I hereby announce The Fourth Annual Satin Pajama Awards. You can nominate blogs in the comments to this post.
The purpose of the awards is to recognize the efforts and contributions of Europe’s many talented bloggers, to maybe help build a sense of community among us, and, more than anything, it’s a chance for people to [...]

My co-blogger on Global Economy Matters Manuel Alvarez in his post on last weekend’s Spanish election called it “Zapatero’s election to lose”, meaning by this that the opposition scarcely seemed credibly poised to win, and their best chance of victory rested on the possibility that Spain’s Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero might somehow or [...]

DTV (digital television) is here; just at a time when people are giving up on watching TV in favour of YouTube. Or so we might have thought. There’s also going to be a switchover in America. What if you’re poor and can’t afford a new television? US Congress has thought of this: two $40 vouchers [...]

It looks like Nicolas Sarkozy’s pet foreign-policy idea has been sporked, good and proper; his idea of a “Mediterranean Union” is now officially an ex-parrot, after it failed to get German support. As we’ve been saying right back to 2005, the key fact of European politics at the moment is that Angela Merkel has achieved [...]

An unexpectedly interesting, really good, long article about bortshch. It’s also about Ukraine and Russia and the Soviet Union, but mostly about borshch. I should try it some time.

Via Unfogged.

Well, that was unexpected.
Just a couple of months ago, I noted that Macedonia’s PM Gruevski was the most popular head of government in the Balkan region. Well, his government just collapsed. The Albanian party — his coalition partner — has pulled out, leaving him without a majority.
Here’s a brief primer on Macedonian politics. [...]

It was a long weekend for the possible Social Democratic (SPD) minister-president of Hesse, Andrea Ypsilanti. At the end of last week, she said that she would go back on the SPD’s pledge not to work with the Left party, the latest incarnation of Germany’s post-communists. She would form a minority government with the Greens, [...]

Serbia’s government seems to be collapsing.
The cause is, of course, Kosovo. Most of the EU countries have now recognized independent Kosovo, which pretty strongly implies that they won’t accept a Serbia that still claims Kosovo into the EU.
Last week, the nationalist Serbian Radical Party introduced a resolution in parliament calling [...]

I am loathe to add to the Wilders-hype, created both by him and the Dutch government, but the following video by Thomas Erdbrink is simply too amazing to let slip by AFOE’s international radar.
Thomas Erdbrink is a Dutch journalist and correspondent for NRC Handelsblad and he has a wonderful blog called Onze Man in Teheran [...]