Overseas news items
Spain: Following the news of last week's deplorable endorsement, Barcepundit (also in Spanish) has the implications of Spain's King Juan Carlos's Thanksgiving in Crawford:

by reaching out to the Spanish highest institutional figures with only symbolic and not executive power, Bush is proving that he's far from the un-nuanced moron as so many simplistically are portraying him. He's clearly signaling that he has no problem against Spain as a country and its people per se; just against Zapatero's current administration.

As this op-ed article (in Spanish) realizes, Spain's foreign policy, from the withdrawal of the (mostly symbolic) troops from Iraq to the new attitude towards Casto/Chavez/whoever else the tyrant du jour might be, is the news, not the King's holiday weekend.

Not related, but also about Spain, racial incidents continued this week as a group of spectators, barechested and wearing Nazi tatoos, chanted "Seig Heil!" (shown in the France2 evening news, no clip available) during a soccer game.

Ukraine: Arthur's been blogging about the Ukraine, and posts about a harebrained conspiracy theory postulated by "a Moscow think-tank closely linked with the Putin administration," which blames Zbigniew Brzezinski (?!?) for the whole thing. Just this morning the BBC TV news showed a clip of the official Ukranian news broadcast where the sign-language interpreter told the audience not to believe anything that was being said. (In view of the above conspiracy theory, that's sound advice.) There has been speculation as to whether Viktor Yushchenko, the oposition candidate, was poisoned, which would account for the change in his appearance. a Fistful of Euros has a roundup and updates on the elections. The Economist speculates on what happens next.