Poland has opted to become a full member of the EU and NATO-linked military club, Eurocorps, in a move designed to spur on the creation of a significant European defence capability.

Warsaw from 2009 is to pledge 3,000 soldiers to the existing 60,000-strong Eurocorps force, hold 15 officer-level posts and forward a deputy director to the Strasbourg-based outfit, Polish media report.

The club currently consists of full members France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg as well as eight junior partners, including Poland, who each contribute a handful of technical staff.

Eurocorps is not an EU institution. It was set up as an independent Franco-German project in 1992 to help support EU, NATO and UN operations, seeing active service in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan so far.

The organisation has strong political links to the EU, however. Its badge is a sword superimposed on a map of Europe and the EU's golden stars. A Eurocorps unit hoisted the EU flag and played the EU anthem outside the EU parliament in Strasbourg on "Europe Day" last week.

The European Union bureaucracy is on a roll: After imposing restrictions on how tobacco, alcohol and food products can be advertised, it has set its sights on gas-guzzling cars. But German manufacturers and media conglomerates warn the financial impact could be devastating.

Only a select few VIPs are allowed to park on the paved lot directly next to the entrance to the enormous Berlaymont building in Brussels, the headquarters of the European Commission. The luxury sedans lined up in the parking lot include Audis, BMWs, Jaguars and Mercedes. The chauffeurs keep the engines running in the winter to stay warm, and in the summer to keep their energy-consuming air-conditioning systems going.

The contents of the Berlaymont's parking lot are especially impressive on Wednesdays, when European Commission President José Manuel Barroso and the 26 European Union commissioners gather around the conference table on the 14th floor. They often discuss climate protection, and what ought to be done to promote it.

In cruel and unusual concert, Italy's new government, its police and paramilitary carabinieri, and even its gangsters, have turned their joint might against the nation's enemy number one: the Gypsies.

Yesterday Pope Benedict XVI and a small number of left-wingers raised lonely voices in central Naples against the national hardening of hearts towards Europe's perennial outsiders. To little avail: the Pope's appeal for a spirit of welcome and acceptance was met with a hail of angry rejection in blogged comments on news websites.

But what will remain scorched in the nation's memory - as a mark of shame, or a beacon pointing the way forward, depending on how you see it - are the flaming structures of the Gypsy camp burnt in the Ponticelli district of Naples on Wednesday.

Residents of the former communist stronghold on the northern outskirts of Naples have been raising hell about the camp since Saturday, when a woman claimed a Gypsy girl had entered her flat and tried to steal her baby.

PARIS: Hundreds of thousands of French teachers and civil servants staged a one-day strike throughout the country Thursday to protest government plans to cut jobs in the public sector.

While the unions and the government differed sharply over the numbers taking part, many thousands of teachers, students, parents and civil servants stayed off the job.

For example, union leaders said that at least 60 percent of the 740,000 teachers in France were on strike; the government said the figure was 34.4 percent, while 24.8 percent of 2.5 million state employees were on strike.

In Paris, organizers said 50,000 people had demonstrated, while the police said the figure was closer to 18,000. There were also large demonstrations in Marseille, Toulouse and Strasbourg.

It was another test of President Nicolas Sarkozy's resolve in his efforts to cut down the large civil service to reduce budget deficits and create more competition in the economy. There will be more strikes to come, including one on May 22 called by the powerful transport unions, which will probably halt train, airline and subway service across the country.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU finance ministers have given their political blessing to an overhaul of the bloc's rules on savings tax, in a bid to clamp down on tax havens.

The move to change the EU's Savings Tax Directive - which came into force in 2005 - comes by way of pressure from Germany in response to a massive tax fraud, reported in February, which involved Liechtenstein and some 1,400 individuals, including 600 German citizens.

The persons had set up funds in the tiny principality in order to avoid taxes in their home countries, prompting Berlin to urge other European countries to force banks and financial institutions in tax havens to disclose information about their clients based in EU member states.

Following the meeting of national finance chiefs in Brussels on Wednesday (14 May), EU tax commissioner Laszlo Kovacs signalled that he would amend the current rules in a way advocated by Germany, improving the exchange of information between banks and extending the scope of the directive.

