"Whoever said that Romania could not build anything is wrong," writes Jurnalul National. According to Bucharest daily, the country is “a paradise for absurd monuments, and useless ones are even fashionable." On the subject, the newspaper is publishing a "handbook" on the use of EU funds for projects such as “a support centre for a moribund agriculture, a public computer (‘InfoCentre’) not connected to a network, or a fountain without water." The newspaper Ziua Veche states that, as of late 2010, Romania had used only 239 million euros of the 19 billion allocated to the country by the EU structural funds for the 2007-2013 period.
Jurnalul National also returns on its front page to the decision of the European Court of Human Rights, which has again condemned Romania for the management of investigations into the army's repression in 1989. Bucharest has yet to pay 52,000 euros to plaintiffs whose relatives were killed during the Revolution. Another example of “the indolence and incompetence of the Romanian judiciary," the paper notes.
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.