Michael Fassbender et Colin Firth devraient se donner la réplique dans “Genius”, évocation des rapports houleux entre l’écrivain Thomas Wolfe et son éditeur Max Perkins.

Face-à-face de haute volée devant la caméra de Michael Grandage, metteur en scène de théâtre chevronné qui s’apprête à faire ses débuts au cinéma avec Genius. Le très courtisé Michael Fassbender et l’Oscarisé Colin Firth devraient en effet jouer les rôles principaux de ce film qui évoque les relations difficiles entre l’écrivain du début du XXe siècle Thomas Wolfe (L’Ange exilé) et l’éditeur Maxwell Perkins, qui travailla entre autres avec Hemingway et Fitzgerald. Selon Deadline, Fassbender incarnera l’auteur américain tandis que Firth se glissera dans la peau de l’éditeur -un rôle pour lequel Sean Penn fut longtemps pressenti. C’est le scénariste John Logan (“Skyfall”, “Hugo Cabret”) qui a été chargé d’adapter l’ouvrage de Scott Berg qui a inspiré ce “Genius” dont le tournage est prévu pour 2014.

JD

VIDEO : la bande-annonce de “Prometheus” avec Michael Fassbender, sorti début octobre en dvd

Prometheus

EU vows to cut off terrorists’ financing networks

Cracking down on terrorists’ financing networks is easier said than done.

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Europe’s justice and interior ministers tasked the Commission on Friday with finding ways to starve terrorist groups of their funding, in response to last week’s attacks in Paris by Islamic State (ISIL).

The list of targets is long: anonymous payments, remittances, virtual currencies, pre-paid cards, virtual currencies and gold and precious metals.

“Without terror financing, there’s less terror,” said German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, at the end of a meeting in Brussels which also looked at ways to improve cooperation between EU law enforcement and financial intelligence agencies.

The tools used for the Paris attacks may not have cost vast amounts of money — a rented car, Kalashnikov assault rifles, home-made bombs — but the network underpinning such attacks is expansive.

The U.S. government declared its determination to target terrorist financing networks at the G20 meeting in Anatalya, Turkey last weekend. The 28 EU member countries need to agree to a common plan, with support from the European Parliament and Commission.

“It all depends on our ability to stem the flow of different finance streams, and for that we also need an exchange of information. We also need the option that fortunes that raise suspicion can be frozen immediately,” said de Maizière.

The EU adopted an anti-money laundering directive earlier this year. Virtual currencies weren’t tackled in the directive, with the Commission instead launching an assessment of money laundering and terrorism financing risks, including the use of virtual currencies. That assessment is due for release in June 2017, but a Commission source said it might be released early ahead of the next meeting of the justice and home affairs ministers in December.

While crypto-currencies such as bitcoin are in vogue, experts say more old-fashioned methods of money laundering should remain the main concern.

“Our impression is that in terms of the risks of money laundering, the risks are quite low in terms of bitcoin,” said Carl Dolan, the director of Transparency International. “There are simpler ways to move money around in disguise, to hide where the money comes from and where it’s going.”

“It takes 10 minutes and €690 to set up a shell company,” he added.

One bitcoin expert, speaking on condition of anonymity, said bitcoins are “literally the last currency a terrorist organization would want to touch.”

That’s because while bitcoin wallets can be created anonymously, in practice the act of sharing the private key to a particular wallet between several people means their activities can be easily linked through the blockchain public register.

Commission sources said EU countries were dragging their feet on the implementation of the anti money-laundering directive.

Speaking after the Council meeting Friday, Vĕra Jourová, the European Commissioner for justice and consumers affairs, said: “All member states promised in February to speed up the implementation [of the directive] and now I count on them to deliver.”

Other measures, such as the Schengen Information System (SIS II) used by border and law enforcement throughout the EU, are also falling by the wayside. National authorities are meant to enter data on all suspected foreign fighters but it is not happening.

“The EU has efficient tools allowing for exchange of information on such individuals, for example SIS II. We need to make full use of instruments already at our disposal,” said Etienne Schneider, Luxembourg’s minister for internal security and defence.

“But we need to be realistic,” Schneider added. “If that hasn’t worked so far, it’s because we haven’t overcome the problems with the exchange of data between law enforcement authorities.”

Kate Day contributed to this story.

Never mind POLITICO’s test of whether you can tell the difference between the European Union and Star Wars: Members of the European Parliament have issued an alternative test of how sad your life is.

