5/17 Reflections and Sharing Time

 This is the round up of the past 7 days. Short news blurbs/my opinions on them, and some cool stuff I tweeted about for those who don't follow me/scroll through the little box to the right.

Roundup of the Week

Today's post is rounding up both the big news from Europe and some discoveries I've made. 

 

News

Bulgaria: This is the most recent and biggest news in Europe.  If you haven't followed up on it, simply scroll through my twitter feed to the right of this post to find numerous sources on it.  Borisov has made a somewhat unusually gallant gesture by stepping down, but it's also just that: a gesture.  His choice of words were, at the very least, an excellent homage to the fundamental ideals of democracy: "The people gave us power and today we are returning it."  Politics is part performance and that's part of its power, but the other part comes from action and there hasn't been much movement on that front.  It has been remarked that Borisov is the tip of the corruption iceberg, hence why people are still protesting.  Presseurop did publish an article showing the cyclical patterns in Bulgarian politics and pointed out that this isn't exactly new fare for the impoverished nation.  It shouldn't be surprising that Bulgaria has struggled so much to shake the weights of the past since it was the most loyal USSR satellite and had the most centralized and sovietized economy in the bloc.  Like everyone else, I'm waiting to see the results of these protests and if they will materialize into either a real political movement, simply a reactionary movement with no clear agenda, or a knee-jerk reaction to austerity that will mirror Greece. 

Balkan News

via

My RSS feed reader is slowly becoming larger than the newspapers I read.  I recently made it worse by adding Balkan Insights, which will supplement the six I was reading before.  I can't even keep up with some of them, so I simply browse headlines to keep myself sane.  This website is great and a fantastic addition to my feeds because I need some more Balkan news.  I give a full review after the jump.

Weekend Post (Art Week is coming up)

This is the last post before ART WEEK!

I may or may not post something over the weekend, but I am a little impulsive. It's also Why So Red's one week anniversary today! Hooray! I am very very VERY excited about art week and I've been doing some research to find good stuff. If the discussion of politics and books hasn't sparked your interest yet, hopefully next week will.

Today's post will include a number of RSS feeds that I recommend. I will admit that they are EU-centric, but the EU is an important aspect of Europe regardless of the region and it's important to at least know something about it.