Munich - US Vice President Joe Biden on Saturday promised greater cooperation with European allies on security issues, but only in exchange for greater European contributions to fighting global security threats.

Biden's speech before the Munich Security Conference, billed as the new US administration's first glimpse of an overarching security and defence policy, presented a laundry list of US priorities around the world, combined with a promise of greater US humility in addressing those issues.

Munich  - Tanks, guns and nuclear warheads were set to top the agenda Friday as world leaders headed to the German city of Munich to attend the city's prestigious annual security conference.

Diplomats including German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Russian Deputy Premier Sergey Ivanov and Iran's speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, were set to debate Iran's nuclear programme, Russia's withdrawal from a key arms-control treaty and the future for nuclear-arms talks between Russia and the United States.

The conference comes just two weeks after the inauguration of US President Barack Obama raised hopes that the US would be willing to hold talks with both Moscow and Tehran on disarmament issues.

Frankfurt - The European Central Bank (ECB) is expected to set the stage Thursday for a rate cut at its meeting in March.

ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet has already indicated that the Frankfurt-based bank is likely to hold off on trimming borrowing costs again this week before pressing on with its rate-cutting cycle in March.

"The next important meeting is in March," said Trichet at his press conference last month after the bank delivered another 50 basis points cut. This brought the cost of money in the 16-member eurozone down to 2 per cent.

For the moment, the ECB appears keen to sit back and assess the economic impact of the 225 basis points in rate reductions it has delivered since October last year.

Berlin/Warsaw - When Chris Gueffroy became the last person to be killed crossing the Berlin Wall, nobody could know that within hours, communism would begin its inexorable fall in the Polish city of Warsaw, 500 kilometres east.

On February 6, 1989, Polish communist leaders sat down with the banned Solidarity labour union, led by Lech Walesa, to launch some two months of negotiations on power-sharing.

Brussels  - More energy from wind power came online in Europe in 2008 than from any other energy source, the European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) reported Monday.

Of new energy-generating capacity that went online in that year, 43 per cent came from wind power, the group said. That meant an average of 20 wind turbines installed every working day of that year.