"Basta! We won't pay any more taxes for Santoro and his cronies." After the La Repubblica petition to defend the freedom of the press – which the left-wing daily claims has gathered 430,000 signatures – rival newspaper Il Giornale has launched a campaign to encourage Italy's citizens not to pay their TV license fees. The Berlusconi-owned paper wants to "punish" the national broadcaster RAI for the "disgraceful junk" aired on RAI 2 in a new programme hosted by left-wing journalist Michele Santoro - "Annozero" – with a recent special guest appearance from investigative reporter Marco Travaglio, the author of several books on Silvio Berlusconi. Members of the government claim that criticism of the Prime Minister on the programme was exaggerated.
The opposition is eager to highlight the compromised position of the government, which is advising Italians to refuse to pay for a public service that is in direct competition with Silvio Berlusconi's networks. At the same time, once again in the columns of Il Giornale, high-profile right-wing intellectual Marcello Veneziani has accused RAI of being "a circus... in the pay of the unions, which colludes with the political parties and the 'nomenklatura'."
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.