Italy back in EU top trio

(ANSA) - Rome, August 23 - Italy is back in the EU's top trio after the three-way summit with Germany and France off the island of Ventotene Monday, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Tuesday.
    "In this season Italy has re-entered with full qualifications the leading group in Europe, which it had appeared to have left," Alfano said, calling the Ventotene summit a "symbolic but also substantive response" to pressing EU issues like Brexit, terror, migrants, growth and youth unemployment.
    Alfano also welcomed Germany's decision to join the EU's migrant relocation scheme by taking several hundred asylum seekers from Italy.
    The interior minister praised German Chancellor Angela Merkel for wanting to be on the "right side of history" in welcoming more than a million refugees, even if it might cost her votes.