Russian officials say they could react to the deployment of a NATO missile defense shield with fresh military investment of their own. This comes ahead of talks between the two sides in Moscow.

There was no sign of compromise on Thursday in a row between Russia and NATO over the Western military alliance's plan to build a missile defense shield in Poland.

Just hours before senior officials from the two sides were to meet at a missile defense conference in Moscow, Russia's defense minister, Angatoly Serdyukov said the two sides had reached an impasse.

"We have not been able to find mutually acceptable solutions at this point and the situation is practically at a dead end," Serdyukov told a televised news conference.

Around 90 intellectuals have warned of Europe's demise and appealed to European governments to create a volunteer service that all Europeans could take part in - regardless of age or experience.

The signatories to the appeal, which was published on Thursday in numerous European newspapers, blames European elites for a political system that they describe as rescuing indebted banks and squandering young people's future in the process.

"[The] top-down Europe, the Europe of elites and technocrats that has prevailed up to now ...considers itself responsible for forging the destiny of the citizenry of Europe - if need be, against its will," the manifesto says. "[It] is this unspoken maxim of European politics that is threatening to destroy the entire European project."

German and European leaders are piling pressure on Kyiv ahead of the Euro 2012 soccer competition. The EU Commission has said it may not attend, while one German politician asked that the final be moved to Warsaw.

EU Commission leaders appear unwilling to attend football matches taking place in Ukraine this summer as part of Euro 2012, citing concern over the treatment of imprisoned opposition figurehead Yulia Tymoshenko.

Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso raised the issue during a weekly meeting on Wednesday, saying he did not currently intend to travel to matches in Ukraine.

Gauck will "speak from the heart and reach many Dutch people," said a Dutch studies professor of the German president's visit to Holland. He discounts protests against Germany's refusal to extradite war criminals.

BRUSSELS - EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding Thursday (3 May) rejected criticism that certain provisions within her draft proposal on data protection rules could amount to a power-grab by the European Commission.

She was forced onto the defensive after a high-level expert committee in March said the commission would be making too many changes to current data protection rules without proper oversight - potentially leading to legal uncertainty.

BRUSSELS - EU austerity measures are helping to feed racism and intolerance, according to a report by the Strasbourg-based human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe.

In its annual survey out on Thursday (3 May), the council's European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said welfare cuts and shrinking job opportunities are factors behind the recent rise in intolerance and violence directed at immigrants and other vulnerable minorities.

BRUSSELS - Some 20 million French people tuned in on Wednesday evening (2 May) to watch a tense and insult-laden debate between the two candidates in Sunday's presidential election. The discussion was almost three hours long but produced no clear winner.

Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy tried to set the frame by saying that voters must be clear after the TV show on what each man plans to do in his five years in office.

He spent much of his time tearing into parts of socialist challenger Francois Hollande's programme - such as his intention to hire 60,000 new teachers.

Francois Bayrou said he will vote for Francois Hollande, marking another setback for Nicolas Sarkozy; Bayrou said it was his personal choice, and did not constitute a recommendation; some of latest polls suggest that the gap between Hollande and Sarkozy may have narrowed to 5 points, but other polls disagree; Hollande is considered to have been the winner of the debate; Philip Stephens says there is no need to fret about a victory by Francois Hollande; Merkel says (implausibly) that she looks forward to working with Hollande; Süddeutsche Zeitung asks whether France will become another Italy after Sunday; Mario Draghi calls for a ten-year strategy for the eurozone; there was no policy change at the ECB yesterday; Fitch has a complex chart showing what will be happen to the eurozone under different scenarios; the FDP's chairman's popularity has sunk to new lows ahead of a crucial set of state elections; Antonis Samaras makes a desperate last ditch plea to his country ahead of Sunday's elections; Austria agrees a national stability pact; Martin Wolf says that austerity policy that lack credibility will collapse dismally; Seamus Coffey says the fiscal treaty's debt reduction rule is no big deal; John McHale, meanwhile, proposes a 4% inflation target.

Chinese millionaires' growing appetite for luxury has propelled German sports car maker Porsche to a new quarterly sales record. China has overtaken the US as Porsche's largest market.

Porsche sales in China soared 79 percent to 7,099 cars in the first three months of 2012, leaving the sports car manufacturer's deliveries to the US trailing at 6,671 vehicles, the company based in Stuttgart said Thursday.

In its home market Germany, sales were also rising markedly with an increase of 32.6 percent to a total of 3,873 cars, Porsche said.

Providing Greece with loans is a smart invest investment for Germany - that's the way former Greek Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos sees it. German finance experts disagree.

Germanyhas earned 400 million euros ($525 million) in the last two years through loans to Greece - that's the figure given by Evangelos Venizelos, chairman of the Greek social democratic PASOK party. The amount comes from the substantial interest on loans Germany has given Greece, he said.

