European press review

If it is true, as someone once said, that a picture is worth a thousand words, then most Spanish dailies today carry the same front-page "editorial" showing a policeman lying by the roaside in a pool of blood. The House of Common's endorsement of research into human embryos is hailed as an epoch-making decision. But will it come too late to prevent the end of the sausage as the Germans know it?

A policeman's blood

"He must have thought he was going to deal with a traffic problem," says Madrid's El Pais of municipal policeman Juan Miguel Gervilla, when on Wednesday morning he approached two people pushing a car along one of Barcelona's main streets. "Most likely he only realized his mistake a moment before the bullets hit him," it adds.

The paper believes that the people of Barcelona and of Catalonia in general "are, against all evidence, still underestimating the danger, as if Catalonia remained an oasis of peace, and the problem of terrorism was an alien import".

But "in the past three months Barcelona has seen six attacks, four of them fatal," the paper points out. "Terrorism is the main problem confronting all Catalans, just as it is all Spaniards."

"The macabre litany of ETA attacks does not seem to augur the germ of a solution in the Basque country," says the Swiss Le Temps. "Wednesday's killing... evoked the same inflexible response from the Spanish authorities and further strengthened the resolve not to give in to terrorist blackmail."

The French Liberation quotes Spanish government sources as "expecting more attacks in the coming weeks".

"In particular more attacks are expected in the run-up to the early elections in the Basque country, due to be held in the Spring of 2001, which might see the moderate nationalists of the Basque Nationalist Party ousted from the regional government for the first time," the paper says.

Send in the clones...

Spain's El Pais stresses the importance of the British parliament's approval of research into cloned human embryos.

"The discovery of the therapeutic potential of human embryo stem cells sheds light... on the transcendental nature of the British decision," the paper says in an editorial entitled, "Cloning to cure".

"The step taken by the United Kingdom will open up a debate in other European countries, such as ours, where all forms of cloning are forbidden under laws drawn up at a time when... the curative potential was unknown to medical science," the paper points out.

... but not Arnie, surely!

Germany's Die Tageszeitung argues that the House of Commons' decision amounts to a "reappraisal of values".

However it clears Westminster of any ulterior cloning motives: Because the idea was to allow research only on human embryos up to 14 days' old, "as far as the MPs were concerned, this meant that there was no question of experimenting with human life," the paper says.

It believes that the need will soon arise for an international response to the moral issues raised by cloning.

"But there is very little that any controversy-shy ethics panel can do against the power of the future Biotech industry," the paper adds, using the plot of Arnold Schwarzenegger's latest film as a worrying illustration of its point.

Bringing in the Supreme Facilitator

As President Bill Clinton makes a final attempt to pick up the threads of the Middle East peace process with visiting Israeli and Palestinian delegations, the Swiss La Tribune De Geneve considers a solution at the highest possible level.

"There is an offer to place Temple Mount in Jerusalem under the direct sovereignty of God," the paper says in a reference to statements by the Israeli foreign minister. "However it appears that the Supreme Facilitator was not consulted on the matter."

However, "since God saw fit to allow three religions to become tangled up in that part of the world, it seems reasonable to ask for His assistance in the disentangling", the paper points out.

The company he must keep

The French weekly L'Express says that on 16 December President-elect George W Bush "was finally touched by glory".

"Only it wasn't his own glory," the paper points out, "but somebody else's", the somebody in question being Gulf War hero General Colin Powell, chosen by Mr Bush for secretary of state.

His choice of what the paper calls "one of the most highly regarded figures in America" was "just what was needed to restore the shine to a somewhat tarnished presidential coat of arms", it says.

"The extent of the country's division and the Republicans' tiny majority in Congress" require George W Bush "to share the limelight with people seen to be irreproachable, strong, competent, popular, and representative of the new American reality," the paper points out.

Taking the Taleban to task

Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau says that the UN Security Council's proposal to impose tougher sanctions on Afghanistan's Taleban movement will have "devastating" implications and is bound to backfire.

"Instead of cracking down on the country's Taleban rulers, the sanctions will intensify the grave harm done to the ordinary people," it points out.

"The Taleban will be insulted by the sanctions - but this is not important," the paper says. "What really matters is that... international humanitarian organizations will find themselves unable to help the poverty-stricken population," it warns in a reference to the decision of several aid agencies to pull out of Afghanistan over fears of a backlash.

And the Taleban leaders themselves are unlikely to worry about the people's welfare, the paper stresses.

The joke and the fear

The departure of a second busload of Romanies emigrating to western Europe prompts the Hungarian Magyar Hirlap to speak of "a country split in two".

It sees the ordinary Hungarian's attitude to the sizable Romany minority as more social than racial, and deeply rooted in Hungary's history.

"There has never been fair competition, equal opportunity or fair victory" in this country, the paper says. The winners in life's struggles have a bad conscience, and "fear retaliation", while the losers, instead of rebelling, "look for even bigger losers... to take it out on them".

"The Romany question is not entirely an ethnic question... rather one of creating or finding scapegoats," the paper adds. "We need a punching bag, an even more miserable person to be punched so that we can forget about our own misery."

It regrets the unwillingness to act shown by both government and opposition. "They have no taste for it, it's not a popular issue... It's a vote-loser for those who embrace the cause," it points out.

Fibre-optics cable was underground in more ways than one

Warsaw's Gazeta Wyborcza stresses the importance of the government's announcement that a formal investigation is to be launched into an illicit fibre-optic information highway found to have been laid alongside the Russian Yamal gas pipeline through Poland.

The matter must be clarified, the paper says, so that such situations not repeat themselves.

Many observers, it notes, have said that the minister of justice was "playing to the gallery in instigating a formal investigation".

"This may be so," the paper says, but at least the minister "is playing to the gallery that wants to see light shed on the affair of the fibre optic cable, not the one that wants to keep it in the dark".

"Wurst-case" scenario

It's the "wurst" of times in Germany, judging by a report in the Swiss Le Temps.

"The 'wurst', the good old German 'wurst', has been caught up in the mad cow controversy," the paper writes. "To say that a wind of panic blows across the country barely does justice to the situation... The Germans are being urged to beware of their sausages."

However the paper explains that the Berlin government did not go so far as to ban the country's favourite delicacy. Instead, "people must decide whether they trust their butchers enough" to keep buying their produce.

Germans were "dumbfounded" when they recently heard Mrs Schroeder, the chancellor's wife, saying that she "no longer knew what to cook", the paper says. "But for the moment the Schroeders have their problem solved," it adds. "They will be spending Christmas in Moscow on a private visit to the Master of the Kremlin. And Vladimir Putin will be bound to serve them some BSE-free caviar."

The European press review is compiled by BBC Monitoring from internet editions of the main European newspapers and some early printed editions.