President puts the people before banks
Britain has threatened to block Iceland’s accession to the European Union after its President vetoed the repayment of a £3.6 billion loan, The Times reports. Last year as Britain and the Netherlands guaranteed the deposits of over 400,000 investors affected by the collapse of Icesave, an online subsidiary of the island nation’s second largest bank, its parliament passed a bill to schedule repayments. President Ólafur Grimsson, however, has “stunned the world’s financial community by refusing to sign the repayment schedule into law,” the London daily reports. He has declared “that the matter would be decided in a referendum among Iceland’s 243,000 voters” who will ultimately have to cough up the money over a 15 year period. Lord Myners, the UK financial services minister, has darkly warned that Icelanders risk “pariah status”. Iceland would “sacrifice any relationship… to the EU if it failed to repay the money,” he said.
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.