Brussels - Montenegro moved a small step closer to becoming a candidate for European Union membership on Thursday as the bloc's member states agreed to send its application for official scrutiny.

Montenegro applied for official candidate status on December 15, but EU member states spent the next four months at loggerheads as they debated whether the small Balkan state - which broke away from union with Serbia in 2006 - should be granted it.

Tehran - Iran and the European Union have coordinated in a telephone call the next round of nuclear talks, the ISNA news agency reported Thursday.

Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeid Jalili and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana had a telephone conversation following Iran's announcement it was ready to resume nuclear talks with world powers on Wednesday.

Solana is representing the so-called 5+1 group which includes the five permanent UN Security Council member states - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - plus Germany.

Tel Aviv - The European Union will freeze a planned upgrade of relations with Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported Thursday, quoting an internal Israeli Foreign Ministry paper.

Ha'aretz also cited a Swedish diplomat, who spoke ahead of Stockholm's assumption of the bloc's rotating presidency in July.

Brussels - Five years after its biggest-ever enlargement, the European Union is still struggling to accept that it really is one union, not two separate blocs called "old" and "new."

Talk of "old Europe" and "new Europe" is "very much a common use: it's very easy and everybody knows who you mean by it, so I think it will stick with us for a while," Maros Sefcovic, Slovakia's EU ambassador since enlargement, told the German Press Agency dpa.

Prague  - Turkish Foreign Minist

Zagreb- Croatia has rejected the European Union's offer of mediation between Zagreb and Slovenia in a border dispute that is delaying Croatia's EU accession talks, local media reported on Saturday.

Croatian President Stjepan Mesic was quoted by the daily Jutarnji List paper as saying that the offer "made no sense." The refusal of the EU offer would also be approved by Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, the paper said.