Slovakia >>

Residents of the east German town of Gottesgnaden and the Slovakian port of Komarno, situated on the flooding Danube river, prepare for further floods with sandbags ...

s moral and political leadership in the eyes of many, cost $3tn, caused 35,000 US casualties, and prolonged the war in Afghanistan. These were the words, not of a polemicist, a left-wing or liberal politician eagerly running for office. They were passages in a keynote speech by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Carter and a leading geostrategist, to Globsec, a fast...

s debt? How do credit ratings vary by country and by ratings agencies? Economists expect the UK to lose it's coveted AAA rating this year. Phillip Inman has more on the story here, where he writes: Many economists predict at least one of the three main credit ratings agencies – Moody's, Fitch or Standard & Poor's – will declare the UK a bigger lending risk in response to the chancellor's admission...

s peaceful separation is approaching its 20th anniversary. Can it be a template for Catalonia and Spain? Secession can be a bit like breaking a biscuit: crumbs everywhere and two pieces that don't seem quite as appealing as the original. Czechoslovakia's "velvet divorce", approaching its 20th anniversary, probably serves as the best example in postwar Europe of a relatively smooth parting of the ways....

s elected political leaders, the debt and currency crisis has taken an extraordinarily heavy toll. Of 17 governments in the eurozone using the single currency, 10 have been drummed out of office in little more than a year, more often than not directly because of the crisis. The mass voter rebellion against incumbents began in February last year as bailout candidate Ireland went to the polls. Fianna...

s voters rebel against deficit-cutting diktats delivered in the name of the eurozone For over two years, the mainstream political elites of Europe have been battling to save the single currency, seeking its salvation in a German-scripted programme of austerity and legally enshrined fiscal rigour that curbs the budgetary sovereignty of elected governments. In elections in France on Sunday, in the Royal...

backlash. Hunting parties, expensive gifts, drunken car crashes, secret police wiretaps, paper bags stuffed with money and public budgets being treated as private accounts all feature in the lurid revelations and allegations being leaked daily on to the front pages of central Europe. Austria, Slovakia, Croatia and the Czech Republic are in the throes of sleaze allegations involving senior politicians...

s left There was a startling life-imitates-politics moment during Saturday's parliamentary elections in Slovakia , when the Krásna Hôrka castle, a national monument, burned to a smoking ruin . With the centre-right government also in flames, social networks quivered with a horrified question: how bad could this get? For the right wing – historically bad. For the first time in its 18-year history, Slovakia...

Krasna Horka, a 14th century castle in eastern Slovakia went up in flames on Saturday. The accident is thought to have been caused by dry, cut grass that caught fire. The blaze, near Rožňava town in Kosice region, destroyed the building's roof, as well as its interior ...

s aggressive rhetoric towards its neighbours – Romania, Slovakia and Serbia, for example – is more than a "pile-up". And, above all, it is not an accident. It is the result of the colossal and ongoing failure of the EU to sufficiently monitor democratic developments alongside economic performance in its member states and to establish a binding code offering a guarantee for the independence of certain...