Incoming European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso revamped his EU executive for parliamentary approval and proposed Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini as candidate for justice commissioner.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende, who is chairing the EU summit, welcomed the changes and said they would go a long way toward soothing the objections which brought the 25-nation EU to the brink of an institutional crisis last week.
"Mr. Barroso has a good and balanced team," Balkenende said on Thursday.
Barroso said he would present his new team to European Parliament leaders yesterday, barely a week after the legislature forced him to back down and jettison embattled Italian candidate Rocco Buttiglione.
After hearings for the new candidates, Barroso is expected to put his team to a parliamentary vote during the session of Nov. 15.
"Now I am ready to go to parliament," Barroso told reporters. "I have made the necessary and sufficient changes ... I have worked hard over recent days to build bridges and find a balanced solution."
Balkenende said Barroso should be confirmed as soon as possible.
"Lets hope that Mr. Barroso can get quickly to work with his new team," he told reporters.
Barroso completed his reworked lineup, which also includes the shuffling of two other candidates, after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi proposed, during an EU leaders summit, his foreign minister as Italy's new representative on the EU executive.
Frattini, who will also be a vice president on the new executive, replaces Buttiglione. The conservative Roman Catholic said during his confirmation hearings last month that homosexuality was "a sin" and later criticized single mothers.
Buttiglione's remarks and initial refusal to quit his nomination enraged EU lawmakers, and a majority of parties, including Socialists, Greens and Liberals, threatened to veto the new team.
Martin Schulz, the leader of the Socialist group in the European Parliament who led opposition to Barroso's team, welcomed the changes and told German daily Aachner Nachrichten, it was "a basis for good cooperation."
In other changes to his nominated lineup, Barroso said he would shuffle former Hungarian foreign minister, Laszlo Kovacs from energy to taxation and customs. He also accepted the new candidate from Latvia, former ambassador to the EU Andris Piebalgs, as a replacement for Ingrida Udre. And he said he would continue to back Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes, the candidate for the post of EU antitrust commissioner, who had come under criticism for her potential conflict of interest with major businesses.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS