PRAGUE - Czech President Vaclav Klaus said on Wednesday that fighting global warming has turned into a 'religion' that replaced the ideology of communism and threatens to clip basic freedoms.

The right-wing president, a free-market champion, wrote to the U.S. Congress that adopting tough environmental policies to fight climate change would have destructive impact on national economies.

'Communism has been replaced by the threat of an ambitious environmentalism,' Klaus wrote in response to questions from the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Energy and Commerce.

The U.S. House Subcommittee for Energy and Air Quality was due to hold a hearing on climate on Wednesday with former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore, who sees global warming as a key challenge, and Danish sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, who says governments should focus on fight disease and hunger instead.

Inspired by the US "green card" scheme, the European Commission is considering introducing its own "blue card" system to attract additional highly skilled immigrants.

Even though EU members states hold differing opinions on migration, EU officials said that "everyone understands that immigration is part of the solution" to the demographic problem of aging the continent is facing.

 

"We had better manage immigration properly as it is going to happen anyway," EU justice spokesman Friso Ascam Abbing told the AFP news agency.

 

As a result, officials are looking at a European version of the US Green Card program, called the "blue card."

 

An impact assessment is currently being drawn up and will be ready "in the next two months or so" after which the Commission will draft detailed proposals, Abbing said.

President Jacques Chirac gave his less than enthusiastic backing yesterday to the presidential campaign of his former protégé, Nicolas Sarkozy.

In a short televised speech, M. Chirac announced that M. Sarkozy would leave his post as interior minister next Monday to concentrate on his run for the presidency.

ThePresident - who had himself clung to hopes of running for a third term until recently - went on to endorse M. Sarkozy but without any evident signs of conviction or pleasure.

M. Sarkozy had been chosen, "because of his qualities", as the official candidate of the ruling centre-right party, the Union Pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), M. Chirac said. This was the President's own party, founded by him five years ago "to unite the centre-right". It was therefore "natural", he said, that he would give M. Sarkozy his "vote" and his "backing".

The President - who announced his retirement from politics 10 days ago - also paid tribute to M. Sarkozy's "work, engagement and results" as France's "top cop" at the Interior Ministry.

Although this amounted to the formal endorsement that M. Sarkozy had craved, the wording and tone came over as grudging and forced.

The German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for a united Europe in dealing with the controversial US plan to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. A united Berlin would be nice too.

Chancellor Angela Merkel would like her government to stop bickering. It's no secret that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is concerned about what the US missile defense system -- planned to be installed in Eastern Europe -- might do to European unity. On a recent visit to Poland, which supports the missile shield, she made the issue one of her talking points.

In a newspaper interview published on Wednesday, Merkel repeated her warning. "Europe is weakened in its strength and ability to assert its position when it is not united," Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

"There must be an attempt to prevent a split in Europe on all issues -- whether it be a question of energy policy or foreign and defense policy," she told the Rheinische Post. "That means that everything must be done to avoid going it alone and to agree on things together," she added.

Even as Merkel has her eyes on the 50th anniversary of the European Union this weekend, the target of her most recent comments can likely be found closer to home. A debate is raging within Germany's governing coalition between Merkel's Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats over US missile defense plans, which would involve stationing facilities in both Poland and the Czech Republic.

Gordon Brown announced tax cuts for Labour's heartlands and Middle England as he gave himself the option of calling a general election in the autumn of next year.

In his 11th and final Budget, the Chancellor unveiled a dramatic cut in the basic rate of income tax from 22p to 20p in the pound, the lowest for 75 years. But the Tories accused him of a "tax con" because his give-and-take package also abolished the 10p in the pound bottom rate of tax, currently paid on the first £2,150 of taxable income.

His surprise tax shake-up will take effect in April next year, providing a possible platform for Mr Brown, who is expected to become Prime Minister this summer, to call an election in the autumn of 2008 rather than wait until 2009. Labour MPs welcomed his targeted tax cuts, saying they would boost the party's election prospects.

Mr Brown also used his last Budget to draw the election battle lines between himself and David Cameron on the environment and marriage. He increased road tax for 4x4 vehicles and petrol duty but ridiculed Tory plans to tax frequent flyers more. He also ruled out Tory proposals to reward marriage in the tax system, saying his strategy would benefit six of the seven million families with children.

A KEY aide of Romano Prodi, the Italian prime minister, yesterday insisted he would not resign after being photographed talking to a transsexual prostitute.

Silvio Sircana, an MP who was promoted last month from being Mr Prodi's personal spokesman to that for the entire government, called the incident "a moment of "stupid curiosity".

The married father-of-two is the focus of a wider controversy in which paparazzi are accused of blackmailing celebrities with compromising photographs.

The scandal broke as Mr Prodi faced growing pressure over his views on family values after issuing a bill to give legal rights to unmarried and gay couples, which is fiercely opposed by conservatives and the Roman Catholic Church.

Italian newspapers yesterday printed a blurred photograph of Mr Sircana in his car talking to a scantily clad, female-looking figure standing on a pavement.

Mr Sircana insisted he retained Mr Prodi's support and would not quit. "Why should I have resigned? For a non-story?" he asked in La Stampa.

The photograph was taken in September and sold for about £68,000 to a magazine which did not print it.

It was published after Mr Sircana said he wanted it made public to clear the air.

Far from being a product of the past, the EU has emerged as Europe's most innovative and significant contribution to modernity. With its multilateral scope, the EU is the source of around 20 percent of all laws passed in Europe. It has extended the reach of democracy and free markets within and beyond its borders--in a way that American neocons can only dream about--and is becoming a model to the developing world. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin advances a compelling case for the ascendancy of European ideals. "While the American Spirit is tiring and languishing in the past," he writes, "a new European Dream is being born"--one that emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, and universal human rights." The global financier George Soros is putting money behind a similar idea, seeking to create a new European Council on Foreign Relations premised on the notion that U.S. foreign policy "has left the world leaderless and in disarray." Europe and a revitalized EU, he believes, offers a better "model and motive force" for addressing the global challenges of the modern era.

True or not, it's significant that 50 years after the EU's march to unity began, it is now Europe, not the United States, that's held up as a new lamp unto nations.

The private equity business has finally found a spokesman. After all, it has not been the British Venture Capital Association, which has been a meek, tongue-tied cheerleader for the industry. Nor should it be Damon Buffini, the Permira boss, who seems to have become the public face of private equity for much the same reason as Richard Gere became the champion of Tibet and Brigitte Bardot became the voice of baby seals -- no one else would. Mr Buffini has neither the right nor the responsibility to speak for firms other than his own.

Instead, it has fallen to Charlie McCreevy, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, to make the case. At the House of Commons this morning, Mr McCreevy is expected to provide a comprehensive rebuttal of private equity's critics. His argument is that it is absurd to complain that the industry is exploiting the low cost of debt. Not only does private equity know and bear the risk of leverage, it would be bizarre to expect it to wait for the cost of borrowing to rise before going out and raising capital. He makes the case that if professional golfers and footballers get paid a fortune, why not professional wealth and job creators? And he dismisses the allegation that private equity operators are "asset strippers", pointing out that one man's asset sale is another man's asset purchase.