Word: romes
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Last Friday, while we all agonized about the impending U.S. elections, in Rome a singular political spectacle took place. On the Capitoline Hill, crowned by Michelangelo’s beautiful piazza, 29 European heads of government and of state met to sign the European Union (EU) constitution. The tulips were Dutch, the direction Italian (Franco Zeffirelli, of “Romeo and Juliet” fame) and all the politicians looked dapper indeed as they posed before the iconic statue of Marcus Aurelius. In true European style, however, the performance was surrounded by a flurry of chaotic disagreement...
...host of the affair, one Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister whose tan out-glows even John Kerry’s, was having a pretty bad day. Rome was chosen not because any of Italy’s neighbors particularly like Berlusconi (quite the opposite is true), but so as to hark back to the epochal 1957 Rome Treaty, which established the European Economic Community and laid the path to the current...
This drama could not be ignored in Rome on Friday: Both outgoing and incoming commissioners crowded the Capitoline. The imposing neoclassical fresco of the Hall of the Horaces looked down on the heads of government as one by one they stepped up to sign the constitution. The constitutional treaty is a lengthy compilation of all previous EU agreements, meant to clarify the division of competences as well as afford the EU new powers, and is widely considered the ultimate political compromise. Only a relatively weak document could make all states content, and its final form required over a year...
...line drives like Michael Phelps bulleting into an Olympic pool and Astros ace Roger Clemens, 42, who pitched in Series for both the Red Sox (losing to the Mets) and the Yanks (beating the Mets), trying valiantly, vainly to get his hometown team to the finals. As commentator Jim Rome noted, it was "the best series that no one ever...
...Barroso arrived in Rome with a clear message: the European Parliament is not to be trifled with. "We'll get what we wanted, which is an improved Commission," says Andrew Duff, a British Liberal Democrat M.E.P. That result would silence talk about last week's showdown having been just another example of pointless institutional muscle-flexing. By demanding higher standards for the Commission than the leaders of the member states themselves - and by proving its members had the gumption to stick together and stand firm - the European Parliament has made the most of its powers of approval. Now both institutions...