The European Union has announced its vision for an association of the EU and other states bordering the Mediterranean. But it falls short of what sponsor France originally wanted.

The European Commission laid out its views in Strasbourg on Tuesday, May 20.

 

The project is open to all EU member states as well as countries from North Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans and includes the Palestinian authorities.

 

This is an initiative to reinforce, to reinvigorate our relationship," EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner said at a press conference. "The more we can develop the region in the South, the less illegal migration there will be...The more prosperity we can give, the less terrorism, the less criminality will be there."

 

Potential tasks for the new union will be to open new sea traffic routes, clean up Mediterranean waters, improve maritime security and exploit solar power in Northern Africa to help meet Europe's energy needs.

The second annual Global Peace Index, a survey on the harmoniousness of the world's nations, has been released. Iceland has been named the world's most peaceful country -- and Iraq its least.

If you don't like conflict, than maybe you should consider moving to Reykjavik -- that's the message from the Global Peace Index.

Iceland headed the rankings of the survey, which is drawn up by a non-governmental initiative called Vision of Humanity. It evaluates 140 nations with respect to 24 criteria, including numbers of deaths from organized conflict, levels of violent crime and proportions of GDP used for military expenditures.

Denmark was deemed the world's second most peaceful country, followed by Norway, New Zealand and Japan.

"The world appears to be a marginally more peaceful place this year," index founder and Australian philanthropist Steve Killelea said in a statement. "This is encouraging, but it takes small steps by individual countries for the world to make greater strides on the road to peace."

Brussels took steps yesterday to adjust its much-criticised £32bn-a-year farming policy to a threatening new world of food shortages and soaring food prices. The proposals - too radical for some European governments; too timid for others - are likely to generate heated argument in the second half of this year.

Wealthy, large landowners, including the Queen, would have part of their EU subsidies removed and invested in environmentally friendly rural developments and traditional, small farms. Compulsory "set-aside" payments to farmers to leave one-tenth of their land fallow would be scrapped, boosting the European harvest of cereals, whose world price has almost trebled in the past year. Limits on milk production (quotas) which have been in place for 25 years would be relaxed and then abolished, reducing - eventually - the upward pressure on dairy prices.

The proposals are, in theory, just a "health check" on the much-contested Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which is not scheduled for a root and branch reform until 2013. However, the European Union's cautious, initial schedule has been swamped by events. Soaring global prices for basic foodstuffs threaten widespread famine and have already caused riots in the developing world. In the EU, rising shop prices for food are putting pressure on household budgets and the popularity of governments.

The suspected political leader of the Basque separatist movement, Eta, has been arrested in a joint Spanish-French operation, Spanish authorities said.

Javier Lopez Pena, alias "Thierry", was arrested with three other Eta suspects in a late-night raid in the south-west French city of Bordeaux.

Eta is blamed for the deaths of more than 820 people in its 40-year campaign for an independent Basque nation.

The group announced a ceasefire in 2006 but formally ended it last June.

The group said it carried out Monday's powerful car bomb attack in Bilbao, the economic capital of Spain's Basque region.

A 24-hour strike paralysed Belgium's rail system on Tuesday, shutting down local lines as well as international services such as Eurostar trains between Brussels and London.

"No trains are running," Fanny Charpentier, a spokeswoman for Infrabel, which manages the country's railway lines, told AFP.

Belgian train commuters had to find alternatives ways to get to work while high-speed Thalys routes to France, Germany and the Netherlands were also idle.

MADRID: When she was appointed Spain's first female defense minister in April, the aspect of Carmé Chacón that drew the most public attention was not her gender, nor her rapid rise through the ranks of the governing Socialist party, but her prominent prenatal bump.

Chacón, who began leave Tuesday after giving birth to a boy, became an instant symbol of the Socialist government's commitment to gender parity in Spain, a traditionally macho society whose new equality laws are among the most progressive in Europe.

"If you were designing a publicity campaign for equality, you couldn't come up with a better symbol," a senior Socialist party official, Elena Valenciano, said in a telephone interview.

"Sexual equality is Spain's new brand, and that is very innovative in a country that only recently admitted equality into its consciousness," she said.

