Probably you could rightly claim that the Baltic Republics with their strong economic, cultural and historic ties to Scandinavia and Russia are different, and modern Poland is indeed a mix of everything, but I think the CEE phrase, as well as Central Europe and Eastern Europe will remain useful in the next few centuries. With a pure re-branding none of these countries will be able to ditch their shared history on and destiny.

Declan Ganley, the founder and main financier of the eurosceptic Libertas party and the man behind the Irish No-Lisbon campaign, have been touring Central Europe for political allies and recruiting local politicians for the Libertas party lists with mixed results.

In 2008 the ECB helped to bail out the Hungarian government. At this point, many Hungarian economists made the claim that probably it would be cheaper and better for both parties if they just let Hungary introduce the euro. A few month later, a few billion euros poorer the argument starts to catch on.

From:  mrgambo1 at adinet.com.uy
Subject: READ VERY CAREFULLY
Dear friend,
I am Mr. Gambo Mustafa.I work with the audit/remittance department of African development bank (adb) Ouagadougou Burkina Faso. I have a business which will be beneficial to both of us. The amount of money involved is ($8.7 million us dollars) which I want to transfer out of [...]

Black pudding or (less often) blood pudding is an English term for sausage made by cooking blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled. It is also called blood sausage (Blutwurst).

Anyway, I think that in the long run the evolution of this new party will make the Czech Republic more governable. The Czech Republic had to live with a strong left-right division with a number of small parties, many minority and car-taking governments, and a major right-wing party that was had to struggle inside with the question of the EU. I believe that SSO will remain a relatively strong but still fringe-party, and will let ODS seek more pragmatic coalitions. It will effectively marginalize this kind of political thought as it will be substracted from the major right-wing party, and probably help to marginalize Mr Klaus, too.

The Belgraded reporst a case where animal rights activists have smuggled four bears from Serbia to Bulgaria, claiming that the EU gives more rights to animals. A Serbian paper commented with a bit of politically incorrect sarcasm that the actitivist have taken away jobs from Roma bear-dancers.

A Serbian accession would be a political breakthrough in the painful post-war transition of the Balkans from dictatorship, planned economy and civil war to a democratic and market oriented society. Serbia has been the strongest, least peaceful and least co-operative former Yugoslav state, and probably also the strongest in the region. A Serbian accession would also boost the hard-hit regional economies, which are tied to the center of the Balkans.

What makes the ruling specially interesting in my region is that the Central European legal systems are very much similar to the German, often based on a shared legal history or simply modeling the strongest country in the neighborhood.

I still wonder how such and embedded social problem like corruption can be resolved through external pressure.