European press review

Europe's papers strike a sombre tone as it is confirmed that the crew of the Russian submarine Kursk is dead.

As Mexico's opposition gains another election victory, hope of better times ahead is tinged with doubts about whether anything will actually change.

And where politicians tread, bad taste is soon to follow as the sound bite catches up with Hungary's last prisoner of war.

Russian grief

"Russia declares the submarine crew dead," is the stark headline of Zurich's Neue Zuercher Zeitung, words that are echoed by most other European papers after Norwegian divers succeeded on Monday in opening one of the sunken submarine's hatches, only to discover that the interior was completely flooded

"Rescue mission: Kursk is filled with water - no survivors," says The Norway Post, a Norwegian online newspaper.

"The Norwegian deep sea divers managed to open the escape hatch to the interior chambers of the stricken Russian sub Kursk on Monday morning," the paper says. "The bulkhead is filled with water, thus the rescue mission is brought to an end".

Vienna's Kurier says that despite the news, Russian officials initially wanted to continue the search for survivors, before bowing to the inevitable.

"Despite the hopeless situation, the Russian Navy wanted to continue searching for survivors with special cameras," the paper says, before concluding later on that the 118 crewmen were in all certainty dead.

"Death. Official, unavoidable, expected, already intimately known by all," says Portugal's Jornal de Noticias. "The Russian submarine Kursk has become a giant steel and water tomb, where 24 missiles and a nuclear propulsion reactor take the place of flowers."

"Russia grieves for its dead," says Copenhagen's Berlingske Tidende over a photograph of a Russian woman lighting candles for the dead sailors in a St Petersburg church.

Belgium's La Libre Belgique has harsh words for Russia's belated call for assistance after the Kursk accident but says some good may yet come out of the tragedy.

According to the paper, the Anglo-Norwegian rescue operation was deliberately solicited too late to avoid what it calls "the ultimate humiliation: Russian soldiers saved by NATO".

But in the paper's view the death of the sailors will not have been in vain if Russian President Vladimir Putin carries out a radical purge of those in charge.

It adds that even more good could come out of the tragedy if Putin, as the paper puts it, "abandoned sterile rhetoric to embark his country on a historic and irreversible course of reconciliation with NATO".

Catholic Church woes

France's leading daily Le Monde says the euphoria of the Catholic World Youth Days in Rome should deceive no-one about the Catholic Church's problems.

"This kind of euphoric, isolated, ephemeral gathering", the paper observers, "does not mean churches or seminaries are now full".

It admits that Pope Jean Paul II is probably on of the great moral personalities of this turn of the century.

But it criticizes his Church's stance on many issues, ranging from its reaffirmation of the power of elderly, male clerics and its preaching of sexual morals at odds with modern trends to its failure to join the anti-Pinochet movement.

"What kind of church do these young people want?" the paper asks. "One that is forward-looking... or one marked by compromise and wheeler-dealing?"

Politicians in bad taste

Under the headline "Political psychiatry", Budapest's Nepszava ridicules the way politicians are trying to capitalize on the recent return of Hungary's "last prisoner of war", Andras Tamas, from a Russian psychiatric institute.

According to the commentary, in his current state of mind, the man - who has no recollection of his past - must be happy because he does not know that Hungary lost World War II, that there was a change in the political system or that there was any need for it.

But now politicians have started visiting him, the paper says, and recently the agriculture minister told him that "his life can be seen as the symbol of the Hungarian nation" and expressed his hope that the man, "who could not live as a Hungarian, will at least die as a Hungarian".

According to the paper, "this kind of narrow-mindedness and the lack of good taste deprives the last prisoner of war of the most important thing, a happy and peaceful old age".

All change in Mexico?

Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau welcomes the latest opposition victory in Mexico, but still harbours doubts about any real change in the country's political system.

The paper reports that Pablo Salazar has been elected as the new governor of the southern state of Chiapas, beating his rival from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which until the recent victory of president-elect Vicente Fox had held the Mexican presidency in an iron grip for the past 70 years.

"But whether everything will be different... is not so sure," the paper says, explaining that Fox's PAN party will find it hard to change what it calls the "culture of loyalty to its leaders and paternalistic demagoguery" of the country's institutions.

Vienna's Die Presse is more optimistic. The paper points out that it was the 1994 Zapatista guerrilla uprising in Chiapas that heralded change in Mexico and weakened the PRI's grip on power.

"With the new governor Pablo Salazar Mendiguchia, who is open-minded regarding the demands and ideas of the Zapatistas, the chances for peace in southeastern Mexico could now finally grow," it says.

"An important first step has been taken," it concludes.

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.