HANNOVER, Germany: With nearly a decade of hindsight, German manufacturers find they can look back on the painful opening years of the millennium with a certain degree of satisfaction.

Then, "Made in Germany" was less a label connoting quality than a millstone around their necks that suggested high prices and mystifying engineering. Labor costs in Germany, the largest economy in Europe, had spun out of control, and German companies had been slow to head for Eastern Europe and Asia - places that looked like the true future of manufacturing.

Turning bolts, Germans were told - often by other Germans - had no future in Germany. The persistence of heavy manufacturing symbolized the country's inability or unwillingness to transform itself into a modern, services-oriented economy like the United States or Britain, two oft-used yardsticks.

Today, the manufacturing sector in Germany is growing as a proportion of the country's total economic output, and Germany looks set to outpace far larger economies like China and the United States as the world's largest merchandise exporter for the fourth year running.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The French parliament will on Tuesday evening (20 May) discuss a constitutional reform plan that could eventually make it compulsory for France to hold a referendum on large countries wanting to join the EU.

Under an amendment tabled by Jean-Luc Warsmann - a deputy from the centre-right UMP party - in the French parliament's Committee on Legislation last week, holding a referendum would become obligatory to approve the EU accession of any country whose population surpasses five percent of the EU's population - currently about 500 million people.

"Considering the size the EU has reached today and the debates held in the past over enlargement, any additional enlargement demands particular attention", especially if it would considerably change the EU's internal balance, reads an explanatory summary for the tabled amendment.

The provision which appears to be clearly targeted at EU candidate Turkey with its population of 70 million - was opposed by the French Socialist Party (PS).

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Activities seriously damaging environment will soon become a crime across the 27-nation EU, as the bloc's main institutions have agreed on a piece of law harmonising what constitutes a severe environmental offence and obliging national governments to apply criminal penalties to punish them.

On Wednesday (21 May), members of the European Parliament are set to give their blessing to a report by German conservative Hartmut Nassauer, which calls for "effective, proportionate and dissuasive" criminal sanctions for number of crimes.

The list includes crimes related to the emission of radiation into the air, soil or water; the disposal of waste; the production, storage and transport of nuclear materials; the possession or killing of protected fauna and flora species; the deterioration of a habitat within a protected site; and the manufacture and distribution of ozone-depleting substances.

All three EU bodies - the parliament, the European commission and the council, representing member states - have thrown their weight behind the draft law during the so-called first reading, the early stages of legislative process.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU lawmakers have called on the European Commission to stick to an earlier promise in a forthcoming anti-discrimination bill and outlaw unfair treatment on all grounds, including concerning age and sexual orientation.

The Strasbourg assembly on Tuesday (20 May) adopted a report (with 362 votes in favour, 262 against and 56 abstentions) calling for a "horizontal" directive to combat any discrimination on grounds of sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation.

The "own-initiative" report, written by British liberal MEP Liz Lynne, is not a legislative document but a signal to the commission about which direction the EU assembly would like to see the bill taking.

The vote comes after the commission recently indicated that it will not propose a new far-reaching anti-discrimination bill to cover all the areas so far not included in existing EU laws, despite the fact that it was planned for in the executive's official agenda for this year.

Italy and Spain have quarrelled over Rome's plans to tighten up its immigration policies as part of a bid to tackle rising tensions among Italians towards migrants from Romania.

Franco Frattini, Italy's foreign minister and former European commissioner for immigration, complained about comments on Italy's affairs made by leading politicians in Madrid, noting "Frankly, it's time to stop these [political] pitch invasions."

"Declarations from ministers that interfere with the activities of a government elected by the Italian citizens are not acceptable, especially in areas like immigration which need close cooperation between Spain and Italy," Mr Frattini said in a radio interview.

He reacted to earlier statements by Spain's deputy premier Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega who had said that the Spanish executive "rejects violence, racism and the xenophobia, and therefore cannot agree with what is happening in Italy."

EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - The European Commission has tabled a compromise deal to liberalise the EU's gas sector, bowing to pressure from a group of member states, who firmly oppose the idea of separating gas companies' production and supply wings.

