Breaking down the bricks racket
“Corruption is suffocating Spain…and already turning over more lucre than drug dealing.” This Sunday, the Spanish daily ABC published a map of what the Spanish dub the “bricks racket” on account of its noxious nexus to real estate development and town planning in recent decades. “Over 300 people are going to be tried in 2010,” explains ABC, stressing that most of those implicated in the scams are mayors and political leaders. “Either we stop them from sucking the lifeblood from what remains of Spanish democracy’s prestige or we shall die as a democracy and seep down the gutter stinking of corruption,” writes ABC’s editor Ángel Expósito. In another editorial, the paper describes the “mix of murky interests combining unscrupulous politicians and crooks disguised as entrepreneurs”. So it is “absolutely vital to revise the legislation by bolstering watchdog mechanisms and, above all, ensuring due enforcement through independent bodies”. And that can only be achieved by forging a government pact between the two main political parties, the conservative PP and socialist PSOE.
In a time of crisis with high unemployment, young Lithuanians are following in the footsteps of their emigrant ancestors. Tens of thousands have left the country in search of a better life, mainly in the British Isles and Scandinavia. The weekly Veidas reports: 
The new Eurogroup meeting on February 9 is not enough to banish the spectre of a Greek bankruptcy. While Athens may largely be responsible for the crisis, the EU and its partners are not blameless themselves. La Stampa argues that their confused messages and the absence of any strategy have transformed a resolvable problem into an explosive chaos. 
Two camps, two theories, and two visions of France: 18 years after the massacre of 800,000 Tutsis, the precise role played by Paris is still the subject of heated debate, fueled by the findings of successive criminal investigations.