Brussels - The annual rate of inflation in the 16-member euro

Brussels - The European Court should be allowed to set the standard for asylum decisions across the European Union, and Sweden could push for that when it takes over the bloc's presidency in July, the country's immigration and asylum minister said Friday.

"If you get an asylum application, you need a body that says that this decision should apply to all similar applications," Tobias Billstrom told journalists in Brussels.

Brussels - The European Union is following very closely reports of a new gas row between Russia and Ukraine, officials in Brussels said Thursday, two months after an earlier dispute crippled gas supplies to the bloc.

The EU's executive, the European Commission, is "following very closely the situation in bilateral commercial relations between Ukraine and Russia, because this could have an impact on supplies to the EU," commission spokesman Ferran Tarradellas said.

Brussels - Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to meet top European Union officials next week during her first visit to Europe as US Secretary of State, diplomatic sources in Brussels said Thursday.

Officials said Clinton was expected to hold talks on March 6 with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, whose country holds the bloc's rotating presidency.

Brussels - The interior ministers of Italy, G

Paris/Brussels - French-Belgian bank Dexia said Thursday that it had lost 3.326 billion euros (4.25 billion dollars) in 2008 primarily because of losses related to the US subprime crisis.

Turnover fell by nearly half compared with 2007, to 3.556 billion euros, with the financial crisis eating nearly 6 billion euros out of the bank's earnings, Dexia said in a statement.

Dexia suffered more than half of that negative impact in the fourth quarter of last year, when it posted a loss of 2.6 billion euros.