BRUSSELS - An acrimonious 16-hour long meeting on stricter bank rules ended with a promise to clinch a final deal on 15 May, with Britain's George Osborne at one point saying the envisaged agreement would make him "look like an idiot."

"We discussed a huge number of things, from 10am when the meeting began until now, two in the night. We can say we have an agreement, it needs technical work until it's completely done - by 15 May," Danish economy minister Margrethe Vestager, who chaired the meeting, said at a press conference early on Thursday morning (3 May).

Syrian security forces have stormed student dorms at a university in the northwest of the country in an attempt to break up anti-government protests, reportedly killing at least four students and wounding several more.

Around 1,500 students were protesting in student quarters next to Aleppo University's main campus late Wednesday when security forces and pro-regime gunmen moved into their residences, firing tear gas at first, then live ammunition to disperse them.

In the lead-up to the attack, students at the university had been staging almost daily protests calling for the fall of President Bashar Assad's regime.

The US has released 17 documents found over a year ago when special forces raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. The letters published portray a man frustrated by his underlings' incompetence.

As part of a string of activities apparently marking the anniversary of the death of Osama Bin Laden, the US authorized the release of 17 documents discovered in the fatal raid on his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.

"On the basis of the 17 declassified documents, Bin Ladin was not, as many thought, the puppet master pulling the strings that set motion jihadi groups around the world," the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) says in its introduction to the documents. "Bin Ladin was burdened by what he saw as their incompetence."

Senior officials from the US and China opened two days of strategic and economic talks on Thursday. But nobody wanted to mention what must have really been on their minds - the fate of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who, along with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, is representing the US at the conference, raised the issue of human rights in her opening speech but did not refer to dissident Chen Guangcheng by name.

The US believes that "all governments have to answer our citizens' aspirations for dignity and the rule of law and that no nation can or should deny those rights," Clinton said.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has registered the first drop in global food prices in April after months of increases. Record crops this year are expected to meet rising global food demand.

World food prices were stabilizing at a "relatively high level" in April, after they had been steadily rising in the first three months of the year, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said Thursday.

FAO's Food Outlook - a twice-yearly global market analysis - said food prices fell by 1.4 percent from March to April this year, driving down the organization's Food Price Index to 214 points from 217 points registered in the previous month.

After broadcasting the film 'Persepolis' in October, an animated film that contains a depiction of God forbidden in Islam, a Tunisian TV station boss has been slapped with a fine.

The head of a television station that screened the award-winning Franco-Iranian film "Persepolis" in October was fined by a Tunisian court on Thursday for "broadcasting a film that disturbs public order and threatens proper morals."

The animated film, which is a take on the Iranian revolution through the eyes of a young girl, includes a depiction of God, which is considered sacrilegious in Islam.

Nineteen journalists have been killed and more than 160 imprisoned since January 2012. DW rounds up expert views on the situation around the globe in commemoration of World Press Freedom Day.

The upheaval in the Arab world has led to dramatic changes, but it hasn't necessarily made life easier for journalists. The degree of press freedom varies strongly from country to country, said Michael Rediske, on the board of Reporters without Borders Germany.

Reporters without Borders releases an annual "Press Freedom Ranking." The current list contains 179 countries. The authors surveyed academics/scientists/researchers, lawyers, and human rights activists, in addition to journalists, to rank each country.

One of the great themes of Occupy Wall Street, of course, is the death of US democracy--the near-total capture of our political system by Wall Street firms and the financial power of the 1%. In the beginning the emphasis was on political corruption, the fact that both parties so beholden to the demands of Wall Street and corporate lobbyists that working within the political system to change anything has become simply meaningless. Recent events have demonstrated just how much deeper the power of money really goes. It is not just the political class. It is the very structure of American government, starting with the law and those who are sworn to enforce it--police officers who, as even this brief illustration makes clear, are directly in the pay of and under the orders of Wall Street executives, and who, as a result, are willing to systematically violate their oaths to protect the public when members of that public have the temerity to make a public issue out of exactly these kind of arrangements.

As Gandhi revealed, non-violent protest is effective above all because it reveals how power really operates: it lays bare the violence it is willing to unleash on even the most peaceful citizens when they dare to challenge its moral legitimacy. And by doing so, it reveals the true moral bankruptcy of those who claim authority to rule us. Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated this time and time again. What the current spate of assaults shows is just how low, to what levels of utter moral degradation, such men are really willing to sink.

Update (3:40 PM): In comments, a reader asked why I did not go to the media. My response:

To be honest my first impulse was to call a sympathetic Times reporter. He said he was going to see if he could spin a story out of it. Apparently his editors told him it wasn't news.