Many apologies for the pun-heavy yellow press headline, but what other choice did we have?Germany’s weekly news magazine Der Spiegel bills itself as a sort of German version of celebrated British newspaper The Economist. Its actions over the past few days however, have shown that bears a closer relation to its English namesake, tabloid The Mirror.

On August 31, just a day before EU leaders were to meet in an emergency summit to discuss the Georgia crisis, the newspaper issued what is known as a ‘teaser’, a sort of theatrical trailer for the main event published on Monday.

This teaser contained the shocking ‘revelation’ that the OSCE, the security body that had monitored the South Ossetia conflict since 1992, had prepared a report outlining how Georgia had plotted the ‘attack’ against Tskhinvali “while citizens of South Ossetia were asleep in bed.”

In fact, the OSCE prepared no such report