European Union foreign ministers are expected to launch the bloc's first police monitoring mission in the Middle East.
The union is set to deploy 50 observers to watch operations at the border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.  
Officials who met in Brussels on Monday said a first contingent of 12 officers and experts could be deployed to the Palestinian Authority-controlled outpost by the end of the week to prepare for the official start of their mission on 25 November, when the Rafah border crossing opens. Fifty to 70 officers and experts will be sent.
Israelis and Palestinians agreed to the opening of the crossing during talks last week.  
The EU mission is to be led by an Italian police general, whose job will be to monitor the crossing to allay Israeli fears that the checkpoint could be used to smuggle resistance fighters or weapons into Gaza.

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EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - An EU mission consisting of around 60 policemen and customs officials will start work at the Gaza-Egypt border next week, but the EU monitors will have no active enforcement role, EU diplomats say.
EU officials told EUobserver that the EU border mission is scheduled to start on 23 November and that it will consist of both policemen and customs officials.
The news comes after the announcement by US foreign secretary Condoleezza Rice earlier on Tuesday (15 November) that Israel and the Palestinians reached a deal on the management of the Rafah border crossing.
The deal includes a "third party" monitoring role at Rafah for the EU, constituting the first real security mission of the bloc in the Middle East.
According to Israel, the crossing between Gaza and Egypt is characterised by weapons smuggling and uncontrolled passage of Palestinian fighters, since Jerusalem pulled out of Gaza this summer

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The in-orbit testing phase of Galileo, Europe's satellite-navigation system, will begin in December.
The first demonstrator spacecraft will fly from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on a Soyuz rocket on the 28th of the month.
The satellite, known as Giove-A, has the critical task of claiming the frequencies allocated to Galileo under international agreements.
To do this, the UK-built spacecraft must generate and transmit a timing and navigation signal by June 2006.
Galileo is Europe's biggest and most expensive space project. It will be independent of the American Global Positioning System (GPS) but interoperable with it.
Analysts expect the new constellation to drive a multi-billion-euro industry, creating perhaps 140,000 jobs

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BRUSSELS, Belgium

The European Union's compromise proposal on how to govern the Internet is gaining international support ahead of this week's U.N. technology summit, the EU's executive Commission said Tuesday.
The EU has been promoting its proposal ahead of the formal start on Wednesday of the three-day United Nations technology summit in Tunisia, the preparations for which have spurred accusations that the Tunisian government has barred entry to activists trying to attend the event.
At issue is the question of who gets to make the big decisions on how the Internet is run _ a task that now solely belongs to the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, overseen by the U.S. Commerce Department.
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Government technology RFID
The IBM Center for the Business of Government has released a report (PDF) calling for the federal goverment to take the lead on making RFID a widespread technology. The report details three federal case studies, at the Defense Dept., FDA and Dept. of Agriculture, where RFID is being used to identify "things" in different ways.
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