La sécurité de Britney Spears a un prix que la chanteuse ne semble pas prête à payer. Une entreprise de gardes du corps l’accuse de mauvais paiements.
Un physique qui vaut de l’or. Britney Spears, que les critiques ont souvent pointée du doigt pour ses quelques kilos superflus, ne prend pourtant pas à la légère la protection de ses courbes. Pour 300000 dollars, la chanteuse a confié la sécurité de sa personne à une entreprise spécialisée dans la protection des civils. Problème: malgré les millions que génère la star, la note très salée avancée par ses gardes du corps n’aurait pas été entièrement payée.
Britney Spears aurait-elle quelques problèmes à sortir les dollars ou la société visée voudrait-elle profiter d’une manne financière? L’affaire est en tout cas aujourd’hui entre les mains de la justice. L’ Advanced Security Concepts Corporation accuse l’interprète de Baby one more time de n’avoir réglé que 140000 dollars en 2010, soit la moitié de la somme initialement convenue.
La société de gardes du corps qui était dans un premier temps ravie de pouvoir compter sur une cliente aussi prestigieuse, déchante désormais. En plus d’accuser Britney Spears, qui vient de fêter ses 30 ans, d’être mauvaise payeuse, l’entreprise prend également la défense de l’un de ses employés ayant travaillé aux côtés de stars et qui se dit aujourd’hui victime de la chanteuse. Abus sexuel et mauvais traitement, la petite fiancée de l’Amérique est-elle allée jusque là avec son ex-garde du corps? Le procès est en cours…
Après le scandale de son rapatriement d’Ukraine, un nouveau voyage de Pierre Sarkozy pose problème, avant même d’avoir eu lieu. Pour un déplacement au Brésil le 19 février, le ministère des Affaires Etrangères aurait demandé une protection renforcée du fils du chef de l’Etat. Une exigence qui surprend les autorités brésiliennes.
Deux policiers aidés d’une garde rapprochée pour escorter un DJ qui doit jouer dans une boîte de nuit au Brésil, voilà qui a de quoi choquer. A fortiori quand le DJ en question s’appelle Pierre Sarkozy et qu’il est le fils du chef de l’Etat.
Son statut lui confère d’office la protection de deux membres du Groupement de sécurité de la présidence de la République. Un dispositif qu’on peut juger normal, quel que soit l’identité ou la couleur politique du Président en fonction. Mais pour accompagner le prochain déplacement de Pierre Sarkozy au Brésil, le 19 février prochain, où sous son nom de DJ Mosey il doit animer une soirée dans une discothèque de Florianopolis, le ministère des Affaires Etrangères aurait sollicité les autorités brésiliennes pour demander une protection rapprochée.
Le canard enchaîné révèle que cette demande émanant des plus hautes instances de l’Etat français aurait surpris les Brésiliens et fait des vagues. Un conseiller travaillant à l’ambassade brésilienne à Paris aurait confié avoir été «choqué» par une telle demande.
Il y a une dizaine de jours, le rapatriement d’Ukraine de Pierre Sarkozy (qui aurait coûté 40 000 euros) en jet privé commandé par l’Elysée, avait fait des remous. La décision avait été prise suite à l’hospitalisation à Odessa du jeune homme, victime d’une intoxication alimentaire. Pas sûr qu’une protection rapprochée évite à l’aîné de Nicolas Sarkozy un tel incident. Les autorités françaises cherchent-elles à le mettre à l’abri d’un acte de vengeance d’un membre de la civilisation sud-américaine?
Bien qu’étant l’une des stars les plus puissantes du show-business, Taylor Swift ne peut rien contre le pouvoir d’Internet. En pleine promotion de son quatrième album Red, la chanteuse de 22 ans a promis d’offrir un concert à l’école qui compterait le plus de « like » sur sa page Facebook. Sauf que des petits malins du forum 4chan ont lancé une campagne pour que les votes aillent à Horace Mann School, école de Boston et établissement pour sourds et malentendants !
