Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has indicated he would like to see a European army established.

Speaking at a Social Democrat security policy conference in Berlin on Monday (5 May), Mr Steinmeier said he favoured the setting up of a "European armed force" and that he would like to see moves in this direction speeded up.

German daily Tagespiegel reported Mr Steinmeier as referring to the fact that the EU's new treaty, currently undergoing ratification across the European Union, allows for the possibility of a group of member states to "move ahead" in defence policy.

He noted that from Berlin's point of view, France is the key partner for this. Mr Steinmeier said he had already spoken with his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, on concrete steps to improve common areas in the military field.

These include the areas of transport, helicopter capacity and procurement.

Germany aims for a cooperative relationship with newly inaugurated Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a newspaper interview published Thursday.

"I wish the new president, Dimitry Medvedev, everything of the best and good luck. I am looking forward to cooperating with him," Merkel told the Passauer Neue Presse.

Merkel also said that she had "a very constructive and direct relationship" with Medvedev's predecessor, Vladimir Putin.

Putin was confirmed prime minister on Thursday, May 8, in a near unanimous parliamentary vote that underscored his continued power, one day after passing the Kremlin to his protege Medvedev.

"We will continue to cooperate in the future in his new role as prime minister," Merkel said, while also acknowledging that there were differences of opinion.

President Mikhail Saakashvili said Thursday, May 8, that Georgia had come "very close" to war with Russia and the "threat remained" for a breakout over its breakaway region of Abkhazia.

"If anyone wants to annex a part of Georgia, there will inevitably be consequences," Saakashvili told Russian journalists, though he stressed a desire to return to diplomacy.

Russia's military announced early Thursday that would increase its troops in Georgia's breakaway region of Abkhazia to counter Georgia's accumulating military forces in the contested region.

"All this is done for the sake of only one thing: preserving peace and avoiding bloodshed," read a statement by the defense ministry.

Frayed Georgian-Russian relations have long led to sparks in Abkhazia, the autonomy of which has been defended by Russian peacekeepers since a ceasefire ended a civil war in 1994.

Franco Frattini has formally stepped down as the European Union's commissioner for justice, freedom and security following his appointment as foreign minister in the new Italian government of Silvio Berlusconi.

"Frattini has accepted to join the Italian government as a minister and consequently has submitted his resignation to the European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso," commission spokesman Johannes Laitenberger said on Thursday, May 8.

Frattini, who also acted as one of the EU executive's five vice-presidents, had taken unpaid leave while taking part in the April election campaign. During that period, he was replaced by Transport Commissioner Jacques Barrot of France.

Barrot will retain his new post as the EU's top justice official, meaning the Berlusconi government will have to designate a new transport commissioner instead.

"At this precise point in time I cannot yet give you any news on who that person will be," the spokesman told reporters.

David Cameron has launched another raid into Labour's natural territory by hailing the Conservatives as the "true progressives" of British politics.

Writing in The Independent, the Tory leader is seeking to exploit Gordon Brown's continuing problems over his abolition of the 10p tax rate by arguing that Labour's top-down solutions have failed on poverty, social mobility, welfare, education, the economy and the environment.

In a pitch for centre-left voters following his party's victory in last week's local and London elections, Mr Cameron says: "If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment - forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change."

His words echo Neil Kinnock's searing attack on the Tory government at the 1983 general election, when he was Labour leader: "If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall ill, and I warn you not to grow old."

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - In a review of ten years of the euro, the European Commission argues the single currency has often suffered from political attacks in countries where it is used, as well as from lacking sufficient weight on the world stage, which Brussels suggests the 16-member to be eurozone could overcome with a single chair at international financial institutions.

The euro - established by the then EU leaders ten years ago this month and launched on 1 January 1999 - has been an "unarguable political and economic success," EU economic and monetary affairs commissioner Joaquin Almunia told the European Parliament on Wednesday (7 May).

He added however that the public image of the single currency "does not always enjoy the reputation it should do," partly because it frequently becomes a scapegoat for economic problems of individual member countries.

In a report adopted by the EU executive on Wednesday, Brussels highlighted the key economic achievements of the euro area, such as "sustained price stability," a fall in average interest rates from nine to five percent, better fiscal policies and creation of 16 million jobs since 1999.

EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Commission on Thursday (8 May) said EU consumers are still getting ripped off when they buy airplane tickets online and threatened the industry with "further measures" if the situation does not change within one year.

"It is unacceptable that one in three consumers going to book a plane ticket online is being ripped off or mislead and confused," said consumer commissioner Meglena Kuneva when presenting the findings in Brussels.

According to the commission, there are still "serious and persistent consumer problems" in the online sale of tickets.

The main issues identified were misleading prices - found on 58 percent of the checked websites, and unfair contract terms such as missing or wrong language versions, or pre-checked boxes for optional services - found on 49 percent of the sites.

"We will need to see credible evidence of improvement to clean up these sales and marketing practices within the airline sector by 1 May next year or we will be left with no choice but to intervene," namely by starting infringement procedures, Ms Kuneva said.

