European Countries

WASHINGTON - An effort to improve the security of passports is facing delays by European countries that say they cannot meet a deadline the United States imposed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Jonathan Faull, director general of the European Commission, said this week that member countries probably would not be ready to begin issuing passports with biometric identifiers by October, as U.S. law requires. Congress mandated a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint on new passports issued by most European countries and other stable democracies such as New Zealand.

MOSCOW - Fuel delivery to four European countries fell below normal yesterday as Russia's state gas monopoly withheld natural gas from neighboring Ukraine for the third consecutive day. Ukraine warned that its gas pipeline system could experience "serious disruptions" if a worsening price dispute isn't settled in 10 to 15 days, threatening shortfalls across Europe in the heart of winter. Flows of gas to Poland, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria, all of which depend on pipelines that cross Ukraine, decreased yesterday, officials said.

ESSEN, Germany -- Leaders of the 12 European Union nations agreed yesterday to begin open-ended discussions next month about membership for six Eastern European countries without setting a timetable for any of them to join.Top officials from all six Eastern European countries that now have association agreements with the European Union -- Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary -- met with the leaders at the Villa Hugel, a sprawling 19th-century hilltop palace.

Stocks rallied yesterday to a huge comeback after suffering their worst week ever. The Dow Jones industrial average climbed 936 points - the biggest one-day gain in its 112-year history - as several countries took concerted steps to ease the financial crisis. All the major U.S. indexes rose more than 11 percent, with the Dow posting its best percentage-point gain in 21 years. The Standard & Poor's 500 index set a record for a one-day point gain and the largest one-day percentage jump since the 1930s.

MOSCOW -- Russia's foreign intelligence service warned NATO yesterday that any move to incorporate Eastern European countries into the Western alliance would bring "fundamental" military countermeasures and heighten anti-Western sentiments.Some Eastern Europe countries that were once under Soviet domination, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, have asked to join NATO. Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin reacted calmly in late August, but the military pushed him to reconsider, and Mr. Yeltsin wrote Western leaders on Sept.

BERLIN, Germany -- At the United Nations conference on climate change last week, which called for a new accord to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, the debates revealed one striking difference between the northern European countries and the United States.Because the European countries are so much more thickly settled than the United States, there is a much higher consciousness here of the urgency of environmental problems and of the need for joint action to confront them.The political success of Green parties has awakened other parties, even some of the most conservative, to the importance that voters attach to environmental issues.

BERLIN, Germany -- At the United Nations conference on climate change last week, which called for a new accord to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, the debates revealed one striking difference between the northern European countries and the United States.Because the European countries are so much more thickly settled than the United States, there is a much higher consciousness here of the urgency of environmental problems and of the need for joint action to confront them.The political success of Green parties has awakened other parties, even some of the most conservative, to the importance that voters attach to environmental issues.

An unusual conference is taking place in Baltimore. Some 400 emerging political and economic leaders from 40 European countries are meeting with their American counterparts. They are pondering topics ranging from entrepreneurship, economic conversion, housing and health. They are also visiting sites and institutions of significance in the Baltimore-Washington region.The American Center for International Leadership, which moved its headquarters to Baltimore two years ago, has sponsored dozens of East-West exchanges since it was founded in 1985.

SKOPJE, Macedonia -- Seven southeastern European countries agreed yesterday to create a multinational military force that could be used for peacekeeping or aid operations in the Balkans and elsewhere.Three NATO allies -- Italy, Greece and Turkey -- joined Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Romania in creating the force, which will be a brigade with 3,000 to 4,000 troops divided into 14 companies by the time it is ready, probably sometime next year.The countries' defense ministers signed a pact creating the force after meeting here in the Macedonian capital.

LONDON -- Stocks and bonds tumbled across Europe yesterday amid growing concern that the long slide in interest rates is over even as some countries are struggling to get their economies moving again.In Germany, the Bundesbank was persuaded to cancel a regularly scheduled sale of government bonds after yields climbed 10 basis points to 6.80 percent, their highest level in almost a year."The Bundesbank just ran into a buyer's strike at these rates, and that's very worrying for the bond market," said Jouni Kokko, economist at S. G. Warburg.

