Leading with the headline, “Goldman Sachs: the Greek connection,” The Independent reports that the investment bank has come under scrutiny as the most important of a group of institutions, which helped the Greek government to disguise the scale of its budget deficits and debt levels. Specifically, the daily refers to a 2002 deal in which “Goldman channelled $1bn of money to the Greek government in a transaction called a cross-currency swap:” and notes that “such deals are an expensive way of raising money, but they have the advantage of not having to be accounted for as debt.” According to The Independent, Greece is not the only state to have resorted to creative accounting using financial derivatives: questions have also been raised about a “controversial transaction” between Italy and JP Morgan, before Italy joined the euro. As European Finance ministers meet in Brussels to discuss ways to protect the eurozone from a looming debt crisis, there is growing concern over “the size and scale of derivatives deals that are not fully understood, even by Eurostat, the European Union's official statistics body, which has complained that member nations' finances are opaque and the information it is given about derivatives deals is incomplete.”
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.