Opening a two-week series of extracts from the Lisbon Treaty, a Wall Street Journal editorial has launched an attack on Brian Lenihan, the Irish finance minister’s claim a No vote on the 2 October referendum would “signal to the world that Ireland has retreated into economic isolation” leading to “a capital flight and higher interest rates.” “It should hardly need stating,” the business daily notes, “that Mr. Lenihan is peddling phantom terrors to scare the Irish people into voting Yes.” While it’s commonplace to suggest that Ireland’s recently terminated period of growth was due to “EU largesse”, WSJ argues that “Ireland sucked on the teat of EU regional aid for two and a half decades without discernible effect. By the mid-1980s, it was still a poor country by European standards.” Only when the state began a campaign of supply-side tax cuts did its economy enter its boom phase. “The days of the Celtic Tiger are gone for the moment, but they have given Ireland an economic base on which to build that is in no way dependent on the benediction of Brussels bureaucrats.” Nor should a Yes vote, it concludes, be based on “fear-mongering and dark threats.”
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.