Since Christmas and New Year already constitute a sufficiently difficult time for those whose lives lack purpose, you might not feel the need of such a test, but nonetheless here it is: Would you knowingly and willingly click on a video entitled: “Targeted spending and checks with performance-based budgeting?”

The video was issued by the European People’s Party, the center-right group in the Parliament, through the website Euractiv, under the guise of “promoted content.” I cannot tell you whether it was the EPP or Euractiv that was responsible for the clickbait headline.

If you resisted the temptation, you were not alone: discussions ahead of the December 17-18 European Council about providing money for Turkey suggest that the video is a million miles (and €3 billion) from reality.

I should confess immediately that I clicked. My prurient questions were: why would anyone make such a video, and why would anyone watch it? At the end of a mercifully brief four minutes, I was none the wiser.

The video began with a television presenter telling me that: “Public budgets can have a life of their own, even when they have outlived their effectiveness. The European Parliament is looking at ways to rip out the dead wood and redirect funding with greater effectiveness. It’s called performance-based budgeting and the EPP group has a position paper on it.”

Well, Hallelujah! One would hate to think of the EPP being caught without a position paper.

The presenter, who is also the video’s narrator, introduces Marian-Jean Marinescu, a center-right Romanian MEP, who hesitantly tells us the “EPP group should want to see more results. So the evaluation of the budget should be on results.”

A slightly clearer version of this message comes three-quarters of the way through, when Ludĕk Niedermayer, another center-right MEP, tells us: “In performance-based budgeting, you should be constantly reviewing the outcomes and based on the outcomes deciding about the future. So on the one hand it’s uncomfortable for those who are not spending money properly, but on the other hand it should give a chance to people who are really delivering the results.”

Budget building

I can’t say that I learnt from that video anything new about performance-based budgeting. I already knew that Kristalina Georgieva, a vice president of the European Commission with responsibility both for the budget and for administration, is making a big deal of performance-based budgeting and her department devoted a conference to the subject in September, albeit under the slightly more digestible title of ‘EU budget focused on results.’ Some cynics believe that she is using the subject to style herself as a reformer in the Commission, which might be helpful to her (undeclared) candidacy for the post of United Nations secretary general.

I also knew that performance-based budgeting differs from (but is not incompatible with) activity-based budgeting, which evolved in the Commission from activity-based management, championed by Neil Kinnock when he was the European commissioner for administrative reform in 1999-2004. That held sway until it was simplified and renamed program budgeting.

The essence of activity-based budgeting and program budgeting is that you build up the budget from its component parts, from each department’s plans for the year or years ahead — the idea being that you are spending with a purpose, not simply because you have the money.

In theory, when Commission departments and member countries draw up their plans for how they will spend EU money, they build into their programs and projects targets and indicators and measurements. But in practice, according to the EU’s critics, the money is doled out with insufficient attention to whether it is achieving its objectives. Hence the renewed attention to “results.”

Portrayed in these broad-brush terms, performance-based budgeting sounds like common sense. Where it becomes more difficult is in the much trickier detail: how does one measure performance? How does one devise meaningful indicators that are faithful to the purpose of the spending? How does one make those indicators detailed, yet at the same time comparable with those for spending performance elsewhere? And all those questions are before one arrives at the more political question of how to respond to non-performance when it is uncovered.

Member countries are, for example, very resistant to the idea that they should lose money from their “national envelopes” because their regional aid or research programs are judged “non-performing.” They have long fought against Commission attempts to concentrate spending where it is most needed or will have most effect. The preference of all but the poorest states is that EU money should be spread widely (and therefore thinly).

A good use of EPP cash?

While I can see merit in performance-based budgeting, that doesn’t mean I see merit in the video. Did anyone at the EPP stop to ask whether the best available illustration of EU spending was euro banknotes being loaded into a cash machine and euro coins being minted? Surely that image of uncontrolled, unlimited excess is the exact opposite of responsible, discriminating spending that they profess to seek? I suspect that the makers were not worried about who watched the video: it was sufficient that it be made.

Hence the first and smaller of the ironies in this rallying cry for better use of EU money: the EPP spent some of its publicity budget on a video that almost no one will watch. If this video were judged by its performance in educating a general audience about EU spending, I doubt that it would score highly, but it probably ticks a box somewhere by giving Marinescu some airtime on EPP-TV.

