French are still down in the mouth
Exhausted and tense: such is the latest diagnosis of French society by the Médiateur de la République, an institutional ombudsman tasked with improving relations between the administration and French citizens, in its annual report to be submitted on 23 February to the French president and parliament. “I see a crumbling society in which every-man-for-himself is supplanting the desire to live together,” alerts Jean-Paul Delevoye in an interview for Le Monde. He estimates there are “around 15 million people who are short of cash by €50 or €150 at the end of each month”, and says he is “struck by the coexistence of two types of society: the official one, and the other, more underground one, which lives on benefits, illegal jobs and networks”. He holds the state and policymakers partly responsible for the prevailing situation: “A rift has grown up between the individual and the state. The people knocking at our door have been poorly understood and poorly guided. They feel overwhelmed by laws that have become too complicated and changeable.”
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.