Ashton plans single EU spy hub
Lady Ashton intends to merge three intelligence-sharing bureaus to create a single EU intelligence hub, reveals euobserver.com. The head of the European External Action Service, the EU’s foreign “ministry” established by the Lisbon Treaty “aims to merge into one new department the EU Council's Joint Situation Centre, its Watch-Keeping Capability and the European Commission's Crisis Room to help guide EAS decisions on security matters.” The Joint Situation Centre, “contains a cell of secret service agents seconded from EU capitals”, and “pools classified information sent in by member states”. Watch-Keeping Capability “pulls in news from the EU's 23 police and military missions” while the Crisis Room “operates a secure website with breaking news about the world's 118 active conflicts from open sources and from the commission's foreign embassies”. The mandate for the new department is so far unclear, but it will not have undercover operatives in the field. Said one EU official, "Belgium and Austria proposed this [creating an EU secret service] after Madrid,” referring the 2004 terrorist attack. “But we are still light years away."
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.