>> She's never been to Glasgow, then.

How do you know how much money the ugly, Glaswegian, prostitutes make?

;-)

Also, in regards to you "brainstorm/mind shower" comment, apparently, it's changed again as "mind shower" has now also been deemed offensive.

Unfortunately, I can't remember what it's been changed to. I'll speak with the wife tonight...

The points that most of the debunkers make are that:
1) The government denies the story
2) It appeared only in the Telegraph (not in the German-language press or even blogosphere)
3) It sounds like it was a fiction inspired by the Yahoo article (which obviously doesn't debunk it per se, since it was published earlier...)

The Occam explanation is definitely that the Torygraph (made it up/were hoaxed)...

Point 2 is fair enough. The problem I have with point 1 is that I've yet to see the German Government deny the story. They have issued a general denial about what the law states, what job centres are supposed to do, etc, but I haven't seen a specific denial about the woman mentioned in the Telegraph article. (If you have seen one, please do let me know.) That is what makes me suspicious. If it hasn't happened, why on Earth not deny it?

Apparently the story is part true, the woman was offered the job in the bar of a brothel, but not as a prostitute. So she was not being forced into prostitution, but did have to work in a brothel to accept the position. Does rather ruin much of the righteous indignation though.

Oh, I don't know. If you have a moral objection to prostitution, being forced to work in a brothel is still pretty bloody awful, even if you aren't required to have sex.

One key point still stands: the fact that the German Government did not make brothels an exception to certain welfare laws when they legalised them. There appears to have been much discussion of this in Germany, and it looks like the Government are going to create the necessary and sensible exceptions in response to public demand, but, if I were a German voter, I'd be very pissed off that the politicians who took quite a big wodge of my cash in payment for their "expertise" only managed to notice something this obvious after the public and the media had pointed it out to them.