Brown accused of Iraq "whitewash"
“Transparency? What a joke,” goes today’s Daily Mail headline, above a photo of a British soldier on fire aboard his tank in Basra, Iraq. PM Gordon Brown’s announcement that a government inquiry into the 2003 Gulf War “Britain's worst foreign policy disaster in 50 years” will take place in secret has the conservative newspaper in a rage. As no evidence will be heard in public, “no witnesses will be able (…) to challenge the testimony of politicians, spin doctors or officials (…) who lied to the country in the run-up to the war.”
The final report, the Daily Mail adds, will be edited so as to exclude “sensitive information”. In other words, “a whitewash”. The inquiry’s reports is due after the last possible date for a general election – “ensuring its disclosures won't influence our votes.” The Iraq War ends as it began, “under a blanket of secrecy and deceit”. “Mr Brown should be ashamed of himself,” the Mail concludes.
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.