The Globe and Mail's Doug Saunders took a closer look at the results of the European Parliament elections. He finds there's reason to believe the Europeans aren't actually partying like it's 1933.

This list from Paste magazine offers up what it calls the top 25 foreign-language films of the 2000s so far.

I've seen 19 of the 25 on the list. My tastes largely coincide with those of listmaker Jeremy Medina.

From a June 11 Independent article:

Modesty may not be Gladwell's natural mode, but nor is he arrogant in any unpleasant way. But, yes, sir, he did do the necessary apprenticeship to become excellent at what he does. "There is this moment of mastery that descends," he offers. It happened for him as a reporter one afternoon in 1993 when a gunman had opened fire on a Long Island commuter train. Gladwell was the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post at the time. With the first deadline almost upon him, he made it out to the scene and dictated the entire front-page story over the phone without writing down a single word.

"In my first years I wouldn't have conceived of doing it," he says. "I just got on the phone and called it in and didn't think twice about it." He has since done a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation of the hours spent writing for the paper up until that day. Ten thousand hours, of course. "It's a marvellous moment. There is a reason why cognitively complicated jobs require long apprenticeships."

He puts journalism into this category deliberately. His other employer, aside from his publisher, is The New Yorker magazine, and his next submission will be an essay on the craft of news reporting and why it must be coddled and sheltered in an age of struggling newspapers. What makes him "mad" he says, is the notion that a newspaper is merely "a monopoly protected by printing press and that the thing being called a journalist is the chance to write the news, as if there isn't this separate set of skills that are difficult to acquire and worthy of preservation. You can't start blogging at 23 and call yourself a journalist."

The Swedish daily Aftonbladet did an investigative feature entitled Do We Dare Get Old in Sweden. It involved hiring movie-makeup artists to turn a 28-year-old reporter into an 82-year-old woman.

More than 100 people were also interviewed, and 20 outrageous examples of health system incompetencies were uncovered. The series is still causing reverberations.

How much do you think it cost to produce?

That would be the analysis of former U.S. diplomat Gary Sick.