Sarkozy loan to create French Ivy League
On 14 December Nicolas Sarkozy announced plans to set up 10 “centres of excellence” in French higher education, involving investment to the tune of €10bn, as part of a €35bn “big loan” from the state. "University of Sarkozy", headlines Libération, explaining that the president is bent on spawning French campuses capable of holding their own with the likes of Harvard and Berkeley. The Parisian daily applauds the ambitious plan to fund these public/private partnership-based “centres of excellence”, touted as future wellsprings of “innovation and jobs”, but doubts that copying Silicon Valley-type models based on geographic concentration will work in France. “None of those hubs was built up from scratch by state decree,” Libération points out. The paper also objects to the “highly scientific, highly economic – in a word, highly utilitarian – cast” of the scheme, wishing the same zeal might be lavished on higher education in the social sciences, psychology, literature and history.
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.