Taylor Swift est surpuissante, elle qui vend plus de disques et gagne plus de millions que U2 et Lady Gaga, mais elle n’est pas à l’abri d’une blague. Alors que son dernier clip, We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, vient d’être dévoilé dans le cadre de la promotion de son album Red, la chanteuse country a proposé il y a quelques jours à ses 34 millions de fans de voter pour l’école dans laquelle elle ira donner un concert exclusif.
Belle idée, si ce n’est qu’elle a été détournée par des anonymes du forum 4chan. Ils ont lancé une campagne pour que les votes et les « like » aillent à la Horace Mann School, l’une des plus vieilles écoles pour sourds et malentendants. « Apparemment, on ne peut voter qu’une fois par jour, alors refaites-le demain, écrivait un bloggueur surnommé The Phenix jeudi dernier. Donnez à ces enfants le meilleur concert de leur vie. »
Les votes seront clos le 23 septembre prochain, et la campagne de détournement est maintenant aussi présente sur Twitter et Reddit. Reste à savoir ce que fera Taylor si la plaisanterie prend réellement. A n’en pas douter, la star se rendrait dans l’école et donnerait ce concert pour le moins original. Et ferait ainsi encore plus parler d’elle et de son album.
Poland's ruling Law and Justice party tightens its grip on public radio and television | Montage by POLITICO/Getty Images
Polish media veers back to pre-1989
Kaczynski leads push to bring state-run media to heel, even if the ratings stink.
WARSAW — The changes to Poland’s media landscape came to international attention at the weekend when unprecedented critical remarks by U.S. President Barack Obama about the state of its democracy were edited out of state-owned TV news broadcasts.
Viewers of independent television stations on Friday evening heard Obama, who was here for a NATO summit, say: “I expressed to President [Andrzej] Duda our concerns over certain actions and the impasse around Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal.” Poles who turned into the public broadcaster’s main evening news program only heard Obama’s comments praising Poland.
The episode highlighted the tightening grip of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party on state-run television, known as TVP, since it came to power last year. The goal of PiS’s new media strategy isn’t to expand audience, which if anything is falling steeply. It’s political, and seems to be working. The party’s poll numbers are soaring above rivals in opinion polls.
The larger fear among political opponents is that the government will next look to bring private broadcasters and publishers to heel, and is already eyeing foreign-owned media in Poland.
The changes at TVP came quickly. Journalists out of step with the new authorities were pushed out. Newscasts are now unapologetically pro-government. On Saturday, TVP responded to criticism of its news agenda by condemning those who had pointed out Poland’s constitutional problems during the NATO summit, with commentators calling it “foul” and “shocking.” Poland has been embroiled for months in a crisis over which rules the country’s top constitutional court should follow.
The new-look state television is bleeding viewers, but those who’ve tuned out aren’t the people PiS is trying to influence. Its main evening news program has shed 750,000 viewers since the beginning of the year, falling to 2.7 million people. Overall, TVP saw a 19.8 percent fall in viewers since Jacek Kurski took over as TVP boss in January, putting it behind two private rivals.
“I don’t deny that some of the viewers, especially those with liberal views, have stopped watching us,” Kurski, a former MEP and PiS politician, said in a recent interview. “At the same time, many conservative viewers from right-wing areas of Poland have returned to TVP.”
Those conservative viewers are likely to be traditional PiS voters. Its core electorate is poorer, older people living outside the country’s large cities. “The government’s control of public television is effective,” said Aleksander Smolar, head of the Stefan Batory Foundation think tank and a critic of PiS. “It hardens the convictions of their core electorate.”
A new survey by the CBOS organization found Law and Justice at 39 percent support, with the opposition Civic Platform party at 15 percent and the new Modern party at 14 percent. That’s a better result than PiS gained in October’s national election.
