Dumitru Condrea has big plans, but an even bigger problem. After six years working in civil society, the affable 25-year-old activist says his hope for change has eroded. He says he loves his country, but has run out of options. “If you want to change something, you need money. And I can’t make money here in Moldova.”

Raising the ante in the confrontation with the Assad regime and its international supporters, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius this week called for the use of force in Syria. Across the Rhine Valley in Berlin, however, his German equivalent Guido Westerwelle urged caution: "Before speaking of consequences we must first have clarification." French daily newspaper Le Monde ran the outsized headline "Toxic Gas Massacre in Damascus". Most German newspapers that day led with the Bradley Manning verdict.

The chamber in the Municipal Court of Budapest was packed, observers crammed into sweaty overflow rooms staring at closed circuit television screens and anxiously awaiting the verdict. As these rooms filled, an unwieldy queue formed outside as an incongruous gaggle of journalists, victims' family, and some skinhead supporters of the accused implored court officials to let them in to hear the verdict. Arpad Kiss, his brother Istvan, their friend Zsolt Peto, and accomplice Istvan Csontos stood dead-eyed in front on the judge, flanked by masked policemen.

I was two days into a pleasant Baltic Sea vacation when the request from RT arrived in my inbox. Formerly “Russia Today,” RT is Moscow’s multilingual, global cable news network. RT is not your babushka’s Soviet-style propaganda; it broadcasts sophisticated conspiracy theories and “anti-establishment” attitudes to push a virulently anti-American and illiberal agenda. The network relies on a pool of talking heads, including “9/11 Truthers,” anti-Semites and other assorted extremists, who espouse the sort of views found where the far left and the far right converge.

Criticising cuts to arts budgets in Britain, Karl Jenkins said increased public funding was needed to invest in the “cultural future” of a country. Describing Government cuts to the creative sector as “tragic”, the 69-year-old Welsh composer, whose works include Adiemus and The Armed Man, said: "In Germany it's just the opposite - increasing funding.”

In 2025, France will have no unemployment, no debt, and tapping the housing market will be a "pleasant" experience - a tleast according to four of its government ministers. The finding came after France's president, Francois Hollande, asked his ministers to present their "holiday homework" on Monday, which was an essay entitled "What is your vision of France in 2025?" Happily for Hollande, the general tone of the homework suggested everything will be just grand in 2025.

The European Union has thrown delivery of billions of aid dollars into question as it meets "urgently" to coordinate a response to Egypt in the aftermath of a crackdown there that has killed almost 900 people in five days. Violence has skyrocketed since the military-backed interim government cleared two camps of supporters of ousted leader Mohammed Morsi in Cairo on Aug. 14.

Britain and Spain are supposed to be NATO and EU allies. You wouldn’t think so now, as a petty dispute over concrete blocks planted in the sea off Gibraltar to protect marine life morphs into a serious cause of friction. Far from fizzling out, as former spats over Gibraltar did usually, this conflict is in danger of escalating to the point of no return.