Brussels - The European Union's investment bank is to boost to almost 7 billion euros (8.9 billion dollars) its loans to the auto industry to develop climate-friendly cars, but it cannot save the sector from economic crisis, the bank's manager said Monday.

"By the end of June, we will probably have approved loans totalling 7 billion euros" to the car industry, the vast majority being awarded to clean-car projects, Philippe Maystadt, president of the European Investment Bank, told journalists in Brussels.

Brussels  - The Belgian government, the French bank BNP Paribas SA and Fortis, the Belgian-Dutch financial services company, agreed overnight to a plan for the divestment of Fortis' Belgian financial units.

BNP Paribas, France's largest bank, is to take over 75 per cent of Fortis Bank in a deal valued at 2.88 billion euros (3.64 billion dollars), the Belgian news agency Belga reported Saturday, citing the government.

The remaining 25-per-cent stake would remain in the hands of the government, the report said.

Brussels  - If Hillary Rodham Clinton wanted proof that her first official visit to Europe as the United States' top diplomat was a success, she could not have asked for much more than this.

"What you said could have been said by a European," Hans-Gert Poettering, the silver-haired German leader of the European Parliament, told her after an hour-long question-and-answer session on the state of EU-US relations.

There could be no higher praise from a man whose entire institution is founded on the idea that it is good to be European.

Brussels - Developed and developing economies alike should accept specific targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions at UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday.

"What I'm hoping for is to have as tight a regime (as possible), with measurable benchmarks and accountability, with specified outcomes," she said after talks with top European Union officials in Brussels.

Brussels - US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton discussed the future of detainees in the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison with European Union officials in Brussels on Friday in the highest-level talks to date on the subject.

"I thanked the EU for working with us to determine a policy regarding detainees from Guantanamo ... If we determine that it would be appropriate for a particular detainee to be relocated, we will discuss that with our friends and partners, like the EU," she said.

Brussels - Russia could join a controversial US plan to deploy missile-defence systems in Europe which has provoked outrage in Moscow, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on Friday just hours before a meeting with her Russian counterpart.

"We believe that Russia and the US have the opportunity to cooperate on missile defence - on joint research, joint development, and even eventually, assuming we can reach such an agreement, joint deployment," Clinton said after talks with European Union officials in Brussels.