The UK's hopes of a successful deal on the European budget to crown its six-month EU presidency were left ominously in the balance on Thursday night after a wary two-hour meeting in Downing Street between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
On what was only her second day in office the first woman, and the first person from former East Germany, to govern her country stressed both the importance of sustaining the expensive EU model of social protection and the need for economic reforms to fund it.
But she refused to be drawn on whether or not she supports the EU majority in demanding that Britain give up all or most of its annual ?2 billion-?3 billion (US$3.5 billion-US$5.2 billion) budget rebate, or backs Blair who wants further concessions on farm subsidies before he gives ground.
"I want to have success and the situation of each country has to be taken into account. If anybody forgets one country with its interests you won't get any success," Merkel told reporters after she and Blair had spent an hour -- twice as long as scheduled -- in private talks with only interpreters present.
As for the six-monthly EU summit which is due on Dec. 15-16 in Brussels, where there will be huge pressure on Blair to give ground, Merkel later refused to look "into the crystal ball", saying: "We have three weeks left. Everybody will want to make their contribution and then we will see."
That looked like a hint that Berlin expects London to give ground. Most EU states argue that the rebate conceded in the darkest days of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher's rule is no longer justified.
An attempt to clinch a budget deal at the June summit was blocked by UK Treasury concerns. If Britain fails next month, either Austria or Finland, the next countries to hold the EU presidencies, will try in more hostile circumstances. The new eastern European EU members are also pressing hard for an early budget deal to ease the acute costs of their modernization programmes.
Over lunch yesterday, the new Polish prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, disclosed that the new states had written a joint letter calling for an urgent resolution to the wrangling over the budget. He called for "solidarity capable of overcoming selfishness."
Although Blair did not go as far on Thursday as French President Jacques Chirac, who kissed Merkel's hand when she visited Paris on Wednesday, the two leaders appeared relaxed in front of the TV cameras last night.
Blair, whose relationship with Gerhard Schroder faltered over the Iraq war, said he looked forward to developing a "very good and close working relationship" with the new chancellor. Reform was vital to meet the "challenges and opportunities of globalization," he stressed.
Britain also remains committed to trying to secure a budget deal in Brussels, but it will be difficult, as Blair admitted. Downing Street aides said later that no budget detail had been discussed.
Merkel conceded: "Without economic strength Europe will not be able to maintain its social model, and that is why reforms are of the utmost necessity."
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to