The second and greater irony is what has been going on since the EPP issued this video last week. At a meeting of EU leaders and Turkey on November 29, the European Council declared that in view of the flow of refugees from Syria “the EU is committed to provide an additional €3 billion of resources.” The European Commission and the member countries have been squabbling ever since over where the money should come from and in what form. It was discussed by member countries’ ambassadors to the EU on December 7, 9 and 11, and Wolfgang Schäuble also insisted on raising it at the meeting of finance ministers December 8. There was another discussion between ambassadors on December 14 and 18, but they failed to close a deal by the EU summit.

The Commission proposed initially that it would contribute €500 million and the member countries would make up the remaining €2.5 billion from outside the EU budget. Most states wanted the Commission to find more from the EU budget. Germany insisted that all EU countries should contribute. The Commission raised its offer to €700 million, for no discernible reason. By Friday, it was offering €1 billion.

Diplomatic sources tell me that the Commission proposes to find its €1 billion from the budgets for 2016 and 2017, but no revision of the 2016 budget will be needed (ie, the money will be found from the existing allocation for foreign policy spending – so EU spending within the member countries will be unaffected). This is budgeting informed not by performance, but by politics, and it is achieved by a combination of arm-twisting, brow-beating, and creative accountancy.

Arguably, the only thing that this politics-based budgeting has in common with performance-based budgeting is the shared notion that spending should be adjusted in the light of changed circumstances.

The migration crisis is so acute that the EU must throw money at the problem and buy Turkey’s assistance. A headline goal is set — in this case €3 billion. The EU describes the initiative as belonging to the EU, but in practice, because of the constraints on the EU’s budget, it has to go outside the EU budget to find most of the sum (and thereby complicates the lines of reporting and accountability). To the extent that money is taken from within the EU budget, the Commission’s credibility is undermined: If it could find only €500 million initially, how come it can now find €1 billion? Are all its numbers so squidgy? If the money is taken away from other programs, only recently approved, what was wrong with that programming?

The Turkey fund is not the first such example. It was the same story with Jean-Claude Juncker’s creation of a European Fund for Strategic Investments as part of a €315 billion investment plan. The headline figure (an EU contribution of €16 billion) was all-important. When EU states did not come up with enough money, the EU budget was dismantled and reshaped to make up the difference. Ukraine, it might be recalled, has been promised €11 billion of EU assistance, though whether direct funds, or guarantees or loans, you would be hard pressed to disentangle.

Going further back, it was a similar story with José Manuel Barroso’s promise in July 2008 of €1 billion for an EU food facility to help developing countries respond to soaring food prices. Although the Commission initially proposed to divert unused money from the Common Agricultural Policy, the €1 billion was eventually taken from one-off reserves and emergency funds.

What all this tells us is a truth about EU politics to add to that old cliché of EU expansion that there is no reverse gear. (A cliché that is being tested both by the fragility of Schengen and by the threat of Brexit.) Equally, the EU’s politicians see no need for a rear-view mirror. They have no interest in looking back at the effectiveness of that €1 billion, or €3 billion or €11 billion. The promise counts for so much more than the performance.

Tim King writes POLITICO‘s Brussels Sketch.

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Brussels seeks Washington’s help on refugees

Europe wants military cooperation in the Med and diplomatic pressure on Gulf states.

The European Commission has sent Washington a wish list of ways the U.S. could provide help in dealing with the migration crisis, including boosting cooperation with American military forces in the Mediterranean.

An internal document prepared by Commission staff spells out areas where the EU thinks the U.S. can help it get control the flow of refugees from the Middle East to Europe. The draft proposals include efforts to stop people-smuggling in the Mediterranean, a call for Washington to put diplomatic pressure on Gulf countries to do “significantly” more to resettle Syrian refugees, and a request that the U.S. itself taken in more asylum-seekers.

The request was sent to Washington last month, according to one EU official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. has signaled it is ready to help the EU deal with the migration crisis — and as the issue has taken on new urgency with security concerns rising in the wake of the Paris attacks.

EU leaders, including Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, have said the refugee crisis needs a global solution.

If the proposals are agreed, the EU and U.S. would establish an “effective liaison” between Eunavfor Med, the bloc’s newly launched mission to stop people smugglers, and the U.S. Sixth Fleet, which is also deployed in the Mediterranean.

The goal, according to the working document, is to “exchange relevant operational and tactical information.”

In recent months EU officials have been holding preliminary discussions with U.S. diplomats on how such cooperation could work, a source close the talks said.

Practical ways to work together have already been discussed with the U.S. ambassador to the EU, Anthony Gardner, said another EU official.

