Cards shuffled in the EU’s most important eastern neighbors. The orange parties in Ukraine have reached a coalition agreement that will put Yulia Timoshenko back in the prime minister’s office. Let’s hope she lasts longer this time.
Meanwhile to the north, the party supported by Russian president Putin is expected to win a crushing victory in [...]

We seem to have some database issues just now. If this post works, expect something (slightly) more substantive shortly.

The IMF is not amused, or at least better put, the IMF is not amused with Croatia. The reasons for their lack of amusement are many and various, but in particular they are displeased by the rising level of consumer and corporate indebtedness, and doubly so due to the fact that the debts are either [...]

Okay, so Kosovo is likely to declare some sort of independence in the near future.
“Some sort” covers a lot of ground, but it will be something formally unacceptable to Serbia, and thus to Russia. The negotiations have another three weeks to run, but it’s clear they’re going nowhere; the Kosovar Albanians want [...]

Early 2004 photos emerged in the media showing Iraqi prisoners allegedly being abused and tortured by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in Iraq. The impact was devastating and the Bush administration, already under fire by critics for the way it handled the Iraq war, was faced with yet another serious public relations [...]

OK, so Denmark’s conservatives are delighted; they won a snap election convincingly. But they are now faced with a probby; a new party has appeared on the scene, and they are considering the desirability of forming a coalition with it.
However, it’s headed by a Palestinian refugee; as the BBC says, a coalition with their far-right [...]

Is Europe currently facing a widespread credit crunch, or are the problems currently being experienced in the banking sector (aka “the financial turmoil of last August”) only a US phenomenon? Reading many of the articles which have been appearing in the financial press recently you could be forgiven for thinking that the latter was the [...]

So Serbia will get a Stability and Association Pact with the EU (SAA). The pact was initialed last week; barring a catastrophe, it will be formally signed in January.
An SAA is the step before formal EU candidacy, so this is good news for Serbia. It looks like Brussels is trying to strengthen the [...]

Well, sort of. Bosnia’s government is still run according to the Dayton Plan, which settled the war back in 1995. So it’s really complicated.
Short version: the representative of the Serb entity, the Republika Serbska (RS), has resigned from the Council of Ministers. The Presidency (which is really a council composed of three [...]

Well, that was interesting:
SANTIAGO: Spain’s king Juan Carlos I told Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to “just shut up,” bringing an Ibero-American summit to end in spectacular fashion on Saturday.
Spain’s monarch stormed out just before the scheduled end of the forum, visibly furious at Chavez’s description of his former PM as a “fascist” and for [...]