Green light for same-sex unions
The talks took all night, but on 17 November, the Austrian government finally decided to allow same-sex civil unions from 1 January 2010. “Equality – save at town hall,” headlines Der Standard, pointing up the main remaining bone of contention: gay couples can’t say “I do” in town hall, but are cordially invited to seek out the local registrar in their district – a proviso the conservative Christian Democrats insisted on to distinguish civil union from marriage proper. That aside, observes the paper, “The partners’ rights and obligations (especially tax-wise) are by and large identical to married couples’.” Although adopting kids and in vitro fertilisation remain off limits to homosexuals, and splitting-up will be less of a legal hassle for gay couples than for their straight counterparts, the Austrian justice minister maintains that this is not wedlock “lite”.
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.