“This bids fair to be a fun book fair,” says the German press sardonically on the eve of the 14 October opening of this year’s Frankfurt Buchmesse, the most important book fair in the world. China, this year’s guest of honour, has already caused the organisers plenty of aggravation: they are accused of giving in to pressure from the censors in Beijing.
So on the one hand, as the Frankfurter Rundschau views it, there will be the “regime-faithful scribblers” like Tie Ning, president of the Chinese Writers Association, who lords it over 8,920 writers, denies there is censorship of any kind in his country (where 600-odd books are banned annually), and will spearhead a delegation of a hundred authors and a thousand officials and editors. On the other hand, there will be dissident authors like Bei Ling, who has succeeded in dodging prison and was only invited under pressure from the German media. Their presence should make for the “best possible debating panel” – comprising “those in charge of censorship and representatives of the Chinese government, as well as their fiercest critics. And the world will get a chance to hear them and judge for itself.”
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.