Brussels - The European Investment Bank (EIB) on Thursday formally approved soft loans totalling 3 billion euros (3.84 billion dollars) to Europe's troubled car making industry.

This is the second instalment in a series of loans that are expected to total more than 7 billion euros by June, EIB officials said in a statement.

The money approved on Thursday will benefit a number of carmakers, including BMW, Daimler, Fiat, PSA Peugeot-Citroen, Renault, Volvo Cars, Scania and Volvo Trucks.

Brussels/Strasbourg - Britain's Conservative party is to leave the main centre-right group in the European Parliament to form a eurosceptic bloc of its own after elections in June, parliament officials in Strasbourg said Thursday.

The move would be a blow to the conservative European People's Party (EPP), of which the Tories are the second-largest member.

But British conservatives insisted that it would not hand more power to socialist parties, since they would still vote with their former partners on key matters.

Brussels  - The Czech presidency of the European Union said Wednesday it had invited officials from the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan to Brussels for a fresh round of talks on the Middle East.

The meeting, the third of its kind since the Gaza conflict broke out at the beginning of the year, is to take place on Sunday, March 15, officials said.

Brussels - NATO and its Russian-dominated counterpart, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), should work together to form a new security system in Europe, the head of the CSTO said in Brussels on Wednesday.

"Nowadays, the system of the balance of power in Europe is failing. The security architecture has to be re-made," CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordyuzha told journalists in Brussels.

Brussels - August's war between Russia and Georgia boosted terrorists across the former Soviet Union, the head of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) said Wednesday.

"As a result of the conflict, we noticed a definite increase in terrorist acts in Central Asia, Russia and the East," Nikolai Bordyuzha, secretary general of the CSTO, told journalists in Brussels.

Brussels - Bosnia-Herzegovina on Wednesday became the 42nd nation to join NATO's counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan, alliance officials said.

NATO spokesman James Appathurai said a document "formally recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina as a non-NATO ISAF contributing nation" was signed at the alliance's headquarters in Brussels by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Bosnia's defence minister, Selmo Cikotic.