"Zero unemployment in Rotterdam in four years’ time": this is how De Volkskrant trumpets the project announced by the city’s deputy burgomaster Dominic Schrijer of the Dutch Labour Party. The paper affirms that all the jobless in Rotterdam – long been plagued by high unemployment (close to 10% at the end of 2009) – should be working by 2014. Whether at regular jobs, or more probably in work placement programmes for students or volunteer work, anyone refusing will automatically lose their unemployment benefit. The project is to be launched first in the Tarwewijk and Overschie districts, where jobless rates are currently at 5% and 8% respectively, and which Schrijer aims to turn into the first “unemployment-free” area in the country. To this end he has termed the experience of some 600-odd asylum-seekers who have found work since the autumn of 2008 an inspiration. With little prior training and professional experience and a poor command of Dutch, they have landed low-skilled and low paid jobs in supermarkets, health care and security work. An example for the rest of the population to follow...
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.