French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday (28 July) announced his government is to order police to round up allegedly illegal migrants of Roma ethnicity for expulsion from French territory and destroy their encampments.

The announcement was the result of a cabinet meeting dedicated to the subject called after officers shot and killed a gypsy youth in the Loire Valley, provoking a riot by others of his community.

The Greek government has used an emergency order to force lorry drivers back to work after a three-day strike. The drivers, who oppose government plans to open the industry to more competition, could lose their licences or face arrest if they do not go back to work.

French financial police on Thursday questioned France's scandal-hit labour minister, Eric Woerth, as part of a continuing investigation into the financial affairs of billionaire L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

Woerth, who has been forced to quit his post as treasurer of the ruling UMP party, has been accused of accepting illegal campaign donations from France's richest woman in a widening scandal that has rocked the government of French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

FRANCE 24's French Politics Editor Marc Perelman said police questioned Woerth over three separate incidents that have come to haunt the embattled minister.

In an effort to keep right-wing extremists out of early-childhood education, the state government of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania has ordered all heads of state-funded pre-schools to swear allegiance to the German constitution.

The order, which takes effect August 1, came after a scandal involving a pre-school in the tiny village of Bartow, population 550. The village needed 15,000 euros to keep the school running when Mattias Schubert, a father of seven, offered to run the school for free.

It was soon discovered that Schubert is a member of the far-right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), which the German government accuses of racism and anti-Semitism. The town council quickly rejected Schubert's offer.

Far-right nationalists in the German state of Thuringia are seeking to reach a wider audience by founding five new newspapers in the region. The worrying move by the National Democratic Party (NPD) is aimed at capturing more voters.

The publications purport to address regional issues, running headlines such as "Is Erfurt broke?", "Venturing more democracy," and "Schools are the future." But behind this veneer of seemingly harmless headlines lies the NPD's true agenda.

"The NPD's ideology is communicated above all else in these articles," said Stefan Heerdegen of the Mobile Council in Thuringia for Democracy - Against Right-wing Extremism, based in the state's capital, Erfurt.

"There is always a hostility towards democracy being piggybacked [in these stories]," said Heerdegen.

At Vienna Press Conference, Dunja Mijatovic Notes that in Most OSCE Member Countries Media Freedom under Threat

New OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic on Thursday released her first regular report to the OSCE Permanent Council, noting that in many OSCE member countries media freedom remains under threat. 

In opening remarks, Mijatovic highlighted the threats posed by criminal defamation and tight Internet control, as well as the cases of recently-murdered Greek journalist Socratis Giolias, imprisoned Azerbaijan bloggers Adnan Hajizada and Emin Milli and recently-attacked Serbian journalist Teofil Pancic. 

Mijatovic's report notes: "The freedom to express ourselves is questioned and challenged from many sides. Some of these challenges are blatant, others concealed; some of them follow traditional methods to silence free speech and critical voices, some use new technologies to suppress and restrict the free flow of information and media pluralism; and far too many result in physical  harassment and deadly violence against journalists. We regularly receive reports of threats, intimidation, administrative harassment (registration and re-registration requirements, alleged tax violations, cancelled contracts for printing or distribution of papers and the like).

The report (pdf)

"Ce qui vient au monde pour ne rien troubler ne mérite ni égards ni patience." René Char

Newsnight has seen a leaked copy of the "command paper" to be issued by Ian Duncan Smith tomorrow. Technically a consultation document, the paper "Welfare in the 21st Century" admits that:

"the overly bureaucratic benefits system can act as a barrier to work, trapping people in poverty".

The problem is the rate at which four or five separate benefits are withdrawn as people move off the dole and into work. For 130,000 people, the effect of working more than 16 hours a week is to remove 90p out of every extra pound they earn. For a staggering 1.9 million people the effect is to remove 60p.

The paper explores three solutions, but IDS' clearly preferred option is the so called Universal Credit. This will be spun as "combining elements of the present system" but even the cursory detail in the command paper makes clear this is radical reform.

Fini was also invited to step down as President of the House of Deputies. 34 deputies have left Berlusconi's party to form an autonomous group with Fini, thus reducing Berlusconi's majority to a razor-thin margin within the House.

Gianfranco Fini co-founded the PdL with the intention of creating a mass center-right party. He has stuck to this line for the past sixteen months, earning praise and respect both here and abroad. On the contrary Berlusconi's vision of the party is that it is nothing more than a political vehicle for his personal interests, a principle he has egregiously reasserted this evening.

The immediate consequences are that the final vote on the infamous law against wiretapping and press freedom has been postponed to September. The government could at this point fall on any vote of confidence.

It is likely that Berlusconi will seek to exasperate the situation to provoke general elections. He is at his best campaigning, selling used cars. However, were his government to fall, this would not necessarily lead to general elections, as a broad anti-Berlusconi coalition could conceivably be formed to continue the legislature (it would of course not be formed in those terms.)

At present his government is swamped in major scandals involving almost all of his closest collaborators. Once again, the judiciary branch and its investigators are forced to resolve a cancerous situation of generalized illegality and capillary corruption that has long since become a social and political norm. Neither the political caste nor public opinion has seen fit to remedy this gravely deteriorating situation.

There may however be limits. Watching a 74 year old lecher jerk off in public for the past 15 years may in the end test the interest of all but the very, very faithful.

The government has hit back at a legal charity's "unwarranted and baseless" suggestion that the senior judge leading the inquiry into allegations of UK involvement in torture is too close to the security services to conduct an impartial investigation.

Last week, Reprieve wrote to Sir Peter Gibson, a former appeal court judge, asking that he recuse himself from the inquiry into claims of British complicity in the abuse of detainees abroad since the 9/11 attacks.

The 11-page letter, which was copied to the prime minister, said that Sir Peter's impartiality had been "fatally compromised" because he had spent the last four years overseeing the security services in his role as intelligence services commissioner (ISC).