In a week when new figures released by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Ruud Lubbers, showed a 22 per cent drop in asylum applications across the EU, British Home Secretary David Blunkett announced a package of tough restrictions on incoming central and eastern European job-seekers and "benefit tourists".
For some, this was a case of too little, too late. "We need real deterrents to those who arrive here without a job already arranged," wrote the Daily Star. "Like a ticket straight back home."
The Daily Mirror, however, thought the government was doing a good job "calming genuine fears" and deprecated "the shameful hysteria of some newspapers and the racist rantings of the BNP".
For Anita Prazmowska, writing in the Times, the tabloid image of vodka-sodden easterners queuing up for free this and free that was a fantasy whose only function was to "inflame the prejudices of those who derive comfort from knowing they are never likely to need assistance themselves".
In the Netherlands, meanwhile, a new law on immigration has done away with multiple appeals against refusal of asylum; rejected applicants are now expelled immediately after the initial decision in their case.
The Dutch Minister for Immigration and Integration, Rita Verdonk, had considerable support in the press for her tough line. "Sympathy is understandable," said NRC Handelsblad, "but Mrs Verdonk's job is to fix limits." For De Telegraaf, the asylum-seekers were responsible for their own plight, having taken the risk of arriving in the Netherlands in the first place, "probably hoping for a miracle".
Algemeen Dagblad, however, felt sorry for those who had been living in the state for some considerable time and had made every effort to assimilate. The real guilty party, the paper said, was the Dutch state, which had raised false hopes among asylum-seekers in giving them the impression they were welcome.
President Vladimir Putin's decision, announced on television on Tuesday, to fire Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and his team and replace him, at least temporarily, with Viktor Khristenko was a demonstration of pure power, according to the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti. Its purpose, coming in the middle of a presidential campaign, was to show the importance of the process of nomination as opposed to that of election.
The other candidates, Vedomosti wrote in an editorial entitled "The hand of the sovereign", can say whatever they like but they cannot nominate anyone, which is to say that they, unlike Mr Putin, have no power.
For the Financial Times, Mr Putin's move was "another sign of the Kremlin's playing fast and loose with the niceties of electoral democracy", a development which the paper says the EU has been slow to notice. "What the EU as a whole has failed to detect is the harsher line Russia is now taking in what it sees as its national interests in and around Europe."
All the main European newspapers and news magazines gave considerable coverage to Tony Blair's troubles with the GCHQ whistleblower Katherine Gun and former minister Clare Short. For Hamburg's Der Spiegel, Mr Blair was lurching from one Iraq scandal to the next and now enjoyed the trust of only a third of voters. His standing was so low, according to analysts, that he had no more ground to lose.
The people who would desert Mr Blair over Iraq, said Mori pollster Bob Worcester, have already done so. "The only ones left are the core Labour voters." The undecided, the disillusioned and the Conservatives are already lost to Mr Blair as potential voters, wrote Der Spiegel.
In Britain, there were widely divergent views on the Short affair. Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, thought that "Mr Annan has every reason to feel personally betrayed by the British", while former Labour defence minister Peter Kilfoyle, writing in the Guardian, warned that "the prime minister's charge that Ms Gun and Ms Short are 'irresponsible' will not wash".
The Daily Telegraph took a different view, judging Ms Short's actions to be "disgraceful" and "typically self-indulgent".
Calling for the former minister to be prosecuted, the Telegraph traced the trouble back to "the pious foundations" of New Labour's attempts to forge an "ethical foreign policy", which it felt sure the prime minister must now regret. "The workings of a nation's security services, especially in times of war or acute external threat, are rarely attractive," the paper wrote.
"Just as it is possible to enjoy eating a Cumberland sausage without wishing to see how it is made, so we can value the work of our security services without demanding full disclosure about how they go about protecting us from danger."