As I have just indicated in my last post Hungarians went to the polls yesterday in a vote over whether or not to scrap government-imposed fees on visits to doctors and hospitals introduced as part of a belt-tightening adjustment programme, designed to bring what was at the time of its introduction [...]

Question: how would you have known they were holding a referendum on the government’s difficult and unpopular economic adjustment package in Hungary on Sunday? Answer: just take a look at what happened in the Hungarian financial markets last Friday.
It should not have been too difficult to see all this coming, yet financial analysts [...]

Via Dutch weblog Sargasso. Somebody in Turkey posted the following video to YouTube:

This was picked up by Sargasso and one of their Dutch readers posted the following response:

Totally inane, of course, but I think it is rather amusing.
And now my bleg for our Turkish readers. Is the YouTube video Great Türkic State a spoof or [...]

I’m working through the frozen conflicts in ascending order of awfulness. Two posts about Transnistria can be found here and here.
So, South Ossetia. Little mountainous region up in the back of the Caucasus. Used to be part of Georgia. Declared independence in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart. [...]

We’re looking for a few good blogs.
If you’ve been paying close attention, you might have noticed our blogroll is changing. We haven’t cleaned it in a while, and link rot has set in — some blogs have stopped posting, some have moved, some just aren’t around any more.
Cleaning the links is the first step. [...]

Via Unzipped – who is rapidly emerging as the go-to blog for stuff about the current situation here in Armenia — I see that four opposition Members of Parliament are being stripped of their immunity so that they can be prosecuted. For, you know, supporting that coup attempt. You know. The coup [...]

Gary Gygax died in Wisconsin, age 69.

Just a quick post to point our readers to a very interesting article in The New York Times by Parag Khanna entitled Waving goodbye to hegemony. Hat tip goes to EUlogist and a comment he made over at Nosemonkey’s EUtopia. The article talks about the redistribution of world power after the end of the Cold [...]

Guess what? Medvedev won!
This FT profile is the best I’ve seen, even tells us a little about his upbringing. The key points: Medvedev’s known Putin for a very long time, since they both worked for Sobchak in the early 90s. He’s been a key aide since the beginning, deputy chief of staff, chief of [...]

Walked into central Yerevan today.
For those of you who haven’t been following this story: for the last two weeks, tens of thousands of Armenians have been turning out to protest the results of the recent Presidential election. The ruling party’s candidate supposedly won in a landslide, but there’s reason to think the elections were [...]