A hands-on approach
What PiS is doing is not unusual. Even after the end of communist rule in 1989, democratic governments of both the Left and Right sought to influence radio and television. But the scale of PiS’s overhaul is deeper than anything that has come before.
The new TVP has a high profile supporter in Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of PiS and Poland’s most powerful politician. “Television has changed for the better and that was done by Jacek Kurski,” Kaczyński said in a recent interview.
In the same interview, Kaczyński spoke at length about the bitter experience of his party’s 2005-2007 government, whose downfall he blamed on insufficient control of the media. “We had no media protection, and that applies to the public media which were supposedly ours. We were attacked from there no less than from private television, which was very unfavorable,” he said, adding, “The average Pole assesses the situation not on the basis of what is, but on the basis of what he sees on television.”
The government is pushing a deeper overhaul of public radio and television, although international criticism from the EU and the Council of Europe prompted it to delay the legislation, probably until next year.
Under a draft bill, national media are supposed to “preserve national traditions, patriotic and human values,” to “counteract misrepresentations of Polish history,” as well as portray “family values” and “respect the Christian value system.” The law would also force most public media employees to reapply for their own jobs.
The media changes PiS has undertaken so far prompted Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group, to drop Poland from 18th to 47th place in its annual press freedom ranking.
“I’m not saying it was good before and now it’s bad. I’m saying it was bad but now it’s a nightmare,” said Maciej Mrozowski, a professor at Warsaw’s social sciences SWPS University who conducted a March study of bias at the country’s main public and private newscasts for the country’s telecommunications regulator.
Krzysztof Skowroński, the head of the Polish Journalists Association, rejected that criticism, saying that if public television is taken together with private networks, which tend to be more critical of the ruling party, then “there is balance.”
TVP rebuffed the accusation of bias, telling POLITICO in a statement that its news programs are “prepared according to journalistic standards of reliability and objectivity.”
‘Repolonizing’ private media
Although the Polish government’s main focus is on revamping public radio and television, Kaczyński has complained about the power of foreign companies, mainly German, in the Polish media market. Polska Press Group, owned by Verlagsgruppe Passau, dominates local newspapers. Ringier Axel Springer, a Swiss-German joint venture, controls Onet.pl, a popular internet portal, as well as the largest tabloid Fakt and Newsweek Polska. (Axel Springer is the co-owner of POLITICO in Europe.)
“We have to undertake the repolonization of the media. We have to be brave and not allow ourselves to be terrorized, either here or eventually in the European Union,” Kaczyński said in a Facebook chat. He called for a “step by step” effort to buy back foreign controlled media so that “they become Polish to the largest possible percent.”
Government control over public broadcasters is nothing new in Europe.
Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi had his Mediaset private broadcaster as well as a grip on the Rai public broadcaster when he was prime minister. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government also keeps a close eye on public television, although the main TV channel’s news program has seen steep falls in viewer numbers since radical changes made a year ago.
Mrozowski of SWPS University argues that few European countries have seen anything like the changes now happening in Poland.
“Every criteria shows that public television has left the standards accepted in the rest of Europe,” he said. “Polish media never really met those standards, but such one-sided television and such lies haven’t been seen in Poland since 1989.”
Monika Kosinska, secretary-general of the European Public Health Alliance, is leaving the organisation in July to move to the regional office in Copenhagen of the World Health Organization. Kosinska, who is Polish, has been at EPHA since 2008.
EIB board
Gauthier Bourland, an inspector from Belgium’s ministry of finance, has been appointed an alternate director at the European Investment Bank (EIB) for a four-year term.
The board of directors – made up of one person from each member state plus one from the European Commission – takes decisions on loans, guarantees and borrowings.
In addition to the board, there are 19 alternate directors, and Bourland was nominated by a regional group of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
The new French government has affirmed that it will stick to a schedule agreed with the European Commission of reducing its deficit below 3% of gross domestic product by 2015.
Although there had been increasing speculation that the government would seek extra time, Manuel Valls, the new prime minister, said while on an official visit to Germany on Monday (14 April) that France would stick to “its commitments”, saying that the credibility of the country was at stake.