EUOBSERVER / KIEV - Ukraine has been celebrating Europe Day in several of its cities this week, while calling for closer ties with the EU and for a clearer recognition of its European identity. But for ordinary Ukrainians, the real priority is for the EU to let them travel freely within its borders.

At the moment, Ukrainians need a visa to travel to EU countries and the process for getting one is lengthy and expensive.

Their frustration with the situation increased when their neighbours, Hungary, Slovakia and Poland joined the EU's borderless zone in December and put in place the same entry requirements as other Schengen countries such as France, Germany and Spain.

By contrast, most EU citizens have been allowed to travel to Ukraine without a visa since July 2005. Bulgarians and Romanians, as the newest members of the bloc, were granted the same waiver in January.

The dispute between Germany's conservative Christian Democrats and left-leaning Social Democrats over what foreign and security policy strategy to follow reveals a deep divide between the partners in Angela Merkel's government. Neither side can impose its will on the other, resulting in gridlock and crippling Germany's influence in the world.

 Who's in charge of Germany's foreign policy? When it comes to dealings abroad, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Chancellor Angela Merkel often speak with very different voices. George W. Bush has given up. He is tired of and no longer sees any sense in talking to a wall. The wall in this case is conservative German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democrats (CDU). The United States president has stopped asking her to send additional troops to fight in southern Afghanistan. In the course of long conversations with the German chancellor, Bush has learned that there are simply political limits to what she can do. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has also had to come to terms with the reality that she can't take the kinds of decisions he would like to see without risking a breakup of her "unstable" coalition government.

There are also many in Merkel's junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), whose patience is wearing thin. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier finds himself explaining to senior party officials one day and to members of his parliamentary group the next why his efforts to engage in a dialogue with Syria, conduct negotiations with Russia or promote an opening towards Cuba are not moving forward. "What good do my proposals do if I can't get any backing from the Christian Democrats," Steinmeier complained to one SPD source.

As former head of the International Monetary Fund, German President Horst Köhler is well qualified to comment on the global financial crisis. In an interview, he described financial markets as a "monster" and said the global financial system "came close to collapse."

German President Horst Köhler: "We came close to a collapse of the global financial markets." Capitalism -- at least in its dreaded red-in-tooth-and-claw Anglo-Saxon variety -- is not cool in Germany, it seems. All across the political spectrum, it is hard to find any German politician with a good word to say about financial markets, hedge funds and the dreaded speculators -- especially in the wake of the ongoing global financial crisis (more...).

Franz Müntefering, the former chairman of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), added a new term to the German political lexicon in 2005 when he described private equity firms as "locusts." Current SPD leader Kurt Beck warned of the dangers of neo-liberalism in a 2007 essay (more...) for the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Even an über-capitalist like Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann commented recently that the markets were incapable of resolving the financial crisis by themselves (more...).

Now Germany's President Horst Köhler has entered the fray in a hard-hitting interview with the weekly magazine Stern. Coining a term which is likely to become as popular as the infamous locusts, Köhler, who belongs to Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union, said that the search for profits has turned the markets into a "monster."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Public debt in eurozone countries should be monitored more strictly, as high-debt states may undermine the stability of the whole monetary union, Dutch finance minister Wouter Bos has said, in remarks echoing earlier warnings that future expenditure arising from aging populations could pose a risk to the survival of the euro.

Speaking at the Brussels Economic Forum on Thursday (15 May), Mr Bos argued that policymakers in the single currency area should "put the focus on sustainable debt positions on an equal footing with the existing focus on annual budgetary results."

He warned that with a greater burden on public budgets due to rising pensions and healthcare costs, coupled with a diminishing working-age population, "three-percent annual deficits are really no longer permissible and in many cases even balanced budgets may be inadequate."

"Large debts have to be purged and sustainability guaranteed," he stressed, adding that otherwise the euro area may suffer, as "doubts about sustainability will push up the cost of capital" in the monetary union.

Estonia has signed a deal with six other NATO members to make it the military alliance's leading expert on Internet-based warfare: It is a move seen as recognizing its surviving a major Web-based attack a year ago.

At a ceremony at NATO's headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday, May 14, Estonia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovakia, Lithuania and Latvia in which the seven countries agreed to fund and man a cyber-defense research and training center in Tallinn.

