Montreal - Canada and the European Union are committed to forging a comprehensive economic partnership, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Friday.

The unfolding global financial crisis makes liberalizing trade between Canada and the EU even more crucial, Harper said after a meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso at the annual Canada-EU Summit in Quebec City.

New York - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday called on the European Union to provide leadership in programmes fighting global warming through ambitious energy and climate change policy.

The EU is scheduled to meet in December under the French presidency to adopt more measures to cut down the bloc's carbon dioxide emissions, the main gas responsible for global warming. The EU agreed last year to reduce emissions by 20 per cent by 2020, to below 1990 levels.

Montreal - The ongoing global financial crisis tops the agenda of talks between Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and European Union leaders, as they meet Friday to launch a process that might eventually lead to an "economic partnership" between Canada and the EU.

The meeting in Quebec City between Harper, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, was initially supposed to focus on a possible free trade deal between Canada and the EU.

Brussels - European Union importers should be forced to make sure that they are not bringing illegally-logged timber into the bloc, the EU's executive said in a law proposed Friday.

"Developed and developing nations must unite to protect the world's remaining forests. We must also send a message to timber suppliers that illegal timber or timber products will not be tolerated on the EU market," EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said.

EU officials say that close on 20 per cent of the timber imported into the EU comes from illegal sources, with a serious impact on world ecosystems and climate.

Brussels - The European Union is to re-introduce import duties for cereals to protect EU farmers from rapidly-falling prices, officials in the EU's executive, the European Union, said Friday.

Over the last year Europe has been hit by record food-price rises, with EU officials pledging on September 17 to boost the bloc's food- aid programme for poor Europeans by some 70 per cent.

But prices for wheat have fallen from around 300 euros (403 dollars) per ton in September 2007 to just 160 euros per ton this October, commission officials said.

That development followed a record harvest of 300 million tons of wheat this year, 20 per cent higher than the 2007 harvest, officials said.

Sofia  - Almost two years after joining the European Union, Bulgaria has passed legislat