The French government is discussing budgets and spending plans for the next three years this week. Its plans will be submitted to the national parliament on 29 April and passed to the Commission in May.
The Commission forecasts that France’s deficit will be 4.0% in 2014 and 3.9% in 2015, but the government has forecast a deficit of 3.6% this year and 2.8% next year.
The government’s budget predictions will have to be revised to take account of promises by Valls, who became prime minister on 31 March, to make savings of €50 billion.
Vall’s pledge to reduce the deficit in 2015 signals a willingness by the new government to avoid a damaging clash with the Commission.
Surprise move
In Paris, there was general surprise at a decision by President François Hollande to appoint Harlem Désir, who was an MEP and first secretary of the Parti Socialiste, as minister for European affairs. Relations between Désir and Hollande are notably cool, with Désir having failed to give wholehearted support to the government, so some interpreted his appointment as a sign that Hollande did not care about the EU.
A rival interpretation is that Hollande does care, and that Désir will be bypassed.
Hollande has made important changes within the ranks of the senior civil servants. He appointed Jean-Pierre Jouyet as secretary-general at the Elysée palace. Jouyet was EU affairs minister under former president Nicolas Sarkozy during France’s presidency of the EU. He graduated with Hollande from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, and was number two in the private office of Jacques Delors during his second term as president of the European Commission, then took over from Pascal Lamy as head of Delors’ office. Most recently, he has been heading a state-owned bank, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations.
Hollande has also given responsibility for the EU affairs secretariat, which co-ordinates France’s EU policy, to Philippe Léglise-Costa, who is already Hollande’s EU affairs adviser. The secretariat will report to the president’s office rather than, as has been the case, to the prime minister.
Léglise-Costa headed the private office of Jouyet, when the latter was EU affairs minister. Taken together, these changes suggest that Hollande will take more control of EU policy.
The reporting line for the minister for external trade has been switched. When Nicole Bricq held the role, it was attached to the ministry of finance and economy. The new minister, Fleur Pellerin, who was previously minister for SMEs, innovation and the digital economy, will report to Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister.
Despite the ministerial reshuffle, prompted by losses in March’s municipal elections, Hollande’s approval rating has slumped to a new low of 18%. Valls, by contrast, is at 58%, the largest ever gap between a president and a prime minister.
Commission president-elect tells MEPs about his plans for the next Commission.
In presenting his work programme for the next five years to the European Parliament on Tuesday (15 July), Jean-Claude Juncker sent out various signals about the shape of his college of European commissioners. He said a commissioner would be given specific responsibility for the Charter of Fundamental Rights and the rule of law. This commissioner would have responsibility for concluding the accession of the EU to the European Convention of Human Rights.
He would entrust responsibility for better regulation to one of the vice-presidents of the Commission, who would be given a mandate to identify ‘red tape’ at European and national level that could be swiftly removed. He would entrust a commissioner with special responsibility for migration to work on this together with all member states and with the non-EU countries most concerned.
He said that the next foreign policy chief would have to be “a strong and experienced player to combine national and European tools, and all the tools available in the Commission, in a more effective way than in the past”.
“He or she must act in concert with our European commissioners for trade, development and humanitarian aid as well as for neighbourhood policy. This will require the high representative to more fully play his/her role within the college of commissioners. To make this possible, I intend to entrust other external relations commissioners with the task of deputising for the high representative both within the work of the college and on the international stage.”
The president-elect is consulting nominees today about possibilities for a reshuffle, ahead of a meeting with Slovenia’s new nominee.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the president-elect of the European Commission, will tonight meet Violeta Bulc, Slovenia’s replacement nominee for European commissioner.
Bulc, who is minister for development and regional policy and is a deputy prime minister, was put forward for the Commission job on Friday by her party leader and prime minister Miro Cerar after Alenka Bratušek had withdrawn her candidacy.