Energy experts from all 27 EU states have entered a critical phase in the months-long battle over the commission's furthest-reaching intervention in the energy sector yet, with talks scheduled for almost every day over the coming weeks.

The core of Brussels' proposal, known as full ownership unbundling, is to break up EU energy giants - such as France's EDF or Germany's E.ON - by forcing the parent company to sell its transmission networks.

The EU's executive argues that control of both supply and transmission makes it harder for new entrants to enter the market and that asset break-up is essential to boosting competition and cutting prices.

How poor is Germany? A new report claims that poverty in the country is rising quickly. Politicians have responded with proposals ranging from tax cuts to a minimum wage. But commentators say the govermnet is failing to tackle the true sources of poverty.

AP

A man begging in the street in the western city of Gelsenkirchen. The government's latest report on poverty showed a widening gap between rich and poor in Germany. A government report showing one in four Germans is either poor or reliant on welfare benefits to stave off poverty has fuelled tensions within the ruling coalition between Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats.

The report, released on Monday, defines people as poor if their net income is less than €781 ($1,212) per month, and it concludes that the gap between rich and poor is widening. It said that 13 percent of German citizens -- about one in eight -- earn less than that amount, while a further 13 percent only exceed that income because they are receiving welfare payments.

Merkel's CDU responded by calling for rapid tax cuts to help the country's shrinking middle class while the SPD reiterated its demands for higher taxation of the wealthy and the introduction of a minimum wage.

Several German media commentators say both parties have got it wrong, and that Merkel's right-left government isn't doing enough to combat the true causes of poverty -- a lack of education and job training, and insufficient child-care provisions to enable single parents to go out to work.

BERLIN: Gazprom, the Russian export monopoly that delivers a quarter of the European Union's natural gas, warned the bloc Tuesday that it was endangering its own security of supply with plans to break up the Continent's energy giants.

At an annual EU-Russian energy conference, Gazprom's director for international relations, Stanislav Tsygankov, said proposals being drafted by the European Commission to force the separation of energy production, transmission and distribution would sow "instability and unpredictability" across the sector.

"Which companies will be able to plan long term investments under those conditions?" he asked at the conference, which was organized by Gazprom, the Russian Gas Society and the German Council for Foreign Policy.

David Cameron, the Tory leader, backed a reduction, indicating that he favoured it being lowered to 20 weeks, while Gordon Brown and a majority of MPs voted to keep the current limit.

A lowering of the limit had been predicted, but MPs instead rejected all the amendments that would have lowered the limit.

An attempt to prevent two-mother families being legally enshrined also failed.

The procura of Naples has opened an investigation into the case following Bonini's scoop. Today Carlo offers further details about the "friendly advice" offered to the Ecolog society to reduce its activity in transporting waste. During the worst crisis at New Years an obscure health functionary had sought to  block the convoys by falsely declaring that Ecolog's permits had expired. This functionary had already been caught up in an investigation against Camorra infiltration into the Benevento health services.

A certain Michele Greco who will presumably be nominated as director of waste disposal for the Campania, has been exposed as putting pressure on Ecolog to pull back their operations to simple transportation. Doctor Greco was accompanied by a certain Tiziano Brembilla, an international waste  broker who runs a society "TBR" currently implicated in illegal dumping in a 2004 case.

In another article reporter Attilio Bolzoni explains the impact of train transport on the garbage crisis. Ecolog was capable of sending two convoys a day to Germany with 1500 tons of waste per trip. Not surprisingly, each time Ecolog was prevented from transporting, waste accumulated in the Campania. A small note. The Ecolog trains were accompanied to the Italian frontier by a wagon of armed guards. Now that the convoys are run by Trenitalia, armed guards are no longer needed.

But then Trenitalia's convoys never leave, ostensibly because the Austrians won't allow transit yet.

In effect what the Camorra wants is that the waste remain in Campania going from one stocking place to another to reap state money. The crises in Naples appear to be directly linked to the blockage of train convoys.

As Sole24 hours pointed out on Sunday, the Italian mafias have caused 30,000 casualties in the past decades,  more than the Israeli- Palestine wars. It would be high time to talk about the Camorra instead of the Rom.