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Italy clashes with EU over migrants stranded on rescue boat
[ARABNEWS] Italia’s populist government said on Friday it would cut funds for the EU unless other states take in boat Diplomatic sources told Rooters a meeting of EU state envoys in Brussels found no agreement on how to deal with the 150 mostly Eritrea ...is run by the People's Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), with about the amounts of democracy and justice you'd expect from a party with that name. National elections have been periodically scheduled and cancelled; none have ever been held in the country. The president, Isaias Afewerki, has been in office since independence in 1993 and will probably die there of old age... n More than 650,000 people have reached Italian shores since 2014 and Rome has begun to take a rigidly anti-immigration line, saying it will not let any more rescue ships dock unless other EU states agree to take the people in. "There has not been a deal on Diciotti," one diplomat said after the Brussels talks. Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who heads the anti-immigrant League party, has said they will not be allowed ashore until other EU states agree to take them in ‐ prompting a criminal investigation into whether the Salvini’s government ally, Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, who leads the 5-Star Movement, has said his party will not approve next year’s European Union  ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...funding if there is no action soon. "The soft line does not work, the hard line will be to withhold funds if they don’t listen to us," Di Maio said. Rejecting the Italian threats as unacceptable, the EU’s executive European Commission said a solution to the Diciotti case was its "main priority." "Unconstructive comments, let alone threats ... will not get us any closer to a solution," front man Alexander Winterstein told a news conference on Friday. The issue of how to handle Italy threatens to pull EU funds over migrant boat crisis [Dhaka Tribune] Italia's deputy prime minister has threatened to pull the country's EU funding if the bloc does not come to the aid of 150 people stranded aboard an Italian coastguard ship. The A meeting of high-level representatives from around a dozen EU member states is due to be held on Friday to discuss the issue, according to the Commission. "In recent months we have had the chance to see how a soft line with the European Union worked and how a hard line works," Italia's Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio said in an interview published on Facebook on Thursday. "If tomorrow (Friday) nothing comes out of the European Commission meeting, if they decide nothing regarding the Diciotti and the redistribution of the EU figures for 2016 say Italia contributed just under 14 billion euros to the EU budget -- less than one percent of its gross national income -- while the bloc spent 11.6 billion euros in Italia. Di Maio, who heads the anti-establishment Five Star, said Italia didn't want the "mickey taken out of us by the union's other countries" on the distribution of "The EU was born of principles like solidarity. If it is not capable of redistributing 170 people it has serious problems with its founding principles," he said in an interview with state broadcaster RAI. Posted by: Fred 2018-08-25 |
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