Nation branding is all the rage these days, and Sweden will not be outdone. It's currently fourth in the FutureBrand Country Brand Index, behind Japan, Canada and the brilliantly branded nation of Switzerland. Sweden is hoping a revamped website, featuring its very own font, will help boost the nation up charts.

Late-October elections in the Czech Republic yielded no parliamentary majority for any party. In an email interview, Robert Kron, a senior analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis, explained why the vote was inconclusive and the prospects for coalition negotiations.

It’s a 7-per-cent tax, unseen and insidious. Do business across a provincial boundary and that’s what the federal government estimates you’ll face in extra costs due to the myriad of conflicting regulations, standards, registrations and restrictions. Canada’s Agreement on Internal Trade, a deal struck in the early days of Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government to reduce trade barriers between provinces, will be 20 years old in 2014.

Spy agencies across Western Europe are working together on mass surveillance of Internet and phone traffic comparable to programs run by their US counterpart denounced by European governments, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday. Citing documents leaked by fugitive former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the Guardian said methods included tapping into fibre optic cables and working covertly with private telecommunications companies.

Unsurprisingly, the news that the NSA has been monitoring the calls of dozens of world leaders hasn't gone down particularly well with any of those world leaders. In fact, after suspecting that the US might have been snooping on her communications, last week German Chancellor Angela Merkel rang up Obama herself to demand some answers. A couple of days later, it emerged that her phone has potentially been monitored for more than a decade by the supposedly friendly American government.

For presidents, like sports-team managers, the tough weeks tend to outnumber the jubilant. But even by the standards of an unforgiving job, Barack Obama could be forgiven for feeling unusually buffeted of late. Many of the blows have come on the domestic front, with the all-consuming stand-off of the government shutdown segueing into frantic efforts to defend and repair the roll-out of Obamacare amid charges of fatal technological incompetence.

One morning in June, the owners of the African restaurant La Mamma in Warsaw found ugly and offensive graffiti near its entrance. Someone in the Muranow neighborhood, the site of the former Jewish ghetto, apparently did not like the restaurant, which is a meeting place for Nigerian immigrants. To make sure the eatery’s owner got the message, the offender painted a black man hanging from a rope and added the words, “chocolate daddy.”

This post-industrial city near the Brittany coast has tried all manner of things to distinguish itself as the other important city in France. Theme-park style rides combined with public art – loads of it, literally, including a giant mechanical elephant that sashays out to a plaza with up to 30 people on its back, and playfully sprays water from its trunk at those on the ground. A memorial celebrating abolition, as a mea culpa for being a major seaport for the slave trade.