Why are we asking this now?

Wendy Alexander, who leads the Labour Party north of the border, has startled a lot of her political colleagues - not least, Gordon Brown - by suddenly announcing that she wants a referendum on Scottish independence, and she wants it now. "I don't fear the verdict of the Scottish people," she said. "Bring it on."

This was a remarkable departure from normal Labour Party policy, which is to preserve the unity of the United Kingdom. Put on the spot, Gordon Brown avoided saying whether he agreed or disagreed, by pretending she had not said what she said.

But this is a disagreement about tactics, not about policy. Wendy Alexander does not want Scotland to leave the UK. On the contrary, she is gambling that if asked now, the Scots would say no. The call for an early referendum was meant to wrongfoot the Scottish Nationalist Party, who run Scotland's devolved administration. They also say they want a referendum, but not until 2010.

Brussels is eyeing Serbia nervously as May 11 parliamentary elections approach. Polls suggests the ultra-nationalist Radical Party may become the strongest group in parliament, which would mean a foreign policy nightmare for the EU and could exacerbate tensions with ethnic minorities within the country.

 An elderly supporter of the Serbian Radical Party kisses a picture of war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic during a pre-elections rally in Belgrade. The words "Toma, Toma" reverberate across the market square in Cacak, a small city in southern Serbia. The man on the stage, who is wearing a gray suit, accepts the crowd's homage with a modest smile, at most moving his wad of chewing gum a little faster around in his mouth.

The 56-year-old, gray-haired Tomislav "Toma" Nikolic embodies the opposite of what once made his Radical Party of Serbia so popular: its constant boisterousness, its politicians' habit of loudly insulting their political adversaries and threats by its chairman, Vojislav Seselj, to bomb the capitals of the West.

But Seselj has been in prison in The Hague for the past five years, where he is on trial for war crimes. Nikolic, his deputy and the party's deputy chairman, as well as a former close associate of deposed Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, has since guided the party into more moderate waters. Nikolic seems relatively unmoved as he gazes down at a sea of blue balloons and party flags, as well as signs bearing the words "Toma, Save the Starving People."

Italy's new government on Thursday named Antonio Tajani, from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, to replace Franco Frattini at the European Commission, a statement said.

Each of the EU's 27 member states has a commissioner, although they are supposed to represent EU rather than national interests in their portfolio.

Law graduate Tajani will take over the Commission's transport portfolio, where one of the items in his in-tray will be a controversial state loan to troubled Italian airline Alitalia.

The Commission has expressed doubts that the loan will meet EU state aid rules.

EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said late Thursday in a statement he had agreed to Tajani's nomination. Jacques Barrot of France, the current transport commissioner, would take over the justice, freedom and security portfolio from Frattini.

Today, as on every 9th of May, the European institutions will celebrate Europe Day, highlighting the successes of EU integration. But socialists and other political leaders say the celebration should also offer "a more political debate" about the EU's future direction.

WASHINGTON: When the Pentagon announced in March that Major General Jay Hood would become the senior American officer based in Pakistan, it reflected the military's aim to put a crisis-tested veteran in a critical job at a pivotal time in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan's tribal areas.

But nearly two months later, the military has quietly canceled the assignment of Hood, a 33-year army veteran who was excoriated in the Pakistani news media for one of his previous jobs: commander of the United States prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

During Hood's command from 2004 to 2006, military authorities force-fed with tubes detainees who were engaging in hunger strikes at the Guantánamo prison, a step they justified as necessary to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide to protest their indefinite confinement. Also during Hood's tenure, reports that an American guard may have desecrated a Koran stirred wide protests in the Islamic world.

The decision to withdraw Hood's assignment has not been announced, but it appears to reflect the widening shadow that the military prison at Guantánamo is casting over American foreign policy. While the United States considers Pakistan a close ally in its counterterrorism efforts, the accounts by Pakistanis who have returned to Pakistan after being held at Guantánamo Bay have added to anti-American sentiment in the country.

Burma wants supplies but not foreign aid workers, its foreign ministry says, hours after the UN chief urged military leaders to prioritise relief work.

Burma was "making strenuous efforts" to get aid to affected areas by itself and was not ready for foreign teams, a statement in a state daily said.

On Thursday UN officials expressed mounting frustration over Burma's failure to accept international help.

Some aid has made it in, but experts stress that it is nothing like enough.

The UN says that up to 1.5 million people may have been affected by Cyclone Nargis, which devastated the Irrawaddy Delta region on Saturday. Burmese state media say 22,980 people were killed, but there are fears the figure could rise to 100,000.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama said Thursday that the most important thing he could achieve as president would be to deal with Iraq and the threat of al Qaeda in Afghanistan while improving "our influence around the world."

Sen. Barack Obama, in his first interview since the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, speaks with Wolf Blitzer.

In his first interview since the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, Obama said he thinks the United States' influence around the world has been diminishing.

