Der Standard reveals all you need to know about driving a stolen tank into the police lines. Apparently, the man who stole an ex-Soviet T34/85 from the 1956 revolution commemorations and used it on the Hungarian riot police has been arrested. He is reportedly a former soldier (no surprise, as Hungary either has or used [...]

The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, renowned for her reporting on the North Caucasus wars, was murdered yesterday in an evident assassination (three shots, two to the chest and one to the head) in the lift leading to her home. It was the birthday of the Russian President, and just after the birthday of the [...]

Maybe Commission President Barroso did not specifically say the Union needed a constitution, despite setbacks in France and the Netherlands. He said that the Union had to address its institutional issues before proceeding with any additional enlargement after Bulgaria and Romani join at the beginning of next year. But the only way to re-jigger the [...]

Just following up briefly on Dougs recent post on Hungary, a right royal poitical scandal now seems to be brewing there since Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany has accepted that a tape recording which was made public over the weekend and which contained comments he made to deputies of his Socialist Party is authentic. The [...]

Romano Prodi, writing in Le Monde, claims that the European Union is inherently a left-of-center project. It’s an interesting claim–certainly one that Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl would probably dispute. But certainly the European institutions have changed since either of those Chancellors’ days, and a contemporary view might lend more strength to Prodi’s views and [...]

Our next anniversary guest post is written by the the great Jonathan Edelstein.
It’s starting to look like the season of referenda in the near abroad.
On September 17, less than a week from today, voters in the unrecognized republic of Transnistria, located between Moldova and Ukraine, will be asked to vote on whether to “renounce [their] [...]

Just a bit of background info to accompany Doug’s post on AFOE:
“Everybody in Hungary knows that real income will decrease in the next two years … and very significant social groups will feel their interests hurt. If this simple rejection is transformed and mixed with national radicalism and social populism, then this is a dangerous [...]

This anniversary guest post is written by the clever and wittty P O’Neill.
For understandable reasons — the addition of 10, and soon to be 12, new member countries, and the constitutional crisis, the European Union has been preoccupied with foundational questions in recent years. But an older concern is working its way back onto the [...]

From The Weekly Standard’s essay The return of the tribes by Ralph Peters (emphasis mine):
Now, in 2006, we see one European state after another enacting protectionist measures to prevent foreign ownership of vital industries (such as yogurt-making). France paused, as hundreds of thousands of its best and brightest protested the creation of new jobs for [...]

Well, with the summer party universités d’été done and everyone going back to work, the run-in begins in earnest to the French presidential election. This shows every sign of being very interesting indeed. After all, it’s the biggest direct mandate for any politician in Europe and the second-biggest in the whole democratic world (I exclude [...]