The EU launches Thursday its Europeana digital library, an online digest of Europe`s cultural heritage that aims to draw together millions of books and other items.

Europeans gained great influence in Georgia by negotiating the end of its August war with Russia, but five years after the `Rose Revolution` they remain divided over Tbilisi`s NATO and EU aspirations.

EU nations reached agreement Wednesday, though not unanimously, on boosting supervision of the increasingly multinational insurance sector.

The deal was sealed, at the expense of one of the initial project`s key elements, thanks to a compromise put forward by the French EU presidency to national representatives, sources close to the talks said.

Nordic people are the happiest Europeans, while their least-happy counterparts can be found in the Balkans, a European Union lifestyle survey released Wednesday suggests.

Danes` ranking of their own happiness came out tops, followed by Swedes, Finns and Norwegians. Bulgarians came bottom of the table, with Macedonians just ahead of them.

The European Patent Office on Wednesday restored on appeal a controversial patent for a breast cancer gene that had been withdrawn from a US biotech firm, but granting it in a more restricted form than before.

Poland has rejected an EU proposal for its coal-fired power stations to be temporarily exempted from buying all their greenhouse gas permits, a move aimed at averting a Polish veto of the bloc`s climate package, a senior Polish official said Wednesday.

The European Commission is planning a 130-billion-euro (163-billion-dollar) economic stimulus programme, a spokeswoman for the German economy ministry said Wednesday.

`That represents one percent of gross domestic product for each member state,` she told AFP.

`For Germany, that means 25 billion euros.`

The European Commission is planning a 130-billion-euro (163-billion-dollar) economic stimulus programme, a German economy ministry spokeswoman said Wednesday.

`That represents one percent of gross domestic product for each member state,` she told AFP.

`For Germany, that means 25 billion euros.`

EU nations on Wednesday were nearing an agreement on revising the bloc`s controversial farm subsidy scheme, including raising milk quotas and reducing farm handouts, but the talks were expected to continue overnight.

The European Commission is planning a 130-billion-euro (163-billion-dollar) programme to jumpstart the economy, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported in its online edition Wednesday.