It was another quiet night in Ukraine with, thankfully, all the rumours of a crackdown by security forces not coming true. Neeka has a couple of posts on what happened overnight. She also points out, that amidst everything else going on, Dynamo Kiev played at home in the Champions League last night, and won 2-0. [...]

One thing Victor Katolyk has said in his reports from Kiev that I’ve heard echoed elsewhere is that there have been protests - mainly by the Ukrainian diaspora - at Ukrainian embassies and consulates around the world. So, I wanted to ask the readers of AFOE to participate in a bit of interactive newsgathering. Here’s [...]

I’m starting a new post for the latest information as the old one was starting to get a bit long. The session in Parliament has broken up as there were 191 deputies there, but 226 (50%+1) were required for a quorum, so no action could be taken. However, the Kyiv Post reports that Yushchenko has [...]

Just a quick update on events in Ukraine today. Mass protests are still taking place in Kiev and Lviv, and the rumoured crackdown by security forces on protestors during the night didn’t take place. Yushchenko has asked the protestors in Kiev to march to Ukraine’s Parliament which is debating the elections. I can’t read it, [...]

I, too, have been following the situation in Ukraine — my roomate has been there for a week as an election observer — and I briefly flirted with the idea of writing something snarky and facetious about the developing situation. But I realize now this may be the wrong tack. After all, there may be [...]

The Ukrainian election is turning into a huge story, as careful observers had suspected. At stake is whether Ukraine — as big as France, with a population of 48m — will make a decisive political turn toward Euro-Atlantic structures, or whether it will go down the CIS road of defective democracies and subordination to Russia.
(Not [...]

So, after a long election campaign, the vote takes place. Exit polls say that one candidate has a clear lead, but when the votes begin to be counted it seems that his rival is leading by a small margin. Election officials keep counting, with results not expected for a day or so, while candidates begin [...]

It seems that there is a renewed interest in detailed comparisons of the economic realities in Europe and the US. First Die Zeit (German), then The Economist, and now Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has a very nice piece illustrating the statistical problems inherent in all international economic comparisons - there’s not one just reality, and [...]

Following up on some of the comments to this post from Doug Muir.
I’m with the other Doug on long-term prospects. As far as I know, no Western European state exists with an indigenous minority population approaching 30 percent.
Thus, the EU is asking the Macedonians (that is, the inhabitants of the former FYROM, regardless of [...]

The Register informs that the new member states are already making a difference:
“The Polish government has withdrawn its support for the European software patent directive. At a cabinet meeting in Warsaw yesterday, officials concluded that the directive does not meet its original objective of limiting patents on software and business methods in Europe.
According to a [...]