Liege, Belgium - An old industrial centre in a former coal-mining area, Liege is giving itself a bit of a face-lift these days. Its new Grand Curtius museum complex opens on March 6, and it plans to inaugurate an ultramodern train station this summer.

The first special exhibition at the Grand Curtius, from March 22 to June 28, will be dedicated to Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994). Apart from female nudes, a favourite motif of his, fittingly enough, was trains and train stations.

Washington  - Republican legislators slammed President Barack Obama's economic agenda on Friday for mimicking the ideals of socialist European governments, one day after the president revealed his 3.6-trillion-dollar budget for 2010.

At a conservative policy gathering in Washington, lawmakers repeatedly attacked Obama for planning a massive uptick in spending on energy, education, health care and other programmes.

Berlin - German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that she expects an honest assessment of the financial situation within Eastern Europe at a European Union (EU) summit meeting this weekend.

Merkel said that, as far as the EU member states are concerned, "we should be given an honest status of the situation," adding that this was not necessarily the case at the EU's December's summit.

The heads of all 27 EU member states are due to meet in Brussels Sunday for an extraordinary summit convened to discuss the global economic crisis.

Rueselsheim, Germany - Thousands of workers employed by General Motors in Europe took to the streets Thursday to demonstrate against the giant US carmaker's sweeping restructuring plans and to save their jobs.

The protests came as GM's German offshoot Opel prepared to unveil a rescue plan for the German operations and the government in Berlin stepped up its criticism of the US-based auto group amid a deepening crisis in the global car industry.

Paris - In an apparent compromise with the European Commission, the French government is prepared to drop a condition in an aid package to its auto industry that has been criticized as anti-competitive, the daily Le Figaro reported on Wednesday.

Citing a source in the government, the daily said that Paris was now prepared to drop a requirement that car makers Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen would not shut any French factories for five years in exchange for loans of 3 billion euros (3.86 billion dollars) each.

Brussels - The European Commission was Wednesday expected to recommend the creation of a pan-European financial watchdog and issue guidelines on how to dispose of toxic assets held by European banks.

The call for a European-wide supervisory body is contained in a report by Jacques de Larosiere, a former head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and of the French central bank.

De Larosiere was asked by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso to provide ways of preventing a repeat of the current financial crisis at a time in which banks have become increasingly international.