European press review

Several papers ponder the testing of the British mettle by a long, hard winter of natural - and not so natural - disasters.

In Afghanistan, the Orwellian Ministry for Virtue and Against Vice sentences statues to death, but the jury is still out on who has the feet of clay.

And the Russians come round to thinking that Mikhail Gorbachev was more sinned against than sinning.

Bring on the spirit of Dunkirk

"UK efforts fail to halt outbreak", reads a headline in the Paris-based International Herald Tribune.

"Foot-and-mouth disease spread to all corners of Britain on Thursday and was threatening Ireland, where potentially infected British sheep were sold to an abattoir," the paper says.

"An export ban on British agriculture products since the outbreak of the disease had left many farmers fearing financial ruin despite the government's promised aid package," the paper points out.

The Hungarian Nepszabadsag sees the crisis as turning increasingly into a trade war.

It says the foot-and-mouth outbreak and the huge costs of the BSE affair have brought to the surface "sharp differences of interest" within the EU which affect the food trade of the entire continent.

"Many fear the European Union's entire agricultural policy will collapse," the paper adds.

France's Le Monde believes the outbreak could "cause a profound cultural change in Britain".

It says the epidemic has led to calls for the country's agriculture to become "gentler and less productivity-driven".

"Battered in the north by snow storms such as have not been seen in decades, the object of finger-pointing from Europe and beyond, 'Cool Britannia'," the paper says, "is demoralised."

"Doom and gloom" is the English expression used by Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung to sum up the situation in Britain today.

The paper says Britain appears to attract disasters as if it were under a magic spell.

"The extent of this can be seen in the fact," it adds, "that Prime Minister Tony Blair may even be prevented from being re-elected in April or May as had been planned".

The only glimmer of light in all this gloom was England's three-nil soccer victory over Spain on Wednesday.

"Cheer up, Britannia!" the paper concludes.

'It's my statue and I'll break it if I want to'

The decision by Afghanistan's ruling Taleban movement on Thursday to start destroying all statues deemed un-Islamic, including two huge statues of Buddha, hewn from a solid cliff in Bamyan province, is described by the German Frankfurter Rundschau as "an act of un-Islamic barbarism".

"It is total and totalitarian," it says. In the paper's view, the action is un-Islamic because the Prophet did not ban pictures as such but only their worship.

"We have diplomatic relations with only three Islamic countries and this does not affect our relations with them," the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur quotes Afghan Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil as saying. "As for all the other countries, they must understand that this is a domestic matter and that the statues belong to Afghanistan."

"A regime that deals in drugs, terror and now vandalism," says the headline over a leading article in London's Independent.

"In a world familiar almost to the point of boredom with wickednesses inflicted upon living people," the paper says, "often only crimes against old stones can move us in the comfortable West to outrage against a savage regime."

"Appalling as this is, it is far from the worst thing to have happened during the terrible decade of Taleban rule," it adds. "Let us leave aside the regime's support for terrorism, and its sheltering of Osama bin Laden. It has trampled upon the rights of women and ignored elementary human rights. It bans drugs, yet has presided over a massive heroin export trade."

The country "was three-quarters ruined by the time the Soviet Union pulled out its troops in 1989. By every discernible economic measure, the ruin is now complete".

Circle tightens around Milosevic

The Belgian Le Soir sees Serbia's new authorities as "weaving a web" around former President Slobodan Milosevic. "Yugoslavia's former strong man is now in the eye of the cyclone", it adds.

With Mr Milosevic under close surveillance and already under investigation, Le Soir would not be surprised to see the first charges brought "in a matter of days".

In Russia, the influential Izvestiya sees the prospect of Milosevic being arrested "within the week" as a sign of "rapprochement between Belgrade and Nato".

The paper expects this rapprochement to continue and to show "how wrong Moscow was to bank everything on Milosevic for the whole decade of the Balkan drama".

Slobodan Milosevic's brother Borislav, until January Yugoslavia's ambassador in Moscow, interviewed in Vremya Novostey, doubts that his brother will be extradited.

Borislav Milosevic, who says he plans to live in Moscow, adds that Russia should have done more to help Serbia during the Kosovo crisis, particularly by sending arms "to restrain the aggressor".

Gorbachev revisited at 70

Virtually all Russian papers pay tribute to former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who turns 70 today.

Nezavisimaya Gazeta says public opinion is gradually coming round in the former leader's favour.

"Gorbachev has not had the recognition he deserves in Russia," the paper says, recalling that he single-handedly brought Russia towards democracy and reform.

Now that the Yeltsin years have ended people want to move to a "modern civilization with high technology, democratic institutions and quality of life", the paper says. "And our thoughts go back to the roots, to Gorbachev".

The popular Moskovskiy Komsomolets agrees that Gorbachev was "rejected, mocked and blamed for all the mishaps and tragedies, all the major and minor disasters that happened under his rule". But when he left, "the country was swept by a wave of dishonesty, corruption and blatant crime and lies as no-one had expected".

The tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda has an exclusive interview with the man himself, in which he recalls with regret his surprise at the collapse of the USSR. "We were confident the Soviet Union was as eternal as the cosmos," Mr Gorbachev says "So much vodka was drunk to the freedom of nations. No-one even imagined the union could fall apart." If he could do it again, Mr Gorbachev says, "my choice would be the same. For freedom."

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