Romania
A Happy and costly New Year
4 January 2010
Presseurop
România libera 
Romania Libera, 4 January 2010
With the new year only barely begun, numerous products are already seeing 5 to 10% price hikes, announces România liberă, which has published a list of the worst affected products: fuels, energy, bread, fruit, vegetables and cigarettes. But the steepest increases will be on meat, with a whopping 50% on beef and mutton and 20 to 30% on poultry. The surge in prices, explains România liberă, is mainly due to the suppression of farming subsidies in accordance with the country's commitments to the Eurpean Union. The newspaper notes that Romanian farmers, who fear that the "market will be unable to adapt," are asking the government to "request a dispensation from Brussels to allow them to continue receiving subsidies."
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. 
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