Political philosophy

Bulgaria is one of the three EU countries that have not yet established by law criteria for updating minimum wages. The other two are Romania and Estonia.

This is clear from the circulated document of the European Commission, which announces the beginning of the second stage of the consultation with European trade unions and employers' organizations.

It took a pandemic and an American president with no respect for the rules and no understanding of the fragility of international relations for all hell to break loose, with China at the epicenter. One had to be historically ignorant or in complete denial to fail to see that China's growing strength economically as well as strategically would bring about geopolitical change.

The unexpected move would mean giving up the ability to rule by decree without a time limit — part of a controversial "coronavirus bill" that opponents said also threatened to stifle media independence.

Here's how "The End of History and the Last Man," the 1992 best seller of political philosopher and Stanford University professor Francis Fukuyama, ends: "Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again." Clearly, the engines of history restarted and have been working at warp speed in the past three decades.

Police said 5,000 people attended an anti-fascist march in central Sarajevo on Saturday against the holding of a Catholic mass which opponents claim glorifies people involved in crimes committed by Croatia's WWII-era Nazi-allied Ustasa regime.

Continuing efforts to enforce restrictions that remain in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the Hellenic Police (ELAS) on Tuesday recorded 23 violations in which citizens had not been wearing a mask in an enclosed public space, a police statement said on Wednesday.
Of those violations, 10 were in Attica, seven on islands in the northern Aegean and four in Western Greece.

As part of continuing efforts to enforce restrictions that remain in place to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the Hellenic Police (ELAS) on Monday recorded 22 violations in which citizens had not been wearing a mask in an enclosed public space, a police statement said on Tuesday.

Unemployment in Turkey dropped to 13.6 percent this February, down 1.1 percentage points from the same month last year, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) announced on May 11.

The number of unemployed persons age 15 and overslipped by 502,000 year-on-year to 4.23 million by the end of February.

As a European leader once remarked, Europe should be a superpower, not a superstate. Faced with an increasingly powerful and authoritarian China, global warming, the potentially existential challenge of AI, not to mention an aggressive Russia, chaotic Middle East and Trumpian United States, this argument is more compelling than ever. In a world of giants, you need to be a giant yourself.

Freedom House's latest 'Nations in Transit' report, published on Wednesday, strongly criticises Serbia, Montenegro and Hungary for falling democratic standards and classifies all three countries for the first time as 'hybrid regimes'.