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It had been snowing heavily for three days and three nights in Lech am Arlberg, a ski village in the far west of Austria. The main street through the village was frozen white and the parked cars were so laden with snow that they looked like a row of soft white pillows.

In his time, many people didn’t know what to make of Gustav Klimt: To the romantics he was trapped in ornamentation, to the purists in symbols. He was called a “purveyor of perversities,” yet also “provincial”. Traditionalists dismissed him as decadent, once naturalist described him as merely “irritating”.  

Emerging from the escalator at the Westbahnhof U-Bahn station, the crowd surged forward, carrying us directly into the swelling group of activists. 

Alan had a comfortable life working as a manager for a packing company in Mexico City, earning the equivalent of €3,500 a month. As a young engineer, he was building a successful career doing what he loved most. Then, one night at a trendy club in an exclusive neighbourhood, he met a striking young woman who would turn his world upside down. 

Toni walks down a long hall in the Vienna courthouse (Landesgericht für Strafsachen), his regard fixed ahead of him, his gait relaxed, a slight tremble in his hand. At the end of the hall his two assailants from the night of his beating stand waiting to enter the courtroom. As he enters with a solemn face and walks through the crowd of five defendants, their eyes follow him as he sits down outside the courtroom for the hearing. They haven't seen him since the early morning hours of Feb.

Four-hundred pages was the length of the report issued by forensic experts in August this year, identifying the extent of dubious payments and contracts conducted by Telekom Austria, the country’s largest telecom provider and a former public utility that is still 28 per cent state-owned.

New York, summer 2007. After eight years as director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, the government’s flagship for promoting Austrian contemporary art in America, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein had clearly won over the city’s cultural elite, not to mention his own staff. Observing him as a summer intern, it was easy to see why.

Are women in Europe on the verge of becoming an engine for political change? In economic-development circles, experience and common sense suggest that progress, accountability, and hard work start with and depend on women. Micro-credits, for example, are much more efficient when women receive and repay them. Perhaps because they bear children and must find the means to feed them, women are now perceived as the best and most determined “agents of change.”

“Nothing really happens here anymore,” says Janez Fajfar with evident pride. Slovenia, the most successful European country to emerge from communism, is conspicuously absent from global headlines – and proud of it.