Cowen stands by budget “adjustments”
Two years after being hit by recession, nothing remains of Ireland’s golden years of double digit growth but a sense that the country is back where it began – mass unemployment, mass emigration, and trains that still take 4 hours to cover a piffling 200 km coast to coast. With drastic cuts to public services announced for the December 9th budget, intended to boost the shrinking economy (-7.5% for 2009), the mood is increasingly bitter. The Irish Times leads with yesterday’s demonstration in Dublin, one of a spate of protests to culminate in the national public service shutdown 24 November. Although the European Commission is giving Ireland an extra year in its timetable for restoring the public finances, Taoiseach Brian Cowen is adamant, arguing in delightful officialese that “adjustments” – i.e. cuts – are necessary now, otherwise later “a greater adjustment would have to be considered”.
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.