PARIS --The shaky U.N.-brokered cease-fire in Lebanon suffered another blow yesterday when the European countries that have been called upon to provide the backbone of a peacekeeping force delayed a decision on committing troops until the mission is more clearly defined. Their reservations postponed any action on the force at least until Wednesday, when the European Union will take up the issue. Haunted by their experiences in Bosnia in the 1990s, when their forces were unable to stop widespread ethnic killing, European governments are insisting upon clarifying the chain of command and rules of engagement before plunging into the even greater complexities of the Middle East.

So there is hope after all for the battered U.S. dollar. That's good news for Americans traveling to Europe or buying foreign goods because their money should go a bit further. Economic and political disarray has dropped the once-mighty euro to nine-month lows against the greenback. Much-ballyhooed European unity isn't all it was cracked up to be. You can thank the postponement by the United Kingdom of its vote on the proposed European Union constitution. Thank the "no" votes in France and the Netherlands, too. Now on hold, that measure must be ratified by all 25 member nations to go into effect.

WASHINGTON - An effort to improve the security of passports is facing delays by European countries that say they cannot meet a deadline the United States imposed shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Jonathan Faull, director general of the European Commission, said this week that member countries probably would not be ready to begin issuing passports with biometric identifiers by October, as U.S. law requires. Congress mandated a biometric identifier such as a fingerprint on new passports issued by most European countries and other stable democracies such as New Zealand.

Pascal Lamy, a European commissioner from France, recently mused publicly about why some members of the European Union are more awkward to deal with than others. "We have to recognize," he said, "that there are some countries which remember that they were once great world powers and which believe that this was not an accident - that they still have special qualities that deserve recognition: France, Britain, Spain, Poland." At the mention of Poland, there was a snort of derision from a Hungarian in the audience.

Nigeria regularly finds itself high up on any list of corrupt nations, helped along by the ever-successful worldwide scheme known as the "419," after the section of the Nigerian criminal code that targets the practice and makes it illegal. Typically, an intended victim receives an e-mail appeal. (The scheme reportedly began in Nigeria in the 1980s with handwritten letters, then evolved to faxed messages and finally e-mails.) The writer pretends to be someone famous, or well-placed or simply rich.

PARIS - With a protest sign and a wide grin, Rachiol Boulaouane stepped out of the crowd of marching strikers last week and summed up the average French worker's view of the government's effort to solve a pension crisis that threatens to swallow the economy. "Something has to be done, yeah," said Boulaouane, 30, who cleans housing projects for the city, "but I don't want to keep working until I have no teeth." Like every French worker, public and private, Boulaouane labors 35 hours a week and gets at least five weeks of paid vacation a year.

LISBON -- The war in what remains of Yugoslavia thrust itself onto the agenda of the European Community summit yesterday."We have been taken by the throat by what is happening to Yugoslavia," said French President Francois Mitterrand. It "demands strong action by the community."The EC is meeting in Lisbon to consider membership applications from several European countries and to find a formula to finance its activities. The leaders of the 12 EC countries also reappointed Jacques Delors to two more years as president of its European Commission.

PARIS -- Since 1973, when the first world oil crisis quadrupled unemployment in Western Europe and furthered the plunge into recession, European nations have significantly reduced their dependence on foreign oil, making them far less vulnerable now to sudden price increases than they were 17 years ago.Unlike the United States, which emphasized personal an household conservation measures that were quickly forgotten when oil prices dropped, Western Europe made...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - Corine Devillers sells a varied lot. Little flags on skinny sticks are for sale next to sweat shirts folded on shelves, hats hanging on pegs, pencils resting in cases, posters stuck to walls and tiny stuffed bears snuggling in the windows. In many ways, though, she is selling only one product: white elephants. She works on the edge of the Grand Place, one of Europe's most impressive public squares, at a shop called Eurostore. The flags, the shirts, the hats - virtually everything she sells - are adorned with a circle of 15 stars, the emblem of the European Union, itself a symbol of European unity, something that no longer exists.

ON WEDNESDAY, when South Africans go to the polls for their second nationwide democratic election, their country will start learning the answer to the question that has been asked for more than five years: What happens after Mandela?From the moment Nelson Mandela walked out of Victor Verster prison near Cape Town in 1990, his ascension to the leadership of whatever nation emerged from the ruins of apartheid seemed certain. When he not only lived up to but surpassed the image of Nelson Mandela constructed by his supporters during his 27 years in prison, his presidency of the new government became inevitable.