The next few months will be decisive for the European Union's future economic health, with the bloc set to agree a new 10-year economic plan in a bid to leave the recent recession behind, and chart a fresh course towards steady growth and job creation.

Decade-high unemployment, an ageing EU population and soaring budget deficits form the backdrop for those involved in drafting the important roadmap.

Memory of the EU's current economic plan - the Lisbon Strategy, due to expire in 2010 - is also likely to influence EU leaders as they prepare to discuss its successor at a number of European summits over the next six months under the Spanish EU presidency.

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has invited to his Madrid office tomorrow (5 January) a number of personalities who are considered as Europe's `wise men', with the view of regularly consulting them, the Spanish press writes.

Those invited for consultation include Jacques Delors, the long-serving Commission President (1985-1994) who is considered as one of the 'fathers of Europe'.

Felipe González, former Spanish Prime minister (1982-1996) and chairman of a reflection group on the future of Europe will also join, alongside former Spanish commissioner Pedro Solbes (1999-2004).

Belgrade submitted its application bid last month with the ambition to "beat all records for fastest EU accession" but diplomats warned there were no shortcuts to the bloc's membership.

Serbian President Boris Tadic, submitted his country's application, a five-page document, to Swedish Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt in Stockholm on 22 December.

Tadic, whose victory at the general elections last May was seen as crucial to the country's integration to Europe, said Belgrade's target date for accession was 2014.

Greece is set to tell the European Commission how it aims to control its public finances and get its beleaguered economy back on track in 2010.

Its debt problems represent a major test of the euro in its 12th year, as markets wait to see how the 16-nation eurozone reacts to Greece's problems.

Government debt ratings have been downgraded in Greece by all three major international rating agencies.

The failed attack on the Danish caricaturist Kurt Westergaard has increased anxiety in Europe about religious extremists. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Islam scholar Peter Heine discusses Islam's stance toward violence and the nature of the threat in Germany.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: In the wake of Friday's failed attack on the Muhammad caricaturist Kurt Westergaard in Denmark, there is once again talk of a so-called "Islamist hit list." But does such a thing really exist?

Peter Heine: There certainly isn't any set hit list for the simple fact that there are too many Islamist organizations, networks and individual groups. And all of them have their own goals, whether political or military.

Three labour MPs are arguing they cannot be prosecuted over expenses claims because they are protected by parliamentary privilege.

The trio - Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine - are being represented by a legal firm that has acted as solicitor to the Labour Party since 1990.

Their lawyers are understood to maintain that the Bill of Rights of 1689 makes them immune to prosecution. Police have forwarded files relating to the expenses claims of six MPs and peers to the Crown Prosecution Service.

Mr Morley and Mr Chaytor both claimed thousands of pounds for "phantom" mortgages they had paid off. Mr Devine submitted invoices for electrical work worth £2,157 from a company with an allegedly false address and an invalid VAT number. Steel & Shamash, a London legal company, confirmed it had instructed two QCs to consider whether the MPs should be protected by parliamentary privilege.

"It is their opinion that there are substantial legal and constitutional arguments that this is, in fact, the case," a spokesman for Steel & Shamash told The Sunday Times. "Any possible future involvement of the prosecuting authorities in this instance raises serious constitutional issues that will affect not just our clients but the way parliament itself operates."

Serbia has filed charges of genocide against Croatia at the United Nations' International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging atrocities during the 1991-95 Yugoslav war.

Serbia's foreign ministry said Belgrade's legal team filed the lawsuit at the Netherlands-based court on Monday.

The lawsuit was a reaction to charges filed more than ten years ago by Croatia, which the ICJ in 2008 decided that it would hear.

In that suit, Zagreb has accused Serbian forces of killing thousands of Croats during the war as they pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing in the north of the country.

Serbia's state-run Tanjug news agency said that Belgrade had filed a "counter-complaint against the Republic of Croatia for genocide committed against Serbs during the 1991-1995 war".

It is famous for its budget offers and rock-bottom prices but when the Lidl supermarket chain received several batches of high-grade cocaine at its Spanish stores last weekend it decided that that was one product which would not be making it on to the shelves.

