“In the midst of an economic crisis, the Greek government is spending billions on arms,” leads an indignant Dziennik Gazeta Prawna. In March, the government of George Papandreou signed a deal to purchase two submarines in Germany for a total of 1.3 billion euro, and in May it committed itself to purchasing warships and helicopters from France costing 2.5 billion euro. According to experts, agreeing to both transactions was one of the informal conditions on which the EU and IMF granted Greece the rescue package of 110 billion euro. The news caused outrage in Greece, a country which has been forced by Brussels to cut 30 billion euro from public finances over the next three years in order to reduce its deficit from 13 to three percent of the GDP. “We feel pressured to carry out transactions we do not want. Greece does not need new arms,” Greece’s Deputy Prime Minister Theodore Pangalos said during a recent visit to Turkey. Both Germany and France claim that the arms deals are a result of many years of negotiations and have nothing to do with the EU rescue package. However, the Warsaw daily notes that in the last ten years French and German arms manufacturers have made fortunes from deals with Greece.
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.