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On March 20th, the Lithuanian Free Market Institute with its unique program of youth debates, Freedom Talks, opened Global Money Week at the Bank of Lithuania. At the inaugural event school youth teams met in a tournament to debate \"Do we need money?\" and \"Can we buy anything with money?\"

On March 9, the Georgian parliament revoked a draft of a bill on Foreign Influence Agents supported by its majority. The purpose of the bill was to oblige any media or civil society organization to register as a foreign agent if they use foreign money.

In this episode, we talk about democratic backsliding and why does it matter for the EU, the issue with Bulgaria and Romania, EU tools to address democratic backsliding among its members, and whether the EU is capable of using its tools more effectively to prevent it.

It used to be easy to gain a lot of information from the way a person looked. You might try it today in Europe, and still get it right in at least some of the cases, but you will be completely baffled once an American walks into a room.

It is a basic need for every human being to connect with others. Social psychology classifies the need for connection as one of the basic human motives, since humans are essentially social beings. Belonging somewhere has countless advantages. But what about when it\'s not a partnership or a group, but a crowd?

If works of fiction taught us anything, it is that imaginary creatures should have rights as well. Can this be translated to real life and to real rights?

According to Jarosław Kaczyński, PiS’ government is not decidedly fighting inflation, not to repeat Leszek Balcerowicz\'s alleged mistakes from the times of transformation: \"We were making up for this shock for several years.\" In reality, however, reforms of Leszek Balcerowicz turned out to be a huge success, and Kaczyński himself was once a supporter of radical solutions.

According to the increasingly popular narrative, apartments purchased for investment purposes are almost synonymous with unoccupied buildings, that is uninhabited properties. The villains are investors, both institutional (apartment funds) and individual (wealthy individuals). They allegedly buy apartments from the market in order to \"speculatively\" refrain from placing them on the market in anticipation of a further increase in real estate prices.

A slight decrease in inflation measured by the CPI (Consumer Price Index) at the end of 2022 should be treated with great caution because it is accompanied by an increase in core inflation, which is calculated by excluding food and energy prices from the market basket.

The past year was full of events related to the ongoing crisis of the rule of law in Poland. The last few months have been dominated mainly with the issue of the \"milestones\" attached to the National Reconstruction Plan and the disagreement within the ruling coalition as to how to achieve them. Among other things, for this purpose the infamous Disciplinary Chamber was abolished and replaced with Chamber of Professional Responsibility.