TURKEY

TURKEY
The Turkish Daily News, Ankara, April 28: Did the Greek Cypriots realize what they were getting into when they rejected the Annan plan and shut the doors to a settlement on Cyprus?
Now the Greek Cypriots are seeing that the advantage of getting into the EU on their own and thus leaving the Turkish Cypriots in the cold is backfiring in a way that really reduces them to a sorrowful state.
The Greek Cypriots will now have to get used to being pushed around in the EU as second-class people. Look at the way their foreign minister was treated at the foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg and you can see what future has in store for them. It is clear that the EU ministers wanted the world to know what was discussed at their closed-door meeting on Monday and how they treated their Greek Cypriot colleague to a highly unusual verbal battering.
Defiant
So they leaked the minutes of their lunch to the Reuters wire service and showed how they will treat the Greek Cypriots from now on. The Greek Cypriots have to realize that even their mentors in Athens will not be able to help them in Brussels after their sad performance last Saturday. Yet, we see that the Greek Cypriots remain defiant saying they will not allow the EU to provide direct aid to the Turkish Cypriots. They are only inviting more intimidation from the EU.
ITALY
La Stampa, Turin, April 27: The confirmation couldn't have been any more evident: the group of terrorists that hold our fellow-countrymen hostage in Iraq demonstrate that they understand very well the mechanisms of Italian politics, and know how to exploit them with a cynical and cruel punctuality.
The kidnappers are aiming to achieve a purely political goal. Neither money nor the releases of detainees will persuade them to free (the hostages). First they tried to separate the Italian government from the United States, now they want to separate it from its citizens, destabilizing the entire country.
Freedom
In fact, the blackmail extends to all Italian citizens, attempting to strike the most important value of our democracy, the freedom of thought and the freedom to express that thought.
The hope is that the "political leadership" of the group that directs the kidnapping is able to understand how the assassination of the three Italians would constitute more than just infamy on the human level, it would lead to the most dramatic defeat of their cause.
BRITAIN
The Guardian, London, April 26: It is nearly a week since Tony Blair called for battle to be joined on the European constitution. These are early days, but there is not much sign of anything of that kind actually happening yet.
It is time to refocus the argument where it ought to be, not on process, but on the issue that really matters: Britain's place in Europe. It is high time there was some optimism about Europe, but there could hardly be a better time to rekindle it. At the end of this very week, a new form of European Union will come into existence. Ten new member states, most of them from the former communist eastern part of our continent, will join together with the 15 nations of western Europe. It will be the third great moment in the post-1945 reconstruction of a peaceful Europe, following the Franco-German rapprochement of the 1950s and the end of dictatorship in southern Europe in the 1970s. It marks the end of one of the deepest political divisions of the 20th century.
Great moment
As Professor Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in the Observer yesterday, the new EU can be seen as marking the fulfillment of the war aims of 1939: a secure and independent central Europe living at peace alongside a liberal Germany. By any standards, that makes this a great moment.