School gates opened today for Italy’s children, and for 700,000 boys and girls of foreign descent. A record high that reflects demographic changes afoot, writes La Repubblica. Despite efforts to negate the reality of multiculturalism, grassroots integration is slowly underway, the daily reports. "I'm Muslim, but I like to stay for the Christian religion class", mentions one Sinhalese child. "I think it's another way to know the Italians".
Such aspirations are lost on Countess Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti over at Corriere della Sera, who believes that the growing number of foreigners “threatens” the quality of instruction. She cites the case of a school in Rome where high immigration drove Italian parents to take their children out, leaving a 97 per cent non-Italian presence. "We can't blame them,” the Countess sighs, “with so many pupils hardly able to speak Italian, teaching is slowed down. The only solution is a system of quotas", a solution mulled over by education minister Maria Stella Gelmini.
The leader of Greece’s leftist alliance SYRIZA is the new bright hope of Greek politics. Steering a course between pragmatism and the rhetoric of class warfare, he has unsettled Berlin, and not just those who back Angela Merkel's austerity policies. 
Europe’s economic woes have forced us to try to understand the secret Olympian world of global finance. But now that we pay more attention to bond yields and stability mechanisms, isn’t it clear that the experts up on their lofty peaks don’t know what’s going on either? 
This year’s Eurovision Song Contest is hosted by Azerbaijan, a country that is far from being a model democracy. An Estonian journalist takes a critical look at the deferential treatment enjoyed by the regime in Baku.