Only a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the pages of German newspapers and Web sites are filled with another natural disaster: Hurricane Rita. "Monster Storm Unleashes Panic," writes the tabloid Bild, Germany's most widely read newspaper. "Galveston is located on an island just off the Texas coast. The city, with its 58,000 residents, may not exist after Sunday. If Rita hits land there, the city will perish." The paper illustrates the story with a massive, annotated image of the hurricane and a small in-laid photo of yellow school buses taking refugees from the imperilled coastline farther inland. The hurricane is expected to make landfall early Saturday morning, somewhere along the coast between Corpus Christi and the Louisiana border. Though it is no longer a "Category 5" hurricane -- its wind speeds have slowed from 175 miles per hour to 140 -- it is still expected to make landfall as a "Category 3" or "Category 4" storm.

This time there are no preachy statements from German politicians linking Rita to global warming and pointing the finger at George W. Bush for his practically non-existent policies on climate protection. Instead, Berlin has left that to Britain's chief environmental authority. Quoted in the Independent newspaper in London, Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, said : "If this makes the climate loonies in the States realize we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation."

But German papers play it safer, perhaps remembering the tongue-lashing outgoing Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin got for his ill-timed linkage of Bush's climate inactivity and Katrina.

Instead, the editors here are thinking about something else they often associate with Bush: oil. Coverage of the evacuation of oil exploration stations in the Gulf of Mexico plays second only to the reports on residents fleeing homes. "Millions flee Rita; Parts of Houston Evacuated; Oil Refineries in Danger," writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung. The paper notes that 1.3 million people are leaving the coastline and the city of Galveston is being completely evacuated. Residents in low-lying parts of Houston, America's fourth-largest city, are also being evacuated. It also notes that oil platforms are endangered by Rita as well as oil refineries, before ominously warning that 80 percent of the country's oil refining capacity is located in what could be the storm's path.

As SPIEGEL ONLINE points out, the region expected to be hit by Rita is home to 87 petrochemical companies -- and environmental activists are warning of an oil pollution catastrophe. Most of the companies are winding down operations and oil platform workers are being brought to shore. SPIEGEL has posted a map of all of the oil exploration and drilling platforms -- mobile oil exploration rigs are orange and drilling platforms are gray.

Unlike Katrina, this time it looks like the National Guard is better prepared for the possibility of catastrophe -- 10,000 soldiers have already been deployed and an additional 5,000 are on standby awaiting deployment.

The weekly newspaper Die Zeit notes that the evacuation effort is creating massive traffic jams. On some roads, it is taking as long as 15 hours to drive 20 kilometers. SPIEGEL ONLINE is reporting that many people's cars are running out of gas. Emergency officials are trying to get more fuel to them in canisters as quickly as possible.

Having learned some lessons from Katrina, officials have warned residents that there will not be any immediate relief after the hurricane hits and that they should stock up on essential food, water and medication beforehand.

The city at greatest risk, notes the daily Die Tageszeitung, is Galveston. With small levees only a few meters tall, enormous flooding is expected if large waves strike. More than 90 percent of Galveston's residents have already been evacuated as America prepares for its third-strongest hurricane ever.

As SPIEGEL OINLINE notes, this wouldn't be the first time a major hurricane hit Galveston. The city still reels from the memory of America's worst-ever natural catastrophe. Back then, hurricanes didn't have names as they do today, but the storm that hit the shores of Galveston -- a sand island with a low elevation of less than 9 feet above sea level -- in 1900 was the strongest ever in American history. Between 8,100-12,000 Galveston residents were killed -- more than during San Francisco's 1906 earthquake or Chicago's 1871 fire.

If the storm makes a direct hit at Galveston, it could also inflict enormous damage on Houston, which is located about 45 miles from the coast. Already, facilities like the Johnson Space Center, home to NASA's mission control, have been taken offline. Normally, the International Space Station is controlled from Johnson, but NASA has transferred control to Russia's space agency.

Southern Texas's major daily, the Houston Chronicle, is blogging the news on the scene . And Flickr has a Rita cluster .

Cash For Kids

While countries all across Europe bemoan their aging populations and dramatically sinking birth rates, France has decided to do something about it. The government has announced the introduction of a further monetary supplement for families with three children. Following the birth of the third child, the parent will receive 750 euros a month if one parent takes a career break.

The amount is limited to one year; the idea being to grant extra support for larger families, but not to encourage women to take too much time out from their careers, which might set them back behind men. Traditionally France has provided a great deal of support for larger families, such as generous tax breaks and relatively comprehensive childcare -- policies which appear to have worked, since France now has a birth-rate of 1.9 children per woman, compared to an EU average of 1.5.

In Germany, Europe's biggest economy, the situation is one of the most worrying, with a birth-rate of 1.3 children per woman. The situation is not helped by lingering cultural attitudes that mothers should stay at home to look after the children -- surprising in a country which is otherwise so liberal. German has an old term, "Rabenmutter" -- roughly translated as "raven mother" -- which is a pejorative term for an unnatural and uncaring mother, and with startling disregard for modern life the word is sometimes used for a woman who goes out to work "instead of" looking after her child.

France's scheme has created a great deal of envious attention in Germany, where politicians can't even decide on the next government, let alone on policies to increase the birth-rate. The situation is particularly critical in view of the fact that the baby boom generation of the 60s only has few years left to prove its fertility -- if left any longer, critics say, it will be even more expensive to raise the birth-rate enough.

The panicked debate however does seem slightly bizarre in view of the parallel argument currently going on about Turkish EU entry. Turkey has one of the region's youngest populations and has the potential to give Germany the demographic shove it needs -- a fact ignored by all those who call for more children but are also virulently opposed to Turkish EU accession.

The Stasi Connection

As if German politicians needed one more reason to grind their teeth, it seems a handful of newly-elected parliamentarians might be ex-Communist stool pigeons.

Part of the terror of living in East Germany was the omnipresence of the secret police, or the Stasi: you never knew if friends, neighbors, or even family members were liable to pass hints of dissent on to the ruling Communist Party. Those who wanted to avoid bad consequences learned to keep their mouths shut and get along.

After reunification, the Stasi melted away -- but left behind files that included the informants' names. Marianne Birthler, whose responsibility is to sift through these files for the German government, has just revealed that seven newly-elected parliamentarians were established informants for the secret police.