EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Some of the most powerful women in the EU are discussing how to bring gender equality to European politics, an arena that continues to be overwhelmingly dominated by men.

A who's who of women politicians in Brussels met on Wednesday (16 September) to see how they can better promote women in the EU capital, where women's names routinely fail to be mentioned for the top jobs.

There were seven women in Jose Manuel Barroso's first commission in 2004

The 15-strong gathering, including four EU commissioners, Sweden's Europe minister and seven parliament committee heads, wants women to become better networkers and better at promoting one another in politics.

"There is still a glass ceiling to reach the very top of European politics. It is still very much an old boy's network and men are very good at praising each other and promoting each other," Finnish Green MEP and head of the human-rights sub-committee, Haidi Hautala, told EUobserver.

"But as there are so few women, this does not really happen."

Lawyers for Silvio Berlusconi admitted yesterday that he could resign if a law giving him immunity from prosecution is struck down next month.

If the Constitutional Court, which begins its deliberations on October 6, overturns the law "there would be damage to the functions of an elected official, which could not be carried out", Glauco Nori, a state lawyer for the Prime Minister's office, said. The move could cause "irreparable damage" and lead to the Prime Minister's resignation.

The law, which Mr Berlusconi pushed through Parliament last year after coming to power for the third time, gives immunity to him, as Prime Minister, and three other holders of high office: the President -- a post to which he aspires -- and the Speakers of both houses of parliament.

The court is expected to reach a verdict within two or three days after it begins to consider the matter.

Germany's Bundesrat upper house of parliament has cleared the way for the country to ratify the European Union's Lisbon Treaty, which is designed to streamline decision-making in the 27-nation bloc.  

Germany's 16 federal states on Friday voted unanimously to adopt amendments to domestic law that make the EU reform treaty more compatible with German law. The Bundestag lower house of parliament had passed the laws earlier this month.

Both houses of the German parliament had already endorsed the 2007 Lisbon Treaty. But the process was halted by the constitutional court on June 30 following a legal challenge by a group of  federal deputies who demanded a law protecting national parliamentary powers and giving them more of a say in decision- making in Brussels to be passed.

The Lisbon Treaty is considered officially ratified by Germany once President Horst Köhler has signed the document.

Russia and Germany have welcomed a US decision not to build missile shield bases in Eastern Europe, but the move has caused bitterness in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said in a TV address that the US pull-back will help in upcoming talks on nuclear disarmament: "The statement made in Washington today shows that quite good conditions are evolving for such work."

Russia's Dmitry Medvedev said the shift will help in nuclear disarmament talks

Russia's ambassador to Nato, Dmitry Rogozin, described it in more colourful terms.

"It's like having a decomposing corpse in your flat and then the mortician comes and takes it away," he said in UK daily The Guardian. "This means we're getting rid of one of those niggling problems which prevented us from doing the real work."

Nato and Russia should link their missile defence systems and work together to meet the security challenges of the 21st century such as a nuclear Iran, Nato's new secretary-general declared today in his first significant policy speech.

Both sides had unrealistic expectations of each other after the end of the Cold War, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, calling for them to put behind them the suspicions of the past and carry out a joint review to serve as a basis for future cooperation to fight terrorism, piracy and nuclear proliferation.

Mr Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish Prime Minister who took over at Nato in the summer, chose to focus on Russia rather than make a traditional tour d'horizon in his inaugural address because he said that it was the relationship that had the most potential and the greatest burden of mistrust.

"Nato wants Russia to be a real stakeholder in European and international security," Mr Rasmussen told an invited audience in Brussels. "We need Russia as a partner in resolving the great issues of our time."

With just over a week to go before Germany's national election, a new poll reveals a much-needed boost for the Social Democrats. But the survey also shows that Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives look like they will be able to form a center-right coalition with their preferred partner, the business-friendly Free Democratic Party.

Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) does not have much to smile about these days after a plodding election campaign, but just over a week before Germans go to the polls, they have finally got a dose of good news. Following a lackluster few weeks, the SPD's candidate Frank-Walter Steinmeier is gaining some support, shrinking Chancellor Angela Merkel's sizable lead.

A poll commissioned by the ARD television channel and released on Thursday evening showed Steinmeier bolstered by his better-than-expected performance in last Sunday's television debate with Merkel. His SPD party gained 3 points compared to a week earlier to reach 26 percent, while Merkel's Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, continued to prevail with their support unchanged at 35 percent.

The EU's costly obsession with harmonising European trains is bad news for Britain's railways.

Britain has consistently been ahead of the game where EU railway legislation is concerned. We broke up a monolithic network, ran private trains and encouraged competition long before the EU told us to.

But even with the current convergence between Britain and Brussels on many railway matters, European legislation has caused far more problems for our railway network than would be expected, due to Brussels' obsession with breaking down national barriers. Having eliminated border crossings in the Schengen Area, the EU is determined to create a harmonised pan-European rail network similarly free from national boundaries.

The Slavic majority and Hungarian minority in Slovakia are embroiled in a bitter dispute over language that is spilling across the border. Nowhere in the European Union are relations worse between neighbors than those between Bratislava and Budapest.