Instead the budget supermarket group called in the police to solve the mystery of how a dozen of its stores had each received hundreds of thousands of euros worth of neatly wrapped cocaine mixed in with their fresh bananas.

The drugs were discovered at the bottom of banana boxes that went to stores in Madrid, Plasencia and the town of Cáceres. The bananas, which had been imported by sea from Ecuador, arrived at the Mercamadrid wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Madrid last week. There they were snapped up by buyers from Lidl and the Alcampo supermarket group.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German government said on Monday it knew nothing about a magazine report that the CIA had planned a secret operation to kill a German-Syrian in Hamburg linked to the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets.

World

The U.S. magazine Vanity Fair had reported that the CIA had in 2004 sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to kill Mamoun Darkazanli, who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda.

January's edition of the magazine cited a source familiar with the program as saying the mission had been kept secret from the German government.

The report has been widely picked up in the German media and could become a source of tension between Washington and Berlin. The CIA declined to comment.

Darkazanli has been accused by the United States of financing Osama bin Laden's network and has been blacklisted by the United Nations as being linked to al Qaeda.

Vanity Fair reported that the CIA had dispatched a hit squad of Blackwater employees to Hamburg in 2004.

After he suddenly decided to leave his post six months ago, Croatia's former Prime Minister and HDZ president, announces his return. His return seems as pompous as his departure and the only difference is that he now seems to be launching an attack against the current HDZ president, Jadranka Kosor.

...

Sanader further explains that party's leadership deficits are partly his responsibility, but only because he decided to make a full withdrawal from the party.

...

Asked to elaborate on why he left the post of Prime Minister, Sanader said that he was not ready to sell Croatia's territory and how his departure assisted in Kosor's agreement with Slovenian Prime Minister, Borut Pahor. However, he refused to make further comments on the agreement.

Javno.hr: Only three HDZ members support Sanader?

HDZ leadership is appalled with Sanader's press conference because nobody in the party knew what he was planning to do on the 10th anniversary of HDZ's first parliamentary loss and his behavior is seen as a sort of attempt of rebellion.

Unofficial sources say that Sanader may be expelled from HDZ because of party's statute which calls for expulsion of the members who harm the party's political interests or their reputation.

Jadranka Kosor called for a Monday meeting with coalition partners who already expressed a full support for her and announced withdrawal from the Government in case Sanader attempts to interfere with her work.

Anjem Choudary is brilliant, isn't he? No one else can currently touch him when it comes professional media trolling; he knows exactly what to say, what to do and who to talk to, and also when to do it. As strokes of genius go, nothing is more likely to wind up the nutters outside of his own clique than a half-baked supposed plan to march through Wootton Bassett, which may as well be our current Jerusalem, a holy place which cannot in any way be defiled, such is how it's been sanctified both by the press and politicians. As for his rather less amusing supposed plan for "sending letters" to the families of those bereaved through the current deployment to Afghanistan, urging them, according to that notoriously accurate source, the Sun, that they should embrace Islam "to save [themselves] from the hellfire", it seems more likely that this would only be through the "open letter" which appeared on the Islam4UK website, which is currently 403ing.

[William] Reville [an academic at University College Cork who has campaigned for the continued influence of the church in Irish society] says the Catholic hierarchy has not pushed for the law at all, and no senior churchmen have come out in recent days to defend it. Some observers have suggested the move is simply to bring the old law up to date with the increasingly multicultural, multifaith nature of Irish society.

Others, such as David Quinn, a former editor of The Irish Catholic newspaper, have their own theories.

"My own personal theory is that it actually had to do with the Danish cartoon controversy of about four years ago," he says. "That there was a fear that we might get a Danish cartoon-style controversy in Ireland -- that some newspaper might publish something that Muslims found highly offensive -- and it might have repercussions for Irish trade in the Muslim world."

There has been no sign so far that the Irish government is going to prosecute the group Atheist Ireland or anyone else.

Many say the best step forward is to hold a referendum about deleting the blasphemy clause from the 1937 Constitution, eliminating the need for a law to enforce it.