Strasbourg, 7th September 2010: European Parliament
Today the President of the European Commission Barroso delivered the first ever State of the Union address to Members of the European Parliament. You can read the official Press Release with the content of his speech here.
Whether or not this is a laudable thing is up for our readers to decide. We hereby offer you some links to different reactions and points of view about the meaning of such an address from European Voice, the blogger Grahnlaw, Labour MEP Mary Honeyball’s blog and an intriguing Barroso Buzzword Bingo at Bloggingportal.
Enjoy the read and make up your mind!
We would like to apologize to our readers for the technical problems we have encountered for the past 2 weeks when our site was down. After having moved to a different server the issues have now been resolved and we hope you will be able to enjoy many more interesting articles and give us your feedback and discuss European and global issues with us!
Your Editorial Team.
Of course the true winners of this year’s World Cup are many: first and foremost the game of football itself; second the South African hosts as they showed great support for all the teams despite their home team Bafana, bafana suffering an early exit; and thirdly we as Europeans can be proud that the top three finishers were all European teams with Spain leading the way!
Even Commission President Barroso got enthusiastic about Europe for a change: “In this championship, the European teams were ambassadors of Europe’s spirit, energy and openness,” he said in a statement emailed to press on Monday morning.
The European Commission has launched today the Europe 2020 Strategy. The Commission identifies three key drivers for growth, to be implemented through concrete actions at EU and national levels: smart growth (fostering knowledge, innovation, education and digital society), sustainable growth (making our production more resource efficient while boosting our competitiveness) and inclusive growth (raising participation in the labour market, the acquisition of skills and the fight against poverty).
The strategy was criticised by some to be not ambitious enough.
The European Parliament approved the new line-up of the European Commission today at 9 February 2010 with 488 votes in favour, 137 against and with 72 abstentions.
The new team will be in charge during the legislative period until 2014.
Read more about it here.
[The New Federalist, webzine of the Young European Federalist]