The document, obtained by POLITICO and first reported on by the Italian daily La Stampa, emerged as the U.S. steps up its diplomatic involvement in Europe’s migration crisis. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday attended a summit of southeast European leaders in Zagreb, the Croatian capital, that focused on tensions and security concerns over the flow of refugees and migrants crossing the region.

That flow shows no signs of abating. As many as 5,000 asylum-seekers and migrants will reach Greece each day from Turkey between November 2015 and February 2016, according to UNCHR, the U.N. Refugee agency.

 ‘Complementary support’

The Commission’s proposals, under the headline “Potential areas of U.S. political and operational support on international migration and refugee crisis,” are part of ongoing work between administrations in Washington and Brussels and are not yet part of an official document, EU sources said.

The European suggestions are mainly divided in two areas: political and operational support, with requests addressed to both the U.S. Departments of State and Defense.

Brussels is considering asking for Washington’s support across the geographical spectrum of the refugee crisis: from the Western Balkan route refugees take when they cross from Turkey into Greece and then head north towards Germany and Sweden; to the Syrian conflict asylum-seekers are fleeing; and also the coast of Libya, from where many migrants leave to reach Sicily.

The Greek-Turkish border has become even more relevant after the Paris attacks. Greece’s deputy prime minister for citizen protection, Nikos Toskas, confirmed on Monday that two of the suspects involved in the attacks passed through the Greek island of Leros as Syrian refugees in October.

Also included among the “the key priorities” listed in the Commission’s working document is a request for the U.S. to provide “capacity-building (training, technical equipment) for transit countries, notably in Western Balkans, for border management and processing of migrants.”

The document also includes request for the U.S. State Department to “increase the number of Syrian refugees to be resettled among the U.S. global refugee quota in 2016 and 2017.”

But this call has already been fulfilled as part of the ongoing talks between the two capitals, the source close to the talks said. In September U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Washington will resettle at least 85,000 refugees in fiscal 2016, which began October 1, including a minimum of 10,000 Syrians.

The issue has proven controversial with the American public as the governors of several U.S. states have said they will not accept any Syrian refugees.

On Sunday Brussels will host a meeting between the leaders of the EU’s 28 countries and the prime minister of Turkey, at which a joint action plan to stem the flow of refugees is expected to be agreed upon.

The Commission, according to the working document, is considering asking the U.S. to provide “complementary support to the priorities agreed in the EU-Turkey Action Plan on migration and refugee crisis, including on humanitarian assistance and strengthening of migration management strategy and system.”

The EU could also ask for the U.S. to “provide needs-based humanitarian assistance and protection for all affected civilians” in Iraq. Last month about 26,000 Iraqis asked for asylum in Europe, making them the third-largest group of applicants after Syrians and Afghans, according to EASO, the EU asylum office.

To deal with the situation in Libya, where the U.N. is trying to foster a political agreement between the two capitals that have been running the county after the 2011 Western military intervention, the EU asks Washington to share “relevant U.S. intelligence information on smuggler business model/networks and the situation on the Libyan coast.”

It also calls for “U.S. direct or indirect support to Libya,” for example “through U.S. programs in support of the Coast Guard in Libya” as well as through “border management” and “management of irregular migration through and from Libya.”

The document also includes a similar request involving NATO member Turkey, calling on Washington to provide support to strengthen “the interception capacity of the Turkish Coast guard” and the “capacity of Turkey to combat migrant smuggling.”

5 reasons relocating refugees is a nightmare

Political and logistical problems threaten the Commission’s plans.

EU leaders begin a week of high-profile meetings on the migration crisis with diplomats increasingly concerned that Europe’s plans to relocate refugees across the bloc could fall apart.

Interior ministers meet Monday, followed by a gathering of European and African leaders in Malta on Wednesday and Thursday — with a last-minute, “extraordinary” summit of EU heads of state and government tacked onto the agenda. The focus is on implementing measures already agreed to, from relocation of asylum-seekers to increased border control and humanitarian aid.

For most of the summer, political obstacles prevented real movement on migration until countries agreed in September to relocate 160,000 refugees over the next two years from Italy and Greece. But those problems — with several countries opposed to mandatory quotas on the acceptance of asylum-seekers — were only the beginning.

The relocation effort has been painfully slow. Fewer than 150 refugees out of the 160,000 total moved out of Italy and Greece as of last week. Meanwhile, thousands of new refugees arrive in Europe every day.

The political roadblocks remain, but now logistical complications threaten the EU’s migration agenda. Many countries claim they are simply not prepared to handle the influx.

