European press review

The foot-and-mouth disease crisis returns to front pages across Europe, while Franco-German disagreements over mad cow disease compensation are also back on some papers' menus.

In Germany Slobodan Milosevic is compared to US gangster Al Capone, while a potential major development in Spanish immigration policy also makes the headlines.

Foot and mouth returns

"The horrifying return of foot-and-mouth disease", reads an article in Geneva's Le Temps.

"Great Britain is paralysed by the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic," the paper says.

"Out of fear of an extremely rapid contagion, the inhabitants of the farms which are affected are living in seclusion," it says.

"Switzerland has taken radical measures to prevent contagion, but the virus can slip through everywhere," it adds.

Set against a photo of the body of a cow being lifted onto a pile of other dead animals ready for burning at a farm in northern England, the front page headline in Paris's Liberation has no doubts about the extent of the foot-and-mouth disease crisis.

"The agriculture earthquake" is how it describes it.

Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung says the deeply unsettling images from Britain showing huge fires blazing at farms infected by foot-and-mouth disease could put consumers right off their food.

"The only thing missing is chickens full of salmonella and fish riddled with worms!", the paper exclaims.

But it warns against public hysteria, pointing out that foot and mouth may be a huge economic problem but that it poses no danger to human health.

The real question is how European farmers will carry on and that question was raised even before the "English disease".

"The best answer is a policy that avoids agricultural overproduction," it says. "The fires blazing in England can easily overshadow the fact that even before BSE, farmers were compensated for destroying healthy calves."

France and Germany's EU beef

"Europe tears itself apart" over the mad cow disease crisis, according to a headline in Paris's Le Figaro about a meeting of EU agriculture ministers in Brussels yesterday.

The paper says French Agriculture Minister "Jean Glavany didn't succeed in obtaining an agreement for compensating the farmers" affected by the crisis.

After 40 years of dominating the Common Agricultural Policy, the paper adds, "Paris today has to compromise with the firm opposition of the German government".

It says that if Europe holds its ground France intends to go it alone and grant national aid to the farmers.

"Paris would be taking illegal action in the eyes of European law, but this infringement is supported by the whole of the French political class", with the local elections just three weeks away, the paper says.

"Adding to the confusion", it says, "it was learnt that the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic...had spread again yesterday" in Britain, adding that it has "perhaps already crossed the Channel".

Slobodan 'Al Capone' Milosevic

Berlin's Die Welt says the news that former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic may shortly be prosecuted for financial irregularities recalls how the gangster Al Capone was put on trial for tax evasion rather than for terrorizing Chicago in the 1920s.

The move may however be seen as a way out of the impasse over Belgrade's refusal to extradite Mr Milosevic to The Hague war crimes tribunal, it says.

"If Belgrade is to be promoted as a strategic partner in the region, it must not be humiliated, or at least not publicly...and it must be allowed to save face," it adds.

"Thus Belgrade can fight to put Milosevic and his henchmen on trial at home first before handing them over to the UN," the paper says.

The "tyrant's arrest" will be the real test of how prepared the new Yugoslavia is to harmonize its social and political values with the West's, the paper says.

Spanish open up to immigrants

The lead story in Madrid's El Pais covers what is significant development towards changing Spain's immigration policy.

"The Interior Ministry is prepared to consider regularising the situation of illegal immigrants who have a job offer," the paper says.

It says the proposal to give temporary residency permits to those foreigners who have the promise of a job was made yesterday by the opposition Socialist Party in its first meeting with the government to negotiate a pact on immigration policy.

The paper adds that: "The majority of unions, NGOs and immigrants' groups welcomed the government's predisposition to consider regularising the situation of immigrants who have a job offer."

However one anti-racist group, SOS Racismo, says the proposal doesn't go far enough and such immigrants should be given permanent residence rights.

Germans turn off international affairs

Germany's Frankfurter Rundschau deplores the fact that Germans now seem to be imitating the Americans with their increasing lack of interest in international affairs.

The German media has more time for show than substance, it says, as was seen by its close scrutiny of German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's distant revolutionary past and corresponding lack of interest in his foreign policy.

The German chancellor and Russian president ride in a sleigh together and the text accompanying the TV images is "irrelevant and meaningless", the paper says.

Referring to the meeting between Mr Fischer and US Secretary of State Colin Powell, it says "public debates on the themes of the talks are not only not missed, they are undesirable".

The paper warns that this public disinterest "all too often means that anyone who gives matters any thought is seen as a tiresome critic".

And as long as the television pictures are all right, it says, the government won't even notice how it is being swept along by this negative tide.

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