"The world wants to see the United States lead. They've been disappointed and disillusioned over the last seven, eight years," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview on "The Situation Room."

"I think there is still a sense everywhere I go that if the United States regains its sense of who it is and our values and our ideals, that we will continue to set the tone for a more peaceful and prosperous world." Watch the full interview with Obama »

Obama said he thinks the way the war in Iraq has been handled has kept the United States from focusing on key issues like energy policy, global warming and the economy.

Americans want to succeed, he said, "but we're going to have to make some investments and ensure that the dynamism and the innovation of the American people is released."

Eight people have been killed and 15 people wounded in Lebanon, according to security sources, as the country's political crisis threatens to spiral out of control. 

Fighting in Beirut intensified on Thursday, the second day of anti-government protests, after a speech by Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, in which he called a government crackdown on the Shia group "tantamount to a declaration of war".

Government offer rejected

 

Saad al-Hariri, the governing coalition leader, proposed a deal on Thursday to end the crisis under which the government decisions that have infuriated Hezbollah would be considered a "misunderstanding" and be referred to the Lebanese army.

The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world. An entire population is being brutally punished.

This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.

Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank have been imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.

Regardless of one's choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions on the supply of water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees.

With prices rising across Europe, people are more intent than ever on finding a cheap holiday destination. German motor club ADAC has helpfully provided a ranking of Europe's summer getaways, organized according to the cost of typical vacation purchases. This year it finds that Poland is the best value.

DPA

Germany's ADAC motor club ranks the country's beaches, like this one in Usedom, as average value. Next door in Poland the vacation prices are lower -- and the sand just as jammed. As the weather warms up, hard-working Europeans start staring out their office windows and dreaming of a nice long summer break. But where to go?

For budget-conscious beachgoers, the prices at classic vacation destinations like Turkey, southern France and the Croatian coast are becoming more and more forbidding. With sunbathing season on the way, Germany's largest motor club has some surprising alternative suggestions.

In a report released on Thursday, the club compared prices in 10 popular European destinations to see which offered the best get-away value. The most expensive country for a beachside vacation was France. The cheapest? Germany's neighbor Poland, followed by Greece, Portugal, Spain and Turkey. Germany came in a respectable sixth, ranked "average" in terms of its vacation value.

The risk of football fans having to forgo their French fries during Euro 2008 has been averted. Only weeks before Europe's biggest soccer tournament kicks off in Switzerland, the government has stepped in to guarantee potato supplies.

 French fries also available in Switzerland throughout Euro 2008. Anyone who has been to a soccer game in Europe knows that fries and burgers are among the most popular food items on sale at football grounds. So, it must have come as a shock when Switzerland's potato industry association warned supplies of the lowly spud were running low -- just weeks before Euro 2008, the continent's biggest soccer tournament, gets underway.

But fans heading to Switzerland for next month's tournament can rest assured they will not have to do without fries. The Swiss government has taken measures to ease the potato shortage. A spokesman for the country's Department of Agriculture told Swiss radio station RadioDRS Wednesday that the government would allow an extra 5,000 tons of potatoes to be imported.

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - A mother and child separated. A father's war wound. An uncle's name on a list.

The unrelated and disparate items are among the discoveries made by 40 Jewish genealogists who spent the past week plumbing a trove of Nazi documents made public after 60 years.

For genealogists of Jewish families, the Holocaust is both a tragedy and a black hole, because so many of the 6 million Jewish victims disappeared without a trace. For years, researchers hoping to fill the gaps have longed to dive into the more than 50 million documents held in this German spa town and entrusted to the International Tracing Service, or ITS.

(...)For decades after World War II, the files were used only to help find missing persons or document atrocities to support compensation claims. But in November, the last of the 11 countries that govern the archive under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross cleared the way for public access.

Since then, interest has skyrocketed. Erich Oetiker, deputy director of the archive, said while the staff of 400 continue to process some 1,000 tracing requests per day, there are now also near daily visits from historians or individuals eager to trace a lost person's fate or view an original document.

Schools will shut, business activity will slow and aperitifs will flow in sun-soaked gardens today while the French confirm their status as the world holiday champions with an unofficial day off.

Ignoring the call from President Sarkozy to work harder, millions of employees will down tools to travel to the seaside and the countryside on what is, in theory, an ordinary working day.

The upshot was two-hour traffic jams around Paris last night as residents headed out of the city, a 30 per cent fall in production for many industries and a rise of up to 20 per cent in holiday bookings compared to last year. Absenteeism will be rife among school pupils. But they are unlikely to be punished because many of their teachers are also playing truant.

The national lie-in has been made possible by a calendar that placed the VE-Day Bank Holiday yesterday, May 8, and the Whit Monday Bank Holiday on May 12. By staying away from work today, the French get a five-day break. A day off squeezed between Bank Holidays is known as le pont (the bridge), and many companies will see up to 90 per cent of their workers on it. Some businesses have shut altogether.