European press review

Europe's papers have been dominated by the rampage by a gunmen in southern France, and that's where we begin this week.

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For Switzerland's Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the shootings are a sign that the international Islamist jihad has changed strategy.

The suspected killer, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, was believed to have trained with Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and the paper says his acts are testimony that the terror network is now relying on solo combattants.

Weakened by an international crackdown and the death of leader Osama Bin Laden, Al-Qaeda is no longer able to conduct strikes on the scale of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the conservative daily says.

It now encourages recruits to act alone in their homeland. Security forces must be ready for uncoordinated attacks in a grey area that is neither an organised criminal enterprise nor the desperate act of the mentally unstable.

The events in Toulouse prove that such attacks might be smaller, but they can still leave an entire nation in shock, the paper says.

The economic crisis continues to make news, and Germany is often the target of criticism for imposing tough conditions on its neighbours to secure international aid.

Only this time, Germany is taking flak for making money in the weapons trade. Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny reports on the latest research by the respected Stockholm-based research institute Sipri.

It shows that the international trade in arms has grown by almost a quarter in the last five years, compared to the previous period. The weapons trade is a world unto itself, the conservative daily says.

You think of Russia as a trader in energy and raw materials? Think again - it's a major weapons supplier.

What about Germany? It has been peaceful since World War II, and opposed to military action by NATO, yet it's the world's third arms exporter ahead of Britain and France.

And spare a thought for Greece. Despite labouring under a debt mountain, it is also Europe's biggest weapons importer, and its top supplier is Germany, the paper says.

Greece has indeed been one of the main protoganists of Europe's debt crisis drama, but one paper has been talking this week about its bad-guy role in a different European club.

Kathimerini says that apart from being under threat in the euro currency group, Greece's position in the Schengen passport-free zone is also shaky, over its failure to properly police its borders.

The country has proved an all too easy entry point for illegal immigrants looking for a home further west. While it could be electioneering, Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to pull France out of Schengen if stricter border measures are not imposed.

Germany too wants stronger cooperation in immigration matters, and this all puts pressure on Athens, the conservative daily says. Greece's long land and sea borders are difficult to police.

But if public administration does not improve, the country cannot be a credible guardian of Europe's borders and, as with the euro, it will have to bear the consequences of failure.

In Spain, the government is set to unveil a new law. But this is no crackdown - rather, it's an opening up. Spaniards are set to finally have the right to a freedom of information law, El Pais reports.

The law is to be presented on 17 April and will be a major step forward for democracy, the centre-left daily says.

Spain will no longer be the odd man out in Europe. It's a shame that it has taken an economic crisis and public anger with the political class for the two main parties to finally give in and allow a transparency law to be drawn up.

It is intolerable that public institutions have been so opaque. Spaniards are denied access to basic information about the quality of schools, contracts signed by the government, and even the results of environmental studies carried out with tax payers' money, the paper says.

And we end this week in Britain, where age-old attitudes to Germany appear to have improved recently. Or are the new views just as dated?

According to The Guardian, Britons may be getting over World War II. A major survey shows that they no longer think of the Nazi jack boots of 70 years ago when they think of Germany.

Problem is, it seems that public perceptions still centre on a misguided stereotype: that Germans are hardworking. Britons, it seems, like the way Germans run their country, as well as their banks, schools and hospitals.

But, the left-leaning daily says, the truth is that Germans don't work any harder than people in Britain. If anything, they're working fewer hours and have more holidays. Perhaps the stereotype says more about British anxiety than German achievement, the paper says.