Jewish institutions that would satisfy insurance companies, and establish an alternative insurance mechanism that would secure any institution that might fall victim to anti-Semitic attacks.

Lithuania is torn apart over what stance to take toward its own gay population. As the country grapples with how much tolerance it will tolerate, it is facing strong pressure from the EU. ­Local deputies have recently voted for the draft law banning “homosexual propaganda”. The European Parliament reacted immediately, lancing those who disapprove of what many see as the agitation of homosexuality in schools and, what is even more surprising, in kindergartens. The struggle escalated in 2009 when the National Association of Parents and Families petitioned the Lithuanian Ministry of Labor and Social Security, complaining about a teaching technique...

German kindergartens told to pay before they sing BERLIN — A body representing German musicians found itself accused of Scrooge-like meanness on Tuesday after pressing kindergartens to pay up for singing songs that are protected by copyright. The GEMA, the German musical copyright monitoring body, has written to 36,000 of the nursery schools telling them they have to fork out to photocopy song texts and to keep a proper record of which ones are sung. Kindergartens and MPs were incensed, with the mass-circulation Bild daily calling the move "bureaucratic madness." A spokeswoman for the Paritaetischer Wohlfahrtsverband Hamburg, an association representing...

President Bush, with his wife, and daughter Jenna, is celebrating his 59th birthday in Denmark and Scotland before the G8 conference begins in Scotland. Welcome to Sanity Island.