Bulc has been in Brussels since yesterday morning. According to Commission sources Juncker is planning to speak to the other nominees about possibilities for a portfolio reshuffle, before meeting Bulc to assign her a portfolio.
Bulc is not expected to be given Bratušek’s position of vice-president for energy union. She is a political newcomer and has been in her ministerial position for only a few weeks. She was given her first political position by Cerar when he formed his new government last month, so it is most unlikely that Juncker will make her a vice-president.
Juncker is also talking to group leaders in the European Parliament before his meeting with Bulc. There is some resistance to Bulc’s nomination among MEPs because of her lack of experience. There are also concerns that her nomination process will end up being just as controversial as Bratušek’s. A vote in Cerar’s cabinet yielded a vote of seven to six against Bulc. But three ministers were not present, and Cerar used special rules of procedure to count these three abstentions as positive votes. This was the same mechanism used by Bratušek in July to push through her own nomination, a move that Cerar criticised at the time.
An association called “Taxpayers will not give up” and the leader of the opposition Christian Socialist party have filed a complaint with the anti-corruption commission, the same commission that found that Bratušek had acted unethically in her nomination process.
MEPs in the two main groups of the Parliament, the centre-left S&D and centre-right EPP, are already irked about Bulc’s nomination because Cerar rebuffed their request that he nominate Slovenian centre-left MEP Tanja Fajon. Fearing another rejection, Juncker wants guarantees from the two groups that Bulc can be confirmed before he officially accepts her nomination. A spokesperson for Juncker yesterday did not rule out the possibility that Juncker could reject Bulc after their meeting today.
However, both the Parliament and the Commission are nervous about delaying the start of the new college of commissioners. A final confirmation vote on the new Commission is scheduled for next Wednesday (22 October) in Strasbourg. Juncker is expected to announce his reshuffle tomorrow (15 October), and the Parliament’s group leaders are meeting on Thursday in the Conference of Presidents configuration to decide when to hold new hearings. MEPs will need to question both Bulc and any other nominee who has had their portfolio changed in the reshuffle. Before the hearings can be held, member states would have to give their approval in writing to a revised proposal from Juncker for the college of commissioners.
The hope is that the hearings could be scheduled for next Monday or Tuesday in Strasbourg and a vote could be held next Thursday (23 October). However that would leave Bulc and the other nominee(s) only a few days to prepare. It now appears more likely that the final vote will have to be delayed until the mini-plenary session in Brussels on 12-13 November. This would delay the start date of the new Commission, which was supposed to be 1 November, by at least two weeks.
According to Commission sources, Bulc is campaigning to keep the energy union vice-presidency for Slovenia. But this remains unlikely. One of Juncker’s options is to give Bulc the transport portfolio, and to assign the energy vice-presidency to Maroš Šefčovič, Slovakia’s nominee, to whom Juncker had assigned the transport dossier in the next Commission. However MEPs on the transport committee are opposed to this idea.
Another option would be to move Günther Oettinger, the current commissioner for energy, to the vice-presidency for energy union. Juncker had assigned him the digital agenda portfolio in the next Commission but at his hearing last week Oettinger did not show much enthusiasm for the dossier. On the other hand, to give the German nominee a vice-presidency (all the others have gone to small member states) would upset the delicate balance that Juncker had sought in his initial line-up.
Another possibility is to give Bulc the portfolio for education, youth, culture and citizenship. MEPs have already voiced unease about this dossier being given to Tibor Navracsics, the Hungarian nominee. Responsibility for citizenship is particularly contentious given the recent tensions between Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Commission over human rights. But MEPs would not want to reward Orban’s nominee, so Juncker would still have to finesse the vice-presidency.
A third option would be to switch Kristalina Georgieva, who has been nominated for vice-president for budget, to take the energy union vice-presidency. But Juncker would then still need to find a convincing candidate for a vice-presidency.