 

The signing ceremony paves the way for NATO as a whole to recognize it as a "center of excellence" and to use it as a main source of cyber-defense expertise. Full NATO accreditation is expected by the end of the year, officials said.

 

"Missiles are no longer needed to shut down infrastructure; this can be achieved in cyberspace. Therefore, we must be innovative in our defense," Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told German news agency DPA ahead of the signing ceremony.

Thanks to its aggressive push into renewable energies, cloud-wreathed Germany has become an unlikely leader in the race to harness the sun's energy. It has by far the largest market for photovoltaic systems, which convert sunlight into electricity, with roughly half of the world's total installations. And it is the third-largest producer of solar cells and modules, after China and Japan.

Now, though, with so many solar panels on so many rooftops, critics say Germany has too much of a good thing -- even in a time of record oil prices. Conservative lawmakers, in particular, want to pare back generous government incentives that support solar development. They say solar generation is growing so fast that it threatens to overburden consumers with high electricity bills. <...>

In the former East Germany, where scores of state-subsidized industries were shuttered after reunification in 1990, the solar industry is a welcome tonic for a depressed region. Signet Solar, an American maker of photovoltaic modules that use thin-film technology, chose to build its first factory and research center near Dresden. <...>

"To develop a technology, you've got to create an industry," said Mr. Milner, the chief executive of Q-Cells, referring to the German success story. "You can wait and wait and wait for costs to come down, but it takes too long."

It's a relatively long article, spelling out the Christian Democrats' concerns about rising costs of building more solar capacity, as well as the much lower cost projections of one "Eicke R. Weber, a prominent physicist".  It also mentions the suspicion among pro-solar advocates that "Germany's power companies [are] behind the effort to change the law":

"Solar energy is more decentralized, so the industry sees more competition from solar than from wind," said Carsten Körnig, the managing director of the German Solar Energy Association.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Tussles over biofuels, trade and even capitalism itself are likely to take centre stage in Lima, Peru on Friday, as European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and some 60 heads of state from the EU and Latin America and the Carribean (LAC) descend on the Peruvian capital for the fifth EU-LAC summit.

Under the protection of some 85,000 soldiers and police who have set up the usual array of roadblocks, traffic detours and zones restricted to local citizens, the leaders are to rattle through what is an ambitious agenda.

Although the leaders will focus on two key issues - combating inequality and tackling climate change - poverty, social inclusion, sustainable development, energy and the environment in general are also set for discussion.

At the summit, the commission is to announce Euroclima, a €5 million fund for Latin American projects that tack climate change.

BRUSSELS - France, Britain and Germany called on Tuesday for the world to deliver aid to cyclone victims in Myanmar if necessary without the military junta's permission, France's junior minister for human rights said.

"We have called for the 'responsibility to protect' to be applied in the case of Burma," Rama Yade told reporters as EU development ministers' met to discuss emergency aid for Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

The little-used U.N. principle could allow the delivery of aid without the accord of the government if the military rulers continue to bar foreign aid teams from entering the country.

Yade said France, backed by the two other major EU powers, would put the proposal to the U.N. Security Council, but she acknowledged it did not have unanimous support among the 27 EU member states.

The European Union development ministers urged Myanmar's military junta on Tuesday to allow "free and unfettered" access for aid workers and take urgent action to allow the free flow of aid, an EU diplomat said.

The statement agreed by EU development ministers supported other initiatives that could be taken in the U.N. framework, but stopped short of endorsing France's call for the world to deliver aid without the junta's agreement, diplomats said.

Chinese authorities are expecting the toll from the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Sichuan province this week to rise above 50,000, state media says.

 

Officials have confirmed 20,000 deaths four days after the quake and believe another 25,000 people could be buried under the rubble in the towns and villages across the worst-hit region in China's southwest as hopes of finding survivors diminish by the hour.

 

"The deaths are estimated to be over 50,000," state television said, citing figures from the national quake relief headquarters.

 

Half the epicentre town of Yingxiu, where corpses are lined along the river, has been flattened and 90 per cent of the buildings remaining look unsafe.

 

Bai Licheng, a Communist party official, warned that epidemics could break out if bodies were not buried soon, saying body bad were urgently needed.