It’s Father’s Day in the German press. A ruling long awaited by unmarried fathers now requires Germany – whose laws give them the short end of the stick – to change its ways. On 3 December the European Court of Human Rights roundly condemned the current arrangement under which the mother in an unmarried couple gets to decide whether or not to share custody for joint children with the father. “Discriminatory,” rules the court in Strasbourg. Henceforth German courts will have to adjudicate on a “case-by-case” basis. The Süddeutsche Zeitung hails the ruling as a “milestone” that puts paid to a conception of the family “marked by preconceived and outmoded ideas of a piece with the idealised image of the mother forever sacrificing herself for her child […] and whose uppermost concern, even in a separation, is the child’s well-being”.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.