The Dutch are poised to reject the treaty tomorrow by an even larger margin than the French, in effect killing off the constitution.President Chirac will announce a new government line-up today under a new prime minister who is expected to preserve the French "social model" - a response to the result in France.Mr Blair said the French result had raised fundamental questions about the EU economies. "I think underneath all this there is a profound question about the future of Europe and the European economy, and how it deals with globalisation."Senior ministerial sources confirmed last night that the UK's referendum was in effect dead. "What's important now is to have a time for reflection," he said. The French vote has placed the EU at the crossroads of a historic dispute over the future direction of the European Union.As the ripples of France's resounding rejection of the constitution continued to wash across Europe, the European Commission's president, Jose Manuel Barroso said the French had created a "very serious problem" for Europe, whose enlargement plans have now been stopped in their tracks. Tony Blair was on a collision course with Jacques Chirac last night as the Government prepared to announce that the UK was shelving plans for a referendum after Sunday's overwhelming French "no" to the EU constitution. Mr Blair broke a holiday in Tuscany to make it clear that he now intended to use the forthcoming British presidency to lead a bruising battle between "old Europe" and "new Europe" over the reform of the EU economies.

She became a prot? of Germany's "Reunification Chancellor", Helmut Kohl. She succeeded him as party leader after a slush fund scandal in 2000, as the CDU sought a break with its past.. In her youth, Mrs Merkel was a member of the Communist Free German Youth movement and won party awards for her academic brilliance. East Germany's Stasi secret police tried to recruit her as a spy while she was a student of physics.

Mrs Merkel managed to dissuade them by declaring she was an "uncontrollable chatterbox".Mrs Merkel entered politics as a press spokeswoman for East Germany's first democratically elected government in 1990. Talks between the two sides to end the legal dispute collapsed in April.. Multiplex, the Australian property company building the new Wembley football stadium, will make a £45m loss on the project after cost overruns and construction delays. Airbus is applying to the UK, France, Spain and Germany to receive billions of pounds of state financing for the launch of its A350 jet. The EU claims Boeing also receives state support in the form of favourable tax breaks. The US says Airbus has pocketed more than $15bn (£8bn) in government loans that it claims amounts to illegal aid.But the EU then filed a counter-complaint against the US, saying Boeing had benefited from unfair support from the US government of as much as $23bn. The company has warned that if the UK Government does not rubber-stamp a £400m aid package for the A350, development and production due to be carried out in the UK will have to go elsewhere.But the US's Boeing, which is planning to develop a rival to the A350, wants all Airbus loans to be stopped, claiming they amount to illegal state aid under global trade rules.The US filed an initial WTO complaint against the EU in October, angry that European governments had given Airbus low-interest loans to help it develop and finance new aircraft.