Hara said the president herself funds girls through school and is encouraging her ministers to do the same.
May demanded to know why, if that was so, he had unsuccessfully pressed ministers to approve the same measures, including suspending verification of fingerprints of biometric visa holders from outside Europe, before the four-month pilot scheme started in July.
According to a report in Der Spiegel magazine, Merkel is considering staying away from Euro 2012 games staged in Ukraine and is urging her ministers to do the same.
"The least one can say is that Jouyet and all Hollande's ministers belong to the same clique.
Once Spain pulled out of Iraq, the author theorizes, the pressure on Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, to do the same might be unbearable — "and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly".
Indeed, the moment of greatest danger to Mr Brown was last Thursday when James Purnell, the Blairite work and pensions secretary, stunned the political world by resigning and calling on the Prime Minister to do the same.
In a statement the UK government appears to have anticipated, Rajoy said he would expect David Cameron, the UK prime minister, to take the same position if Catalonia sought to join the EU as an independent state.
He said the Labour leader was considering publishing his own tax returns to put extra pressure on the prime minister to do the same.
This followed a request from Football Federation president Iya Mohammed urging the Sports Minister to sign the same paperwork.
There was thus a certain symbolism in the decision by Dominique de Villepin, France's prime minister, to choose the same place for his first big speech on Europe, on January 18th.
