Tomorrow Bulgaria will have elections:
Nearly six decades after Simeon II, Bulgaria’s 9-year-old child-king, was removed by the Communists, their heirs are again poised to oust him from power. The opposition Socialist Party is leading opinion polls ahead of the June 25 general election and is likely to defeat Prime Minister Simeon Saxcoburggotski.
Actually I know a [...]

According to preliminary figures released today the number of people looking for work in Germany dropped in June for the third month in a row, but the slight change revealed little evidence of a real labour market turnaround.
Bild quoted preliminary figures from the Federal Labor Agency — the body responsible for compiling monthly unemployment [...]

John Snow obviously had had sight of the document ( and here pdf ) when he went round lecturing us that Europe may become a non-favoured environment for US FDI:
“Foreign investment in France and Germany fell sharply in 2004, reinforcing concerns that inflexible labour practices and weak domestic demand are driving investors elsewhere.
In France, inward [...]

Politically incorrect as ever, Samuel Brittan asks an interesting question in today’s FT: have we got it wrong on China. Have Western leaders so obsessed themselves with the need to lecture China on what they should be doing with the Renminbi that we are missing a historic opportunity to put pressure on them about human [...]

I’ve set up an afoe IRC channel on the nightstar channel, if your into that kinda thing. The nice thing with nightstar is that you don’t have to use a client if you don’t want to, they have a web based interface.
If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about, just go here, enter #afistfulofeuros [...]

Even if it is a debatable question whether or not the Iraq war is bogged down in a quagmire, Italy’s economy evidently is. And no-one has even gotten round to offering a plan ‘b’, not even Tony Blair himself. So the silence is deafening, and this simply leads to increased speculation. Berlusconi only pronounced [...]

My gut tells me there’s a bit of inevitability about reforming the EU’s ridiculous farm subsidies, so it surprises me that Mikulas Dzurinda, Slovakia’s PM, is only the first of the 24 one of the first of the many EU leaders lined up against Britain to break ranks. ?I am for reforms,? Dzurinda declared.
Meanwhile Blair [...]

This issue has, I think, been obvious for some time now.
“A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.
The assessment, completed [...]

AP writes from Bratislava about how budget airlines are allowing middle-aged villagers from Central and Eastern Europe to get on an airplane for the first time. Presumably they will also allow British stag parties to enjoy piss-up weekends someplace other than Prague (or Ljubljana or Tallinn) for a change.
“British tourists can now discover Poland [...]

Italy’s crisis rumbles on, and I don’t expect it to get much better any time soon. This week we learn that Italian retail sales fell sharply in April,

After adjustment for seasonal factors, retail sales in April were down 0.8 percent on the previous month ? the steepest month-on-month fall since May 2004. Compared with a [...]