NATO welcomed its 12th secretary general on Monday as Denmark's former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen arrived for his first day in organization's top job.

The European Union and the United States could draw up joint human-rights guidelines for fighting terrorism in a bid to avoid the kind of row which poisoned relations in recent years, according to a paper seen by the German Press Agency dpa on Friday.

European Union-wide voting for the European Parliament continued Friday, with polls opening in Ireland and the Czech Republic - two of the member states that have provoked the most headaches in Brussels.

Polling in Ireland began at 7 am (0600 GMT) and was to continue until the evening. Czech voters started voting in the afternoon, with polling stations closing on Saturday.

The European Union will agree on June 4 the rules member states should follow if they take in former inmates of the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison, EU diplomats said Wednesday.

Former cycling world champion Tom Boonen faces a criminal investigation but no sports sanctions after testing positive for cocaine again, Belgian news reports said on Saturday.

NATO has expelled two Russian diplomats based in Brussels in connection with a spying scandal involving an Estonian official jailed for passing top secret documents to Moscow, alliance diplomats confirmed Thursday. One of the expelled officials is the son of Vladimir Chizhov, the Russian ambassador to the European Union.

Both men were attached to Russia's mission to NATO, which like the EU is based in Brussels. And according to a report in Thursday's Financial Times, both had been working in the Belgian capital as undercover agents.

China must do more to make its manufacturers produce safe goods, the European Union's consumer affairs commissioner said Monday as a report revealed that record numbers of dangerous Chinese imports were seized in the EU in 2008.

China's product-safety authorities have investigated roughly half of the cases of dangerous Chinese goods which the EU has discovered in recent years, and this is "not good enough," Meglena Kuneva told journalists in Brussels.

The European Union is to offer the International Monetary Fund (IMF) 75 billion euros (101.5 billion dollars) in extra loans, the holder of the bloc's rotating presidency said Friday.

The sum of "75 billion euros is the figure for a voluntary loan to the IMF to enable it to react better in the context of the crisis," Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek told journalists in Brussels after a summit with EU leaders.