A rift between the United States and member states of the European Union on whether to impose additional sanctions against Russia is becoming more public as tensions in the east of Ukraine continue to mount.
John Kerry, the secretary of state, has warned Sergey Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, that the Obama administration would impose additional sanctions on Russia unless its leadership took “positive steps to de-escalate” the situation in Ukraine, a US official told reporters in Washington yesterday (23 April).
The official said that there was no indication that Russia was implementing an agreement struck with Ukraine in Geneva last Thursday (17 April) that was overseen by US and EU mediators.
US vice-president Joe Biden said during a visit to Kiev on Tuesday that Russia would face new sanctions unless it pulled back its troops from the border with Ukraine and abided by the Geneva deal.
Lavrov warned yesterday that any attack on ethnic Russians in Ukraine would be viewed as an attack against Russia itself, and would trigger a response from Moscow.
But European politicians are warning that talk of new sanctions against Russia is counterproductive. Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, said that the energy used in debating sanctions would be better spent on avoiding an escalation.
Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria said yesterday (23 April): “I would fundamentally support what the German foreign minister Steinmeier made clear again today: that conflict between Russia and Ukraine should not be inflamed by additional sanctions, but on the contrary, that de-escalation is what is required.”
Faymann said that Austria’s finance ministry was working on an assessment of what the implications of additional sanctions for EU businesses might be. Several EU member states are reluctant to approve new sanctions because they fear the economic fallout.
The European Commission is also preparing to hold talks with Ukraine and Russia on ensuring that gas supplies via Ukraine are not disrupted.
The US is seeking to co-ordinate its response with the EU. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign-policy chief, met Bill Burns, the deputy secretary of state, in London on Tuesday evening (22 April) to discuss the crisis. A spokesman for Ashton said: “What we do [on sanctions] depends on the situation on the ground. We have not reached the point yet where a decision is required.”
The Red Devils’ all-time leading goalscorer and former captain has called for patience at the Theatre of Dreams
Wayne Rooney believes Manchester United need “two or three years” to return to the top of English football as the former Red Devils captain highlighted the models of Liverpool and Manchester City.
Rooney enjoyed great success at Old Trafford, where he became the club’s all-time leading goalscorer while winning five Premier League titles and the Champions League among other silverware.
The 34-year-old, who left the club in 2017 following 13 years in Manchester, was also part of the last United team to win the Premier League in 2012-13.
More teams
Since then, United have struggled with only two runners-up finishes in the Premier League, while Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s fifth-placed side are 37 points adrift of runaway leaders Liverpool this term.
Ahead of his United reunion as a player-coach with Derby County in the FA Cup fifth round on Thursday, Rooney called for patience.
“It is going to take time. It is going to take another two or three years, I believe. They need to bring some players, they need to get rid of some players,” Rooney said, quoted in several British newspapers.
“It’s not going to happen [as a quick fix]. They’ve tried that with [Louis] van Gaal, with [Jose] Mourinho.
“If you look at Liverpool and what they’ve done, and Man City, you’re not going to buy a team to go and challenge with them. You see with Liverpool – they’ve built that team.
“[Pep] Guardiola has gradually brought more players in and his way of playing.
“So United have to be a bit patient and try and build a team that will be able to challenge those two. The Manchester United fans need to be a bit patient with what is going on.”
Rooney admitted to excitement at being drawn against his former club.
“I can’t wait,” Rooney told United’s official website.
“Obviously, the draw, the one team I wanted was Man United. We were on the coach, actually, going to the hotel the night before a game when the draw was taking place and there was a cheer when Manchester United came out.
“It is a great draw for us, having United come to our ground and for the fans it is a great game to go to.
“For us as a team it is a great challenge for us to come up against Manchester United, to see if we can beat them. It is a challenge, but it is something we are all looking forward to.”
United are three points adrift of Chelsea, who occupy the fourth and final Champions League spot after 28 rounds, ahead of Sunday’s derby against Manchester City at Old Trafford.