"Which market will the EU promise Russia for a nod to Moldovan reunification?" wonders România liberă. According to the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, German chancellor Angela Merkel is offering Russian president Dmitri Medvedev autonomous status and economic aid for Transnistria, Moldova’s breakaway Russian-speaking province, in hopes of eventually bringing it into the EU fold along with the rest of Moldova. The country itself is mostly Romanian-speaking, and jealously protected by Bucharest. Berlin, as a new temporary member of the UN Security Council, "is trying to resolve Europe’s deadlocked conflicts”, comments Alexander Rahr, director of the foreign policy think-tank, the Berthold Beitz Centre. The matter will be thrashed out at the upcoming summit in France between Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and Dmitri Medvedev on 17 October.
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.