Sweden on Wednesday asked to change its status in the EU’s refugee relocation scheme so that it will not have to take in additional migrants, but rather will send them to other countries. Other countries seeing record numbers of refugees, including Germany and Austria, could follow Sweden’s lead.

“I am not worried about the slow pace of relocation, I am much more worried for the possibility of a domino effect,” said an EU senior diplomat.

Sweden’s migration agency projected last month that 190,000 refugees could arrive this year, more than twice as many as expected. Sweden was supposed to take in 3,728 refugees from Greece and Italy who now, if the request is approved, will have to be sent to other member states.

The fear is that if too many other countries want to send refugees away and too few want to take them in, a domino effect could collapse the whole process, which is already proving a nightmare to implement.

“I have not heard the Germans or the Austrians saying that they want to do the same thing,” said another EU diplomat, “but obviously if it happens we would need to re-design almost the whole system.”

Here are five ways the relocation plan has gone wrong:

Slow pace

So far 105 asylum-seekers out of 39,600 have been relocated from Italy and 30 out of 66,400 from Greece. To speed up progress and hit the target of relocating more than 100,000 refugees from Italy and Greece over the next two years, 140 refugees need to be boarding a plane every day.

That is currently nowhere near the case, and the way things are going it looks difficult to achieve anytime soon, despite constant urging from EU officials.

“I want to see dozens of such flights in the next days, to all member states, sending a signal to the smugglers and traffickers that we can cut them out and to the refugees that safe avenues exist,” European Parliament President Martin Schulz said Thursday after a two-day visit to Greece.

Missed targets

Even as the actual relocations move slowly, EU countries have still not finalized their agreement on who will take all of them.

The 160,000 total figure is the sum of two different relocation plans: one, decided in June, for 40,000 refugees, and another, decided in September, for a further 120,000. But while the European Commission keeps talking about the total number, it’s worth remembering that counties have yet to meet its first target of relocating 40,000 refugees.

Countries have only agreed to take a total of 32,256 refugees from that number. A final decision on that is expected by the end of the year, EU officials said.

Facilities bottleneck

Countries have been slow to fulfill the agreements they made to accept asylum-seekers, meaning there are not enough places for refugees to be relocated to. So far 14 member states have made available just over 3,500 places for refugees out of 160,000, according to the European Commission.

Bulgaria has done the most on this score: So far it has made available 1,302 places, fulfilling its pledge. But France has prepared just 900 out of 19,694 places, and Germany only 10 out of 27,536 additional refugees it is supposed to take from Italy and Greece as part of the relocation scheme. Among Baltic countries, only Lithuania so far has pledged 40 places.

“Luckily relocation is moving slowly, otherwise we would run out of places very soon,” joked one EU official.

For refugees, a lack of trust

Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last month told members of the European Parliament that Luxembourg is “quite willing” to welcome refugees but “it seems to me that very many of the refugees are actually not keen to come to Luxembourg.”

Officials working in the field say there is an even bigger problem than convincing refugees to go to countries where they may not want to go: winning their trust.

“Refugees are people who went through awful experiences and they are reluctant to board the plane because they are afraid that we will offload them in some African or Middle East countries,” said an EU official who works in Italy. “To convince them often we have to involve the local communities of migrants in the nations where they will be relocated.”

Offers of help rejected

In the world of refugee-relocation politics, strange things happen.

Kosovo, which has just taken its first official steps toward joining the EU, in September offered to take in 2,000 to 3,000 refugees from Europe. Yet two months later, Kosovo Foreign Minister Hashim Thaçi told POLITICO the country had not gotten any answer from the Commission but still stands ready to help.

“Kosovo was a country of origin of migrants but not anymore,” Thaçi said, adding that according to Eurostat, the EU statistics bureau, “more than 15,000 Kosovars have returned home this year, a majority of which came back voluntarily.”

Actress and left-wing activist Jane Fonda led her sixth consecutive climate change protest on Friday, where she led a rally unlawfully into the Russell Senate Office Building.

Fonda was joined at the protest, known as “Fire Drill Fridays,” by her Grace & Frankie co-stars Brooklyn Decker and June Diane Raphael, as well as the show’s writers. Others present included CSI actress Marg Helgenberger, anti-vax activist Robert Kennedy Jr. and the filmmaker Abigail Disney.

The rally took place on the Capitol lawn, before around 70 demonstrators marched toward and illegally entered the Russell Senate Office Building rotunda. Police arrested a number of protesters, including Raphael, Helgenberger, and Kennedy.

Jane Fonda, meanwhile, has claimed