Diplomatic showdown over hunger strike
“Total impasse in the Haidar affair,” headlines the Spanish daily El País. Aminatou Haidar, an independence activist whom supporters call the “Sahrawi Gandhi”, has been on a hunger strike at Lanzarote airport in the Spanish Canary Islands since 16 November. Haidar, a champion of self-determination in the Western Sahara, a region administered by Morocco but whose sovereignty is still contested, was deported to Lanzarote and had her Moroccan passport revoked after she refused to declare her nationality as Moroccan on an airport arrival form. “Rabat’s refusal”, in turn, “to allow the Sahrawi to return is sparking a diplomatic showdown” between Spain and Morocco, explains the Madrid daily.
“Does it make any sense to offer Morocco a privileged status vis-à-vis the EU when its political system diverges from Europe’s on such basic points as freedom of the press and human rights?”asks analyst Bernabé López. Rabat will not issue Haidar a new passport unless she “apologises to the king”.
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.