Gordon Brown believes that tough action is needed “to clamp down on excessive remuneration for bankers,” reports the Financial Times on its front page. Hot on the heels of a French initiative to put a mandatory cap on bankers’ remuneration trumpeted by Nicolas Sarkozy last week, the British prime minister believes that “pay and bonuses should be based on long-term success not short-term speculative gains”, arguing that banks should claw back bankers’ rewards if performance later suffers. While this may sound remarkably like the French president’s plan to correct the systemic weaknesses that led to financial meltdown last year, the British premier is keen to point out that the French plan, unlike his own, would be “difficult to enforce.” Ahead of the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Mr Brown argues the need to safeguard the international status of the City of London. As to a proposed crackdowns on bankers’ remuneration, the author of a book entitled “Courage” argued that “the UK could not be expected to take action unilaterally.”
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.