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The European Union on Thursday offered six former Soviet states €600 million ($798 million) in incentives to promote stronger energy and economic ties and democratic reforms.

The plan, called the Eastern Partnership, has inflamed tensions between the EU and Russia, as Moscow worries that the bloc is encroaching on its traditional turf. The EU, for its part, remains wary following Russia's war in Georgia last year and a weekslong January cutoff of gas supplies to the EU during a dispute between Moscow and Ukraine.

"The EU knows, not just because of the Georgia crisis and the gas crisis at the beginning of this year, that safety and prosperity in Europe also depend on the stability of the Eastern partner countries," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a summit here of the six countries and the EU.

Angela Merkel said on Wednesday that the economy is worse than at any time since the end of World War II. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman says the chancellor herself is partially to blame.

On Tuesday, the Federal Statistical Office announced that German exports, the motor behind the country's traditionally strong economy, have shrunk rapidly. Numbers for January show that, compared with the same month a year ago, exports are down by 20.7 percent. The drop is the steepest seen in 16 years.

In an interview with the newsmagazine Stern to be published on Thursday, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman takes Germany, and Europe, to task for not doing enough. Europe, he said, is stumbling. "I don't see any signs of unified activity, especially when it comes to financial policy," he said in the interview, which was only available in German. He was even more critical when it came to Germany's role in crisis management thus far: "Germany has so far been a huge stumbling block, a major hindrance." He pinned the blame on Finance Minister Peer Steinbrück, who he said is much too orthodox in his approach to economic stimulus. When it comes to Merkel, Krugman said her response has not spoken well for her intellect.

In France and Germany on Friday, US President Barack Obama said he wanted to renew the trans-Atlantic partnership. Part of that alliance, though, involves more European troops for Afghanistan, he said. Unexpectedly, Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons.

"In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world." He went on to say that "there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

The US president was coming from the G-20 summit, held on Wednesday and Thursday in London. At that meeting, the world's richest nations agreed to make $1 trillion available to the developing world through the World Bank and the International Monetary fund in addition to tripling the money available to the IMF.

US President Barack Obama spent much of his trip to Europe rebuilding bridges. In Prague on Sunday for a US-EU summit, he said "in my view, there is no old Europe or new Europe. There is only a united Europe."

During a speech at the NATO summit in Strasbourg late last week, Obama reached out the olive branch, saying, "in America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world."

And at the G-20 summit in London before that, Obama even took responsibility for the global economic meltdown. "It is true … that the crisis began in the US. I take responsibility, even if I wasn't even president at the time."

U.S. President Barack Obama and Brown both favor driving on fiscal stimulus, even if the governor of the Bank of England is cautioning his prime minister he can't afford to throw any more money at the problem

Brown and Obama have limited room for maneuver since both their countries have such hefty current account and budget deficits. They just don't have the money to do it themselves, and they may have trouble persuading those who do have the cash to use it.

In an uncomfortable reminder of serious divisions over the Iraq war, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, each with more national traditions than Obama and Brown, and with their welfare states already pumping money into their economies as unemployment increases, are pursuing a different agenda. Blaming "Anglo-Saxon economics" and dodgy banking practices for the mess, they don't want more funds injected.

The morning after the night before, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was either defiant or in denial. The veteran Danish centre-leftist and former prime minister heads the PES, or Party of European Socialists, that groups all the mainstream social democratic movements of the EU."To those who announce a profound crisis in European socialism", he declared yesterday, "I say no."

"Our voters stayed away. They simply didn't see the relevance of these elections. They did not see the political choices at European level ... we had a European alternative, but it was not visible enough."

"This is a meltdown for the centre-left," said Professor Simon Hix of the London School of Economics, who has been running an EU-wide poll-tracking project for the election. Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform said: "There is a structural crisis for the centre-left, whether they are unpopular incumbents or in opposition. They have been routed."

The Turks, who always used to complain to their Western allies about their rough neighborhood, apparently no longer have any enemies in the east. Turkey's old rival Russia has since become its most important energy and trading partner. Syria and Iraq, two countries with which Ankara has in the past been on the brink of war, are now friends of Turkey, and relations are even improving with Armenia. The Arabs, who never truly took to the successors of the Ottomans, now look with admiration to what they call the "Turkish model," a dynamic, open country that has a better handle on its problems than they do.

When Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed office in 2003, he planned to lead Turkey into the European Union. But Europe was unmoved by this vision, and it has also lost much of its appeal within Turkey. According to Germany's Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the center-left Social Democratic Party, as the Europeans have become weary of expansion, Turkey has lost interest in joining the EU. Indeed, what Erdogan meant when he spoke of Turkey's "alternative" to becoming an EU member is becoming increasingly clear.

Critics and supporters alike describe this new course as "neo-Ottomanism." Ankara remains formally committed to its European ambitions. However, frustrated by the open rejection with which it has long been met in Paris, Vienna and Berlin, and which it has been facing once again during the EU election campaign, Turkey is focusing increasingly on its role as a peacekeeping power in a region it either ruled or dominated for centuries.

