Cars are burning bright by night in Berlin: 267 autos have been charred this year to date, reports the Frankfurter Rundschau. Whilst the tabloids fulminate against those “damned anarchist arsonists terrorising” Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Porsche owners by torching their fancy cars in such rapidly gentrifying neighbourhoods as Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg, Berlin-Mitte and Pankow, the police have yet to come up with an effective strategy to quell the arsonists. According to Berlin’s intelligence service, these firebugs are from the left-wing autonomist scene and, the paper explains, they light into manifestations of the newcomers’ conspicuous consumption, holding them accountable for driving out the artists and students who used to live in these erstwhile working-class neighbourhoods. To fight the phenomenon of rampant gentrification, the FR adduces the example of Hamburg, where a bunch of artists got the city senate to try to buy back a neighbourhood threatened with a huge development project and restore it with their help.
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.