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SUMMERTIME cries out for some beach reading. How about a page-turner on the European Union? On paper, the E.U. is a colossus, with nearly 500 million people and a gross domestic product of around $16 trillion, larger than that of the United States. In practice, the E.U. is an empire of paper, some 90,000 pages laboriously negotiated over half a century. These rules and regulations -- they expand to two million pages once translated into the union's many member languages -- govern everything from bottle labels to agricultural subsidies. Settle into that beach chair. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

BRUSSELS -- Amid a debt crisis that threatens to engulf the global economy, the European Union this week will try again to address a serious flaw in the construction of the euro: the lack of fiscal rules tough enough to provide a foundation for the currency. While steering far clear of transferring actual authority over national budgets here, the revamped rules, scheduled for a vote Wednesday in the European Parliament, are described as tougher, more credible and more sophisticated than the original set, on paper at least. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]