En dépit des réserves "juridiques" de Paris et de Berlin, José Manuel Barroso espère que chefs d'Etat et de gouvernement des Vingt-sept le désigneront formellement dès le Conseil européen des 18 et 19 juin, à Bruxelles.

Les réserves française et allemande. Nicolas Sarkozy et Angela Merkel ont de fortes réserves sur le calendrier défendu par le PPE et son candidat. Paris veut temporiser en attendant la ratification définitive du traité de Lisbonne.

JPost.com » Israel » Article Apr 24, 2009 0:14&nbsp;|&nbsp;Updated Apr 24, 2009 13:54 'World leaders must drop their slogans' By DAVID HOROVITZ AND AMIR MIZROCH PrintSubscribe articleTitle = ' \'World leaders must drop their slogans\' '; showOdiogoReadNowButton ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566',articleTitle,'0', 290, 55); E-mailToolbar + Recommend: What's this? showInitialOdiogoReadNowFrame ('1002,1003,1005,1004,1006,1484,1560,1561,1562,1563,1564,1565,1566', '0', 290, 0); Talkbacks for this article: 117 &nbsp; | &nbsp;Avg. rating 4.61 out of 5</s

The international community has to "stop speaking in slogans" if it really wants to help the new Israeli government work toward a solution to the Palestinian conflict and help bring stability to the Middle East, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, in his first interview with an Israeli newspaper since taking the job.

"Over the last two weeks I've had many conversations with my colleagues around the world," he said. "Just today, I saw the political adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Chinese foreign minister and the Czech prime minister. And everybody, you know, speaks with you like you're in a campaign: Occupation, settlements, settlers..." Slogans like these, and others Lieberman cited, such as "land for peace" and "two-state solution," were both overly simplistic and ignored the root causes of the ongoing conflict, he said.

to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it.

SPIEGEL: But one cannot claim that the German government is making any particular effort to stop climate change. The measures that have been introduced to date are insufficient to achieve the goal we have set for ourselves, a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Are you disappointed by Angela Merkel, the former climate chancellor?

Gabriel: Oh please. We are among a handful of countries in Europe that have exceeded their Kyoto climate protection goals for 2012 in 2008. And we never claimed that have already implemented all the measures that will be needed to reach our goal for the year 2020. We are still about five percentage points behind. But a great deal has been put in motion, from the expansion of renewable energy to the renovation of buildings. And just as an aside, these efforts have created 280,000 new jobs. Our counterparts in other countries, including South Africa, China and India, rate us in a completely different way and see us as role models. So why the criticism?

En route to Ankara, Mr Obama said he supported the country's efforts to join the European Union. He said Turkey's accession would send an important signal to the Muslim world and firmly anchor it in Europe.

Before travelling to Turkey, Mr Obama participated in a Nato gathering in France, where he helped to overcome Turkey's objection to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance's next leader.

Turkey had misgivings about Mr Rasmussen over his refusal to apologise for the "cartoons controversy", in which a Danish newspaper published illustrations that inflamed passions in much of the Muslim world. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said late Sunday that Mr Obama's support had helped to resolve concerns. "He put forth a lot of positive energy," Mr Erdogan said. "We responded positively to this. We hope that the promises made are kept."

Most of the hallmarks of the foreign policy of George W. Bush are gone. The old conservative idea of "American exceptionalism," which placed the U.S. on a plane above the rest of the world as a unique beacon of democracy and financial might, has been rejected. At almost every stop, Obama has made clear that the U.S. is but one actor in a global community. Talk of American economic supremacy has been replaced by a call from Obama for more growth in developing countries. Claims of American military supremacy have been replaced with heavy emphasis on cooperation and diplomatic hard labor.

The tone was set from Obama's first public remarks in London on Wednesday, at a press conference with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, where the American President said he had come "to listen, not to lecture." At a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Baden-Baden on Friday, a German reporter asked Obama about his "grand designs" for NATO. "I don't come bearing grand designs," Obama said, scrapping the leadership role the U.S. maintained through the Cold War. "I'm here to listen, to share ideas and to jointly, as one of many NATO allies, help shape our vision for the future."

At a town hall in Strasbourg, France, Obama stood before an audience of mostly French and German youth and admitted that the U.S. should have a greater respect for Europe. "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world," he said before offering other European critical views of his country. "There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

Angela Merkel, the German ­chancellor, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French ­president, will throw down the gauntlet today by staging a joint press conference in ­London demanding the G20 summit usher in a new era of global regulation of banks, ­executive bonuses, hedge funds andoffshore tax havens.In what will be seen as a challenge to Obama, they will also insist nobody at the summit should discuss a fresh stimulus package, despite a report from the ­Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that "world trade is now in freefall".

Brown was reported to be working hard to persuade the Chinese to contribute more to global institutions such as the IMF, in return for extra voting rights.

Earlier, President Sarkozy told French radio that although there were projects on the table, "as things stand at the moment, these projects do not suit France or Germany". The French President is due to give a joint press conference with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel later. French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has already said that France would walk away from talks if its demands for stricter financial regulation were not met.