I gave up reading the news for a week, more or less ... I didn't feel like it.

Yesterday woke me again. I was reading Der Spiegel's article about tax evading prostitutes in Cologne, stunned by the gap in the article that concludes that there appears to be a significant number of tax evaders.

How did they deduce this ... well they worked out how many prostitutes there were in Germany and did the math.

But ... they only needed to research a little further and discover the reality of prostitution in Europe ... that human traffiking is alive and well.

In an article about taxing prostitutues in Antwerp - referring to the 'tax' as a tax on 'the windows they or their owners hire' you quickly discover what the German tax inspectors are overlooking:

You can read: But even here (in Antwerp), human trafficking endures just outside the zone. Police say illegal prostitutes still outnumber legal ones and about a quarter of the total are the victims of human trafficking or work for pimps. In Germany, aid groups say there are three times as many illegal prostitutes as legally registered ones. In the Netherlands, only 5 percent to 10 percent of the nearly 20,000 prostitutes pay taxes, according to the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam.

Dated May 2005 you can read the rest of that article here .

Sometimes the big papers don't tell it like it is and so perhaps I need to keep reading the news because the gaps frighten me.