The Hungarian high school in Komarno, Slovakia is the picture of bourgeois solidity. Its facade is 101 years old and typifies the colossal architectural style typical of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. The building is a haven of classical education and an elite training center for the children of the upper classes in the town of 40,000 inhabitants situated at the confluence of the Danube and Vah rivers.

To mark the start of the new school year, the pupils are wearing white shirts and a blue tie emblazoned with the school crest. And today they also intend to break the law.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has warned the Czech Republic that it will have to face "consequences" if it continues to delay final ratification of the Lisbon Treaty following a Yes vote in a referendum in Ireland next month.

Speaking after a meeting of EU leaders in Brussels on Thursday (16 September), Mr Sarkozy was careful to praise Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer as a "man of great quality" before taking a clear sideswipe at the country's president, Vaclav Klaus, who has indicated he will postpone as long as possible putting his signature under the treaty - the final step of ratification.

Vaclav Klaus: No one is sure when he intends to sign the Lisbon Treaty

"I stated clearly that if the Irish say Yes, there is no question that we will accept to stay in a no man's land with a Europe that does not have the institutions to cope with the crisis."

"It will be necessary to draw the consequences - but those will be the subject of another meeting," said the president.

I question female friends and colleagues and sure enough they all have similar stories to tell. Perhaps it's simply that Paris is the pervert capital of the world?

What is it that makes Frenchmen feel that they have the right to proposition women half their age and/or flash at them? Is it something they're eating? Is someone slipping viagra into their foie gras? Is it something cultural? Or is Paris just "une ville excitante"?

More wonders from the Torygraph.

^{With little to tell its rivals apart, the far left party is thriving and may transform the political landscape with its populist agenda}

By Kate Connolly, guardian.co.uk

Against a backdrop of multicoloured pre-fabricated housing blocks, a tanning salon and a travel agent offering last-minute deals to the Baltic coast, Frank Spieth handed out red balloons, pens and advice in equal measure...

But in little more than a week, when Germans vote for a new parliament, Spieth and his allies are hoping to make a national impact.

His anti-capitalist, pro-social justice Die Linke is striking a chord with an increasingly disenfranchised electorate, espousing causes - such as inequality, reunification issues and, crucially, the war in Afghanistan - that are finding a receptive audience in both east and west.

"Our voters are representative of millions of Germans who feel cut off from the political process and they could have a significant impact on Germany's political landscape," said 62-year-old Spieth, who left the Social Democratic party (SPD) in 2003 after 37 years in protest at its restructuring of the social welfare state.

While Die Linke's rivals have mercilessly attacked it for its radical wealth redistribution plans and its links to the defunct communist regime, its message is clearly getting through.

One in seven Germans want the Berlin Wall back because they were better off when the country was divided, according to an opinion poll published on Wednesday ahead of the 20th anniversary of its collapse on November 9, 1989.

The survey of 1,002 Germans by the Forsa institute published in Stern magazine said 15 percent of the country's 82 million long for the days when there were two Germanys. Some 16 percent pining for the Wall were westerners and 10 percent easterners.

The survey found that many westerners are bitter about higher taxes to pay for rebuilding the formerly communist east, where some 1.2 trillion euros ($1,762 billion) worth of state funds has been transferred in the last 20 years.

Eastern Germans are unhappy about income levels that are on average only 80 percent of western levels and that due to higher unemployment depopulation is decimating parts of the east, where the population has declined by about two million since 1990.

How 2 Swedish towns vied for nuclear waste

Civic competition is a deep and ancient force. Ever since towns were towns, they have found ways to assert their superiority over one another, through commerce, war and other, more sporting encounters. The thrill of outdoing a neighbour, the fear of losing to the rivals from along the shore, are apparently universal human urges and the world crackles with all kinds of local contests, from the town lantern competitions of the Philippines to America's "Best Tennis Town" and the tidy villages of Ireland.

A few of these competitions are born of a culture so specific they can be hard to understand. In the Thai town of Phuket, temples founded by Chinese immigrants compete to produce extraordinary displays of human self-harm and mutilation, known as mah song. In Sweden, meanwhile, two municipalities, Östhammar and Oskarshamn, have spent the past seven years competing for the right to host the world's first high-level nuclear waste storage facility.

Although it comes in many varieties, nuclear waste is short on what most people consider winning qualities. It is the downsides that catch our eye, and, of these, high-level nuclear waste has a peculiarly rich array. This kind of waste is normally "spent fuel", long rods of uranium that have been burnt in a nuclear reactor. No longer capable of supplying the steady chain reaction that a power station demands, the bundles of radioactive metal emerge at the end of their useful lives to become a terrifying hazard.

(...)

The people of Östhammar and Oskarshamn know all this - not that I heard anyone mention the necrotic jaw. Geologists and physicists have been convinced since the 1970s that high-level nuclear waste can be stored safely, as long as it is buried hundreds of metres underground in secure repositories. The problem has been convincing the rest of us. In the US, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, all attempts to designate geologically suitable sites or find communities willing to accept nuclear waste repositories have failed. Other countries, such as the UK, have given themselves long, mid-century deadlines for dealing with the question. Only Finland and France are at a similar stage as Sweden, with all three countries expecting to open repositories some time around 2025.

A very long article. Email me if you want it in full.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes