Trump: EU was ‘set up to take advantage’ of US

‘We can’t let that happen,’ US president said.

Donald Trump has accused the EU of going after the United States’ “piggybank,” amid an ongoing trade dispute over tariffs.

“We love the countries of the European Union. But the European Union, of course, was set up to take advantage of the United States,” Trump said at a rally in North Dakota on Wednesday. “And you know what, we can’t let that happen.”

His latest comment comes amid a continued escalation in the trade war between the U.S. and the rest of the world, which began when Trump slapped a series of tariffs on some countries at the end of March, before extending them to close allies such as the EU at the end of May. Brussels responded with retaliatory duties, which came into force last week, prompting iconic American motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson to announce it would move some of its production abroad.

Trump on Wednesday doubled down on his claims the EU is cheating the U.S on trade, saying the U.S. last year lost $15 billion on trade with the EU.

“Because they send the Mercedes in, they send the BMWs in, they send their products in [and when] we sent things to them, they say ‘No, thank you, we don’t take your product,” Trump said. “For all you free traders out there, that’s not free trade, that’s stupid trade.”

Trump — who on Tuesday extended an invitation to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to discuss trade — has insisted the EU will ultimately back down, but Brussels says it won’t give in to bullying.

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“There are no [trade] talks planned,” EU trade chief Cecilia Malmström said Tuesday, adding that “there had to be consequences [when] you do not respect international global rules.”

France’s economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, has also insisted Europe won’t back down. “If the United States hits us again with a 20 percent increase on cars, we will respond again. We don’t want an escalation, but we are the ones being attacked,” he said.

PRAGUE — The Czech Republic looks set for a confrontation with the European Commission — and its anti-nuclear neighbors — over its ambitions to expand nuclear power.

Prague wants to streamline a project to build a new reactor at the Dukovany nuclear power plant, 50 kilometers north of the Austrian border, to replace a Soviet-era reactor. That means persuading Brussels to exempt the project from strict EU rules on government bids.

If it fails, the Czech government is considering striking a nuclear deal with Russia along the same contentious lines as Hungary, which signed with Moscow last year.

The second option would raise trouble for the Commission, which reluctantly approved Hungary’s Paks II nuclear project last year following long negotiations with Budapest. The decision was widely criticized for seeming to appeal to political interests over technical merits and is now being challenged by Austria for breaching EU state aid rules.

Austria and another Czech neighbor, Germany, strongly oppose any expansion of nuclear power in Europe.

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Kristýna Křižanová, adviser to the deputy minister of industry and trade, said talks with Brussels are “getting really complicated and we are not sure we will be granted the exemption.” She said the country is responding to Commission questions ahead of a March deadline before another round of talks.

If that doesn’t work, the Czech government will consider other moves, including a direct government-to-government deal like Hungary’s €12 billion Paks. Budapest granted Russia’s Rosatom the contract to build the two reactors without a tender, arguing that the state-owned company was the only one that could fulfill the technical requirements to replace older Soviet-era units. Russia is also financing €10 billion of the project through a loan to Hungary.

“We are now assessing other possible options and that is a legitimate example of how to proceed, but we have no preferred option right now,” Křižanová said.

Under its State Energy Policy, approved in 2015, the Czech Republic aims to make nuclear the main source of its electricity as aging coal-fired power plants are phased out over the coming decades. Nuclear is forecast to rise to above 50 percent of the power mix by 2040.

For that to happen, the Czech government needs to get the new project off the ground. A previous effort by state-controlled utility CEZ to build two reactors at the Temelin nuclear plant turned into a fiasco. That tender was launched in 2009 and cancelled in 2014, the victim of a series of over-optimistic financial forecasts and problems in getting government guarantees.

The decision on Dukovany, however, may be delayed as political parties negotiate the formation of a new government.

A second try

Fearful of a repeat, Prague wants Brussels to agree to exemptions of strict EU rules on public bidding, downgrading the issue of price in favor of criteria such as technology, to shorten and simplify the process.

Ján Štuller, special envoy for nuclear energy at the ministry of industry and trade, said the six bidders who completed a Czech Request for Information in 2016 are “on the same line of the starting point with the same opportunity to win.”

But if the Commission agrees to the relaxed tender conditions, or if the Czechs decide to pursue a direct government-to-government deal, Russia and its state nuclear company Rosatom would find themselves ahead of the five other bidders — Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, China General Nuclear Power, U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric, France’s Areva and EDF, and a joint venture between Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Areva called ATMEA.

Like the Hungarians, the Czechs could argue that Rosatom is best placed to replace the existing Russian reactor. On top of that, Moscow can offer financing for projects it sees as strategically important, and it has strong political backing in Prague following the reelection of openly pro-Russian President Miloš Zeman in January.

And Rosatom has the advantage of being able to offer nuclear technology tried and tested in Russia, making its project in Hungary cheaper than Areva’s under construction in Britain, for example.

“Rosatom will be ready to offer the best conditions to the Czech side, depending on which project model will be selected by the Czech government,” the company’s media office said, pointing to projects it’s developing in Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh, Belarus and Finland as well as Hungary. “In case the Czech government decides to announce a tender, Rosatom will be ready to participate in it.”

Westinghouse, which said it was the preliminary front-runner for the Czech Temelin project in 2013, worries that the country’s new nuclear procurement process could become a “banking contest” in which the bidder’s financial package trumps other criteria, said a company official who asked not to be named.

That, the official said, would give Rosatom and state-owned rivals from South Korea and China an unfair advantage over private companies such as Westinghouse and Areva, which are both in financial trouble.

Mikhail Chudakov, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Department of Nuclear Energy, doesn’t believe nuclear power is possible at a large scale without strong government commitment and government assistance.

“One of the reasons why nuclear power plants are planned but not constructed is the high upfront investment,” he said.

Russian relations

Zeman has said he would not be opposed to a nuclear deal similar to the one Hungary struck for Paks. The Czech Republic’s acting Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has not expressed an official position on Russia.

“We’ve always known that the preference is for Russia,” said an EU diplomat based in Prague. “The decision in the end will be political.”

That could be especially true if the project’s need for subsidies becomes more dire, especially amid lower European wholesale power prices and falling renewable energy costs.

Prague is now looking at how to cover the cost of new nuclear. Babiš has spoken publicly against the previous government’s idea of raising money for the project by spinning off some of CEZ’s units and keeping nuclear, fossil fuels and hydroelectric assets under state control.

“There is a vast consensus on building new nuclear resources … but financing is one topic where we do not have a consensus,” said Štuller of the ministry of industry and trade. “In November, I would love to see the answer to three questions: the investment model, the financing model and how we should select the supplier.”

But if Rosatom does win the contract, the Czech Republic is likely to face a much higher level of scrutiny than Hungary did over Paks II.

There are also security fears in Brussels about the growing influence of Russia in the Czech Republic, which would only increase if Moscow gained such a stranglehold over the country’s electricity production. Rosatom is already the exclusive supplier of fuel for the Temelin nuclear plant until 2020.

“Projects such as Nord Stream 2, or Russian energy activities in Serbia, the Czech Republic and Hungary keep the Euroatlantic counterintelligence community awake at night,” said Jakub Janda, deputy director of the Prague-based European Values think tank.

Rosatom rejected the idea that nuclear energy could be used to abuse market power.

“Unfortunately, there are some energy groups’ lobbyists and — in our view, irresponsible — politicians who exploit ignorance about nuclear energy and current political divisions between Russia and the West to spread myths and Bogeyman stories about nuclear geopolitics in order to derail new build projects.”

Sara Stefanini and Nicholas Hirst contributed reporting from Brussels.

Actress and gun control activist Alyssa Milano reacted to the Virginia Beach shooting by blaming Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Milano suggested that the shooting would not have occurred in HR8 had been voted on in the Senate.

11 KILLED AND MCCONNELL WON’T BRING #HR8 UP FOR A VOTE. Tell me again how the @GOP is “pro-life” when they won’t vote for a bill— that already passed the house—that would make the country safer from gun violence. #NoRA.” the actress said.

HR8 is legislation criminalizing private gun sales by requiring would-be private gun buyers to undergo a background check like buyers at retail. The problem with Milano promoting this legislation now — and blaming McConnell in the process — is that NBC News reports the Virginia Beach attacker acquired his gun “legally,” which means he underwent a background check to get it.

Democrats named the legislation HR8 as a way to honor Gabby Giffords, who eight years ago survived being shot in Tucson, Arizona. But the truth of the matter is that HR8 would not have prevented her from being shot, as her attacker passed a background check to acquire his gun.

If Hollywood gun control activists and other Democrat surrogates want to lessen the occurrences of heinous attacks, the solution is fewer restrictions on armed law-abiding citizens, not more. Law-abiding citizens must be able to shoot back.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at [email protected]. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

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Europe has long prided itself on being an environmental leader — a champion of “the circular economy,” in which energy and resources are carefully husbanded, reused and recycled.

The truth is that much of its green success has relied on exporting its trash elsewhere.

Until the beginning of this year, the Continent kept itself clean by sending millions of tons of paper, cardboard, plastics and textiles on cargo ships over the horizon to China.

Of the 56.4 million tons of paper EU citizens threw away in 2016, some 8 million ended up in China, purchased by recycling centers that turn it into cardboard and send it back to Europe as packaging for Chinese exports. That same year, the EU collected 8.4 million tons of plastic waste, and sent 1.6 million tons to China.

At the end of last year, Beijing put an end to the practice, putting in place strict limits on imports of foreign waste. Only eight weeks later, Europe is struggling to deal with mountains of plastic and paper waste.

“All the sorting centers are clogged, our stocks are exceeding the allowed limits,” said Pascal Gennevieve, head of paper at Federec, the federation of French recyclers, and director of recycling at French waste management giant Veolia. “Right after the Christmas peak, we had a lot of paper and no export solution. All European plants are full, saturated.”

Garbage ban

The EU is to some extent a victim of its own success. For years, European leaders have touted the benefits of limiting and reusing waste. Just last month, the European Commission presented its vision for the future of plastics, exhorting Europe to turn waste into an economic opportunity.

Europe’s pitch for sustainability, it seems, was so convincing that it persuaded Beijing to give it a go.

The Chinese Communist Party is under growing pressure from an increasingly affluent middle class fed up with the side effects of decades of breakneck growth: cities where the air isn’t fit to breathe and a landscape clogged with garbage.

Beijing cited environmental and health concerns when it imposed strict limitations on imports of 24 types of “foreign garbage,” including plastic scraps and mixed, unsorted paper, that came into force at the beginning of this year.

China’s limits on impurities in paper and cardboard are more stringent than the EU’s — a standard almost impossible to meet. It has also imposed a flat-out ban on plastics.

The country’s recycling capacity will be focused instead on dealing with its own mounting trash problem.

China has “an environmental agenda and an economic agenda to … become world leaders in recycling,” said Arnaud Brunet, director general of the Bureau of International Recycling, the global association of waste traders.

The limitations have already had an effect, as the waste industry on both sides of the ocean has scrambled to adjust. As of November, China had taken in just 6.4 million tons of paper from the EU, compared to 8 million tons in 2016. Plastic waste imports from the EU fell by 36 percent last year to 1 million.

“We are juggling,” said Nicole Couder, EU affairs officer at global waste management firm Suez. “We are reaching a point where we have too much stock … We’re going to have a drastic issue in a short-term perspective. We are reaching this crisis stage now … I don’t think we can’t stress enough the impact of China.”

‘A gamechanger’

As garbage problems cascade across the Continent, the European Commission is seizing the crisis to promote its vision of a clean economy.

The Commission’s Plastics Strategy, announced in January, aims to make all plastic packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, something that it says could create 200,000 jobs. For that to happen, Europe’s capacity to sort and recycle waste would have to be multiplied fourfold — something that would cost as much as €16.6 billion.

“We mostly export,” said Commission Vice President Jyrki Katainen while presenting the strategy. “This does not make any sense in economic or sustainability terms. We are throwing away 95 percent of the value of plastic packages and only 5 percent is retained in our economy.”

The Commission is also considering a tax on virgin plastics to make recycled plastics more attractive. Low oil prices mean new plastics are much cheaper to produce than recycled ones.

“It would be a gamechanger,” Antonino Furfari, director of Plastics Recyclers Europe, said of a plastic tax.

In addition, EU countries agreed last December to raise recycling targets for other packaging materials — paper and cardboard, metals and glass — to 70 percent by 2030.

Two-speed recycling

All these steps are still pretty far into the future, however, and in the meantime, some EU countries are finding it easier to deal with the new Chinese limits than others.

Countries like the Netherlands, which segregates all of its waste into separate streams, have been relatively unaffected. “The quality of collection in the Netherlands is very good and we can sell it very well,” said Hans van de Nes, director of Dutch waste management company Sortiva.

Most EU countries collect plastic with metal, which helps reducing collection costs and maintains relatively high quality, but the U.K., Ireland, Greece, Romania and Malta allow a mix of metal, plastics, glass, cardboard and paper in the same bag. That produces low-quality waste that is difficult to sell.

Ireland, the highest per capita producer of plastic waste, depended on China to deal with 95 percent of its plastic waste and is now coping with a waste crisis, according to local reports.

The U.K. is one of the EU’s largest waste exporters and lacks recycling capacity at home. “There is more stock than we would normally have. I think that the China import ban is contributing to this. Is it a crisis? I can’t answer that one yet,” said Simon Ellin, CEO of the Recycling Association in the U.K.

British recyclers hope that the glut of material resulting from the Chinese ban, combined with the risk of not being able to export waste to the EU after Brexit, will prompt the government to overhaul its approach to waste management in its Resources and Waste Strategy, due later this year. “If it’s a short-term pain for the longer term gain, we’re all for it,” Ellin said.

But for the moment, the U.K. is still sending its waste abroad.

New destinations

Indeed, as Beijing’s ban bites, some countries — including many in the EU, as well as the U.S. and Australia — are looking for other outlets in Asia to accept their waste overflow.

Provisional data from the Bureau of International Recycling, shared with POLITICO, show that between the last quarter of 2016 and that of 2017, Malaysia’s imports of plastic scrap more than doubled to 180,000 tons. Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and India show similar trends. There is no data yet for the first month of this year.

In response, some Asian countries are clamping down on waste imports.

Last month, Vietnam stopped issuing waste import permits. The Malaysian government passed a law last year obliging waste importers to have environmental permits, but so far this is little enforced: “We really don’t know what comes in,” said Mageswari Sangaralingam of the Consumers’ Association of Penang. “Enforcement is the issue.”

Still, Asian countries only account for half a million tons of global plastic scrap imports — less than one-third of what Europe once shipped to China.

Meanwhile on the Continent, the garbage glut has caused waste prices to plummet, causing environmental advocates and some in the industry to complain that much of it will end up in incinerators for energy production.

“We’re going to pick only the plastic we can sell, and the rest will go to incinerators,” said Gennevieve, the recycling director at Veolia. “It’s making energy, but it’s not making new materials.”

Incinerators are built to handle mixed municipal waste. Too much plastic — which releases more heat when burned — has a corrosive impact on machinery, meaning that waste-burning plants are also struggling with the oversupply.

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Some countries are turning to a cheaper option: landfilling.

The revised Landfill Directive, agreed upon by EU institutions last December, capped landfilling at 10 percent of all municipal waste by 2035 but allowed European countries with high landfill rates an extra five years to comply. Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Romania and  Slovakia all landfilled more than half of their waste in 2014 according to Eurostat.

The EU’s garbage can still be sent east, but to Eastern Europe instead of East Asia.

Bulgaria, which in 2014 landfilled 82 percent of its waste, has very low taxes on burying garbage.

“They could become the landfill of Europe,” said Ella Stengler, director of waste-to-energy plants federation CEWEP. “Waste always find the cheapest way.”

This article is part of a series on the circular economy, Getting Wasted.

Actor Tom Arnold compared the U.S. to Nazi Germany on Saturday in an attempt to slam the Trump administration’s use of migrant shelters on the southern border, claiming that this is “exactly how it started [in] Germany.”

“I’m Jewish. My uncle wrote The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler & grandfather was a medic in the 42nd Rainbow Division that liberated Dachau. This is exactly how it started Germany 1930’s Families rounded up, separated & put in cages,” Tom Arnold said in response to a Twitter user who superimposed a Nazi helmet on Vice President Mike Pence’s head and a Nazi flag behind him in a deep fake video clip.

“For those people who want to blame Mike Pence for lying about the conditions in the immigrant concentration camps, just remember; he was only ‘following orders,’” the user wrote, in a tweet with the Pence CNN video attached.

The vice president visited migrant shelters in the McAllen, Texas, area on Friday and sat down for an interview with CNN senior White House correspondent Pamela Brown, blasting individuals who routinely insult Customs and Border Protection agents and frequently compare migrant shelters to concentration camps.

“I hope first and foremost that we put to the lie this slander against Customs and Border Protection. People saying that families and children are being held in concentration camps is an outrage,” Pence said. “The Nazis killed people. Our Customs and Border Protection, as you heard today, are saving lives every day.”

Anderson Cooper 360 aired the interview but split the screen, showing a sizable group of male migrants in an overcrowded room. Pence called the network out on Twitter, informing followers that he also visited women and children who reportedly told said they were “being treated well.”

He wrote:

Arnold is far from the first ultra-left wing celebrity or politician who has irresponsibly compared migrant shelters to concentration camps. Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sparked the political firestorm after describing them as such during an Instagram live video last month.

“That is exactly what they are. They are concentration camps,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her initial video. “The fact that concentrations camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free is extraordinarily disturbing and we need to do something about it.”

She continued to double down for weeks, despite Holocaust survivors, Holocaust centers, and Polish politicians correcting her.

“I went through it. How can you – looking at my face – tell me that the camps that they have in the south are concentration camps?” Holocaust survivor Sami Steigmann asked in a Turning Point USA video.

“You are insulting every victim of the Holocaust,” he added. “Shame on you.”

Over the weekend, former View co-host Rosie O’Donnell spoke at the “Lights for Liberty: A Vigil to End Human Concentration Camps” protest in New York — one of hundreds across the country — and made a call to take the “fascist” out of the White House.

“The signs are beautiful. The sentiment here is beautiful. Don’t forget people. Look around. This is who we are,” she said. “This is what America stands for. All colors all shapes all sizes, all nationalities, sexualities, genders, transgender.”

“Freedom is what we were founded on. Freedom and decency are what we must demand from this government and never stop. Never forget until we take the fascist out of the White House,” O’Donnell said to applause.

She also appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen in June and directly compared migrant shelters to concentration camps.

“Yeah, the concentration camps, even though there’s lots of controversy about the word,” O’Donnell told Cohen. “But, actually, legitimate scholars who study genocide say, yes, these are, in fact, the criteria for concentration camps, they meet them. There are over 100,000 camps, in nearly every state.”

Avengers: Endgame, the culmination of ten years of Marvel superhero movies, has already smashed the global box office record after only two days in theaters. By Friday, the latest Marvel blockbuster had already made $644 million, making it the biggest opening of any film in history, according to CNN Business.

Before Saturday, Endgame had beaten its predecessor, Avengers: Infinity War, which made $641 million for its entire opening weekend. Endgame also broke the record in China for the biggest opening ever, ringing up $217 million in ticket sales.

The records are breaking in the U.S., as well. Thus far, Endgame toppled 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens by earning an estimated $156.7 million on Friday, $37 million more that the Star Wars record.

Industry beancounters are now estimating that Endgame could earn as much as $310 million by Sunday evening in the domestic market, a take that smashes the $258 million earned by Infinity War.

At this rate, Avengers: Endgame will join the billion-dollar club earlier than any previous film.

Marvel studio has earned an amazing $19 billion worldwide since debuting its first blockbuster, Ironman, a decade ago.

Other records Endgame will likely smash include Largest Thursday Preview Gross, Largest Friday, Opening Day and Single Day, Opening Weekend, April Opening, Spring Opening, and fastest to earn 150 million, $200 million, $250 million, and $300 million, among others.

Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.

Federal authorities announced on Tuesday that Lori Loughlin and her husband have been indicted by a federal grand jury with regards to their involvement in William “Rick” Singer’s college admissions scam.

16 parents were indicted on Tuesday in connection with the Department of Justice’s investigation into a wide-ranging college admissions scam. Amongst them are actress Lori Loughlin and her husband Mossimo Giannulli, who will now face an additional money laundering charge.

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The parents “were charged today in Boston in a second superseding indictment with conspiring to commit fraud and money laundering in connection with a scheme to use bribery to cheat on college entrance exams and to facilitate their children’s admission to selective colleges and universities as purported athletic recruits,” wrote the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston.

Loughlin and Giannulli were not among the 13 parents that decided to plead guilty to the charges on Monday under an agreement that had been worked out with federal prosecutors.

A source who spoke with Us Weekly says that Loughin is in denial about her role in the crime. According to the source, Loughlin does not believe she will spend time in prison.

“Lori is in denial and doesn’t believe she should have to spend any time in prison,” the source said. “She’ll go to trial before being separated from her family, and take those odds rather than just go to prison as part of a deal.”

A report from the Boston Herald suggests that Lori Loughlin and her husband face a maximum of 20 years in prison. Earlier this week, prosecutors offered the couple a plea deal that would have included a minimum of two years behind bars.

Stay tuned to Breitbart News for more updates on this story.

PARIS — Jean-Claude Juncker risks stirring up a hornets’ nest by including a small eurozone-focused budget in his blueprint for the EU’s long-term finances.

The European Commission president is not only jumping the gun — and meddling — in the tough negotiations currently under way between France, Germany and other governments on consolidating the EU’s monetary union, but he is also staking the Commission’s claim on future tools and procedures that some governments would prefer to keep out of Brussels’ way.

Just because Juncker has been thoughtful enough to include, in his proposals for the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), something that Germany may like and another thing that the French could favor doesn’t mean that his plans will see the light of day.

What will be music to Berlin’s ears is Juncker’s proposal to launch a “Reform Support Program” within the overall EU budget to provide financial and technical assistance to eurozone countries. Germany has long hinted that one possible way it could agree to pooling at least some resources would be to set up such an instrument — that is, financial aid conditional on the recipient country undertaking serious reforms.

What the French will like, meanwhile, is the Commission’s proposal to set up a stabilization fund to deal with economic or financial shocks. Economists have long argued that the eurozone is badly lacking a tool to face asymmetric shocks — unexpected economic developments that hit one particular country or region. To soothe longstanding German fears that such an initiative may lead to unconditional fiscal transfers, the Commission uses the cover of an  “investment” facility — which would offer a type of spending that passes for something more serious than the funding of current expenses.

On two fronts, though, the Commission is laying the ground for a turf war, in line with what it did in its own eurozone reform proposals presented in December.

The first is on how a eurozone budget should operate: Juncker has long made it clear that, contrary to the ideas of French President Emmanuel Macron, he thinks a future budget for the 19-country single currency bloc should be part of the EU’s.

“We do not need parallel structures. We do not need a budget for the euro area but a strong euro area budget line within the EU budget,” Juncker said in his State of the Union address in September.

Beneath the different approaches runs the old EU divide between the so-called federalists and those who favor a less-centralized approach in which governments deal and agree with each other.

The second aspect of a possible turf war is its bureaucratic component. The Commission and member governments disagree on who should be tasked with managing the potential future eurozone budget.

France and Germany so far seem to assume that the eurozone’s bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), which already manages the money lent to countries bailed out during the euro crisis (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus and Spain), would be in charge of managing the budget, whether in the form of reform support or rainy day funds.

Germany has even pushed hard for the ESM to monitor member countries’ compliance with the EU’s fiscal discipline rules, a task that is for now the Commission’s.

A spokesman for the ESM declined to comment on the Commission’s MFF proposal. But a French official noted, “Juncker isn’t about to cede ground because he has seen the danger” of losing some powers.

Paris so far seems agnostic on the second battle of the turf war. It would prefer governments to go ahead and agree on a reform package that wouldn’t give the Commission too much extra power. But the French are also wary about the ESM’s governance, whose unanimity rule allows one country (read: Germany) to oppose decisions.

“If you’re talking about a rainy day fund, the ESM needs to act quickly and it can’t do that if the German government always pretends they have to go get the authorization of the Bundestag for any decision,” said the French official.

For its part, a Commission official denied that Juncker’s latest proposals amount to a turf war and maintains that it is staying above the fray of disagreeing governments.

The official said the idea was to “keep the momentum” on eurozone reform — which “might die a natural death, if you leave it up to the French and Germans.”

A coalition of black women pro-life leaders is calling upon Hollywood elites to end their push for more abortions of black babies as the way for black women to escape poverty and abuse.

The women leaders, who are part of a larger group of black leaders known as the National Black Prolife Coalition, say they view abortion as a “cruel detriment to the growth of their communities.”

“For decades, Planned Parenthood’s slick advertising has promoted the genocide against communities of color,” Denise Walker of Rich in Mercy, an abortion recovery organization, said in the leaders’ statement. “They target our children for death, and use Gabrielle Union, Tracee Ellis Ross and Uzo Aduba to convince women to hate their children and kill them.”

“These women are not leaders – they are executioners,” Walker added. “Shame on them for hating Black, Latina and Asian children!”

The black leaders assert that Hollywood celebrities bent on opposing recent “Heartbeat” abortion bans passed in some states are actually supporting “the number one culprit” of the killings of millions of black women and children.

