Brussels - The European Union executive on Wednesday welcomed Cuba's decision to re-open diplomatic dialogue with the bloc following the lifting of EU sanctions, officials in Brussels said.

"We see that as a positive step and we welcome their reaction to the eventual re-establishment of a political dialogue," a spokesman for EU aid commissioner Louis Michel said.

Michel is due to visit Cuba around October 22-25, he said.

The Cuban government under new leader Raul Castro has approached the European Union about a resumption of the political dialogue halted since 2003, EU representative in Havana Javier Nino told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa late Tuesday.

Brussels - The European Commission on Wednesday approved Greek government plans for the privatization of Olympic Airlines, but told the carrier that it must pay back 850 million euros (1.2 billion dollars) in illegal state aid from the sale of its assets.

Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani said an investigation had shown that Greece's ailing flagship carrier had receive financial help from the government since 2005.

"This aid is incompatible with the (European Union) treaty," Tajani said.

At the same time, the commissioner approved plans for a new, smaller carrier, which will be born from the ashes of Olympic and will likely be called Pantheon Airways.

Brussels - Mohamed was the most popular name for new-born boys in Brussels in 2007, the Belgian statistics office announced Wednesday.

The boys' names Amin (sixth most popular), Ayub and Mehdi (joint seventh), and the girls' names Aya (third), Yasmine (fourth) and Salma (seventh) also made the top ten in a further confirmation of the European Union capital's multi-culturalism.

Mohamed was also the seventh most popular name nationwide, beating traditional Belgian names such as Mathis (ninth) and Hugo (tenth) - although it lagged well behind the most popular names: Nathan, Lucas and Noah.

Brussels - The European Union's Lisbon Treaty is not likely to be in place before European Parliament elections in June 2009, postponing some of its key reforms for at least five years, Luxembourg's influential prime minister said Wednesday.

"I do not think the treaty will be in place by June 2009," Jean-Claude Juncker said at a briefing with the European Policy Centre in Brussels.

The EU is grappling with the question of how to respond to Irish voters' rejection of the treaty at a referendum on June 12. The vote means the treaty cannot come into force anywhere in the EU unless the Irish government finds a way to ratify it, possibly by calling a second referendum.

Brussels - Despite some progress, women remain grossly under- represented in European politics.

Slightly fewer than one third of the European Parliament's (EP) 785 seats are occupied by women, while only nine of the EU's 27 commissioners are female.

On Tuesday, a group of leading women politicians launched a campaign in Brussels aimed at bridging this gender gap when the composition of the EP and the European Commission come up for renewal next year.

"A representative democracy without gender equality is a contradiction in terms," said Margot Wallstrom, a Swede who acts as one of the commission's five vice-presidents.

Brussels  - European Union officials Tuesday said Uzbekistan had made important progress on human rights issues, but insisted that it was still too early to say whether the progress had been enough to convince the bloc to lift a travel ban on Uzbek regime members.

The EU has "noted the progress Uzbekistan has made, such as the abolition of the death penalty ... and the release of political prisoners," French Minister for Europe Jean-Pierre Jouyet, who chaired the meeting of the EU-Uzbekistan cooperation council, said.