From BBC News: 

A group of Polish members of parliament have submitted a bill seeking to proclaim Jesus Christ king of their overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Forty-six deputies - 10% of the lower house - signed the bill, which was tabled earlier this week, reports say.

Some Polish clerics however have criticised the move as unnecessary.

If the bill becomes law, Jesus will follow the path of the Virgin Mary, who was declared honorary queen of Poland by King John Casimir 350 years ago.

The bill probably won't pass, but if it did, wouldn't that make Jesus's mother his wife? Somehow, I don't think that'll fly.

Don't miss Jackson Diehl's column today:

The Western allies have no idea what to do about Putin. Five years ago the energetic former KGB colonel was regarded as a strategic partner for NATO and its members. Now he is generally understood to be an autocratic imperialist whose political enemies suffer from a high rate of sinister poisonings. Bush and other NATO leaders aren't ready to act on that understanding, or even to state it out loud.

Sixteen years after the fall of its Communist government, Bulgaria is still struggling with what to do with its secret archives. They may finally see the light of day:

Bulgaria's main political parties have finally agreed to open the archives of the once feared secret service of Todor Zhivkov's regime, the Durzhavna Sigurnost (state security). Parliament last week made its first move to permit public access to the millions of files that the secret services assiduously collected by an army of anonymous spies and collaborators.

The Bulgarian secret services were linked to some of the Cold War's nastiest moments, including the shooting of Pope John Paul II and the killing of a dissident in London (with a poisoned umbrella). Keep an eye out for revelations.

If you're Hungarian, your prime minister has been caught on tape admitting that he's lied and his administration "screwed up," and protestors demanding his ouster are descending on the capital city in violent riots, what's your first move? 

Join the protestors? Take a long trip to Prague? How about secure the rights to Web domain "elkurtuk.hu," "WeScrewedup.com" in Hungarian? Three Hungarians are duking it out over ownership rights to the newly fashionable address, possibly to post the video of the prime minister's unfortunate admission. Probably to profit from the traffic that is certain to follow, assuming the Hungarian agency charged with handing them out will even allow it.

It's good news that Hungarians are fully embracing the benefits they might garner from postcommunist free markets. May the best capitalist win! 

Back when everyone used to talk about the Balkan tinderbox, tiny Macedonia was often voted most likely to ignite. Tensions between ethnic Albanians and Macedonians flared into violence in 2001. Frantic Western diplomacy produced a power-sharing agreement, but few were sanguine about it chances. Five years on, it appears to be a remarkable success. A new tolerance for the Albanian language is just one of the signs of progress.

Before 2001, whenever a deputy of the Albanian community tried to speak in the Macedonian parliament in his mother tongue, the microphone on the platform would immediately be switched off. The action was typical of a country that steadfastly maintained Macedonia was a state of ethnic Macedonians alone. Today, the picture is very different and Albanian is spoken at plenary sessions in parliament as well as in local municipal assemblies.

At a time when conflict resolution in many parts of the world appears almost futile, it's helpful to remember that a combination of Western incentives and force have helped many parts of the Balkans edge away from the abyss.

Ask the existing EU members about the prospect of Ukraine joining their club, and you get a resounding "call us in 20 years".  But the remoteness of the prospect--and likely Russian objections--haven't stopped the hoping and the planning. Witness the recent Yalta conference of the optimistically named group YES (Yalta Europe Strategy), a committee aiming to guide Ukraine into Europe.

The shadow of the 1943 Yalta conference, where some say the Cold War began, hangs over these talks, and it's clear that decades behind the Iron Curtain left a lot of Ukrainians looking westward. Not everyone is optimistic about the time frame of accession, and some doubt it will even happen. Still others seem to think that pre-accession measures are worth it, even if Ukraine's entry is still decades in the future. From one unexpected leader at the conference:

I am not sure that in 10 to 15 years Ukraine will be a member of the EU. But we need these reforms: democracy, a market economy and the rule of law."  --Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukraine's richest men and the son-in-law of ousted President Leonid Kuchma

The BBC offers today an interesting look at Gazprom, Russia's gas giant. There's some world-class hyperbole in the piece, including this:

Russia is a huge, almost limitless, supplier of gas, and this makes it probably more powerful now than it was during the Cold War."

The premise of the article is that Russia's oil and gas reserves generate geopolitical clout. Perhaps in the short term. But it appears just as likely that the warping of the economy caused by reliance on oil and gas profits will undermine Russia's economic and political transition and ultimately diminish its international profile. Tom Friedman made the case in FP recently that high energy prices hurt freedom. Other prominent Putin critics go much further: they contend that Russia's economic growth is a fraction of what it should be and that energy windfalls are masking economic stagnation.

Under oil windfall profits, Russia's GDP should have grown by 15% to 16% in 2005. Once you dismiss the windfall profits, you see a poor quality of the economic policy that has proven negative to the tune of losing some 9% to 10% of the GDP growth."

When energy prices slide, we'll get a truer sense of where Russia stands.   

Bosnia's international supervisor, Christian Schwarz-Schilling, has announced that his position will self-destruct by mid-2007. After that time, he'll merely be the EU's special representative to Bosnia. The post of High Representative was created in late 1995 as part of the Dayton Accords. Very quickly, the High Rep acquired near colonial powers as the West struggled to get Bosnia's ethnic factions into line. The succession of diplomats who have filled the post have regularly enacted laws that Bosnia's parliament won't and fired elected politicians. When I was in Sarajevo late last year, street corner vendors peddled cartoons of a regal High Representative ruling over the country's squabbling politicians. It appears that era is now ending. Soon, we'll see how Bosnia's politicians do without an international hand on the tiller.  

In the West, there is growing pessimism about anyone's ability to stop Vladimir Putin from turning Russia into the world's most stage-managed democracy. John McCain's call for the United States to boycott next month's G8 in St. Petersburg has gone nowhere fast. But, as Tom Friedman has argued in FP, soaring oil prices are making Putin more troublesome domestically and internationally. So, could a party girl be about to do what no political party can - seriously challenge Putin’s ever-growing power?

The glamorous 24-year-old reality TV hostess Ksenia Sobchak has launched a youth movement with the provocative name "All are Free." Its aim: Teach Russian youth "how to be free." The group is in direct competition with the Kremlin-endorsed clubs set up to stymie the emergence of an Orange revolution-style movement. She told the St. Petersburg Times, "We have a lot of political youth movements, but I think they are kind of fake."