British Prime Minister Tony Blair took the EU helm Friday, announcing he will host an EU summit to assess the direction and speed of European integration.
Blair said the purpose of the autumn summit was to review how Europe's treasured social model is hobbling the continent economically and to see if the 25 leaders can rekindle public enthusiasm about the EU's future.
Blair said he will ask the leaders to revisit their ambitious goal to make Europe the world's most dynamic economy by 2010, an undertaking launched in 2000 but one that has missed many targets already.
That failure, coupled with the rejection of the EU constitution by French and Dutch voters and Blair's own acrimonious exchanges with French President Jacques Chirac at a mid-June summit over EU finances point to a general malaise in the EU.
"You cannot really abstract the [EU] financing deal from this debate about the future direction of Europe," Blair told a visiting group of Brussels-based journalists.
Earlier he met with the European Commission -- the EU executive -- to discuss the agenda for the second half of this year when Britain holds the EU presidency.
At a joint news conference with European Commission President Jose-Manuel Barroso, Blair said the two "agreed it would be sensible to have an informal summit ... to discuss how Europe can make progress in the future."
He set no date for the meeting.
Blair said the crisis of confidence gripping the EU required a period of intense soul-searching that would have to cover a wide field: from the EU's economic failures to its contentious plans to embrace more newcomers, to revamping the budget that still devotes more than 40 percent of annual spending, to agriculture.
It was the farm-spending issue that caused the collapse of the June summit in Brussels, compounding a crisis resulting from the French and Dutch voter rejection of the EU charter two weeks earlier.
The EU leaders have pushed back a November 2006 deadline for all EU states to ratify the EU constitution -- by perhaps as much as a year.
On Friday, Blair said he saw little chance of rescuing the charter.
He said the French and Dutch rejection reflected an ill-defined but deep-seated sense among the bloc's population that the EU is out of touch with public opinion and not acting on sensitive issues such as immigration, crime and security.
Blair pledged to try hard in the second half of this year to get agreement on an EU budget for the years after 2007. "Whether that is possible I really don't know. Nor does anyone else at this stage," he added.
The budget disagreement touches on Blair's refusal to give in to his partners' demand to surrender an annual rebate -- now totaling some 4.6 billion euros (US$5.5 billion) -- that London gets for its large budget payments. Britain's net payments are large because it has relatively few farmers, limiting its ability to win EU funding.
In Blair's view, the EU budget as structured now will not let EU governments take in new, poorer members and at the same time fulfill their 2000 promise to make Europe the world's most dynamic economy.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
CONFIDENT ON DEAL: ‘Ukraine wants a seat at the table, but wouldn’t the people of Ukraine have a say? It’s been a long time since an election, the US president said US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and added that he was more confident of a deal to end the war after US-Russia talks. Trump increased pressure on Zelenskiy to hold elections and chided him for complaining about being frozen out of talks in Saudi Arabia. The US president also suggested that he could meet Russian President Vladimir Putin before the end of the month as Washington overhauls its stance toward Russia. “I’m very disappointed, I hear that they’re upset about not having a seat,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida when asked about the Ukrainian