Earlier this month, for example, actress and activist Alyssa Milano led an effort to threaten a boycott over Georgia’s newly passed Heartbeat legislation, which would ban abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected. Black Hollywood stars Gabrielle Union, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Uzo Aduba all signed onto the boycott letter.

“Gabrielle Union, Tracee Ellis Ross and Uzo Aduba are Planned Parenthood’s Ministers of Propaganda, paid to ensure Georgia’s Black abortion rate remains at 62% or higher,” said Catherine Davis of The Restoration Project. “Their absence from this state is welcomed since their presence and propaganda aids Planned Parenthood’s Negro Project’s genocide.”

Lori Hoye of Issues4Life Foundation emphasized that “abortion is the #1 cause of death in the Black Community.”

“As a child conceived in rape, it bothers me that it’s acceptable to sacrifice children like me for the sins of their fathers,” she asserted. “For these misguided Black American female entertainers to promote the destruction of their own race is unconscionable.”

Evangelist Dr. Alveda King, director of Civil Rights for The Unborn, summarized in a statement the coalition’s challenge to Hollywood celebrities:

King said Holy Week “is the perfect time to pray for mothers and their unborn children.”

“Thank God that Mary did not abort Jesus; even though her pregnancy was inconvenient in the eyes of many,” the evangelist continued. “Here in the 21st century, the infanticide and risks to a mother’s health are warning signals that abortion is never a healthy option for women. Black women suffer the highest risk of loss by abortion, How can the dream survive if we murder the children?”

Moscovici: Eurogroup needs new monitoring scheme to keep tabs on Greece

Financial affairs commissioner calls for ‘enhanced surveillance.’

Eurozone finance ministers “need to invent something new” to ensure Greece sticks to its reform commitments once it exits an €86 billion European rescue program in August, said European Commissioner Pierre Moscovici.

“This is not business as usual. It would be false to pretend that the Greek case is exactly the same as Ireland, Portugal and Cyprus [which were also bailed out in the eurozone’s debt crisis],” Moscovici, who oversees the Commission’s economic and financial affairs portfolio, said in an interview with POLITICO Brussels Playbook.

“We must not go in the opposite direction and create a fourth program in disguise. I don’t want the troika, or the institutions, now to go to Athens in just different suits,” the commissioner said. “But obviously we need to follow up on decisive strategic items with quite detailed commitments. That has a name — enhanced surveillance.”

Details of how that follow-up monitoring will work are among the key issues on Greece still to be resolved at Thursday’s Eurogroup meeting of finance ministers, as they look to sign off on a yearslong, costly rollercoaster ride that took the eurozone close to collapse.

Moscovici was keen not to underplay the significance of the meeting.

“Everybody is acting as if it was normal,” he said. “It’s not normal. It’s fantastic. Just imagine that we were not able to find a solution Thursday. What would be the message sent for the [European Council on June] 28th?”

“Things are not yet done. It’s not precooked, but we are on the right track,” Moscovici added. “I’m very confident that we have the building blocks for a conclusion. No, I’m actually sure.”

Other issues that ministers still need to hammer out include the size of a final payment for Greece — seen at between €10 billion and €15 billion — and buying back more expensive loans, such as from the International Monetary Fund, to keep financing costs down.

“€15 billion is more convincing than 10, and it’s easier to buy back with more money than with less,” Moscovici said. “But that’s probably one of the figures that will need to be adjusted at the last moment.”

On how long debt maturities should be extended — to keep markets sweet — Moscovici said there is a need for “substantial, but not ridiculous” measures. “Some say 15 years, some say seven, some say 10. Double digits are better than single digits.”

Macron, Merkel reform push

Moscovici welcomed the “Meseberg declaration” on eurozone reform put forward by the leaders of France and Germany Tuesday.

“It was crucial that they showed that they keep the momentum.”

“That final push by the leaders was very positive because the wording seems to be even clearer than what the finance ministers prepared,” the commissioner said, acknowledging there are still unanswered questions on just how big a budget the eurozone could have, whether it’s part of the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework, and what the money would pay for.

“There is a need for a lot of work to define exactly what it is — but it is a political breakthrough. It is the first time ever that we consider having a budget dedicated to stabilization investment. That also means convergence and that is a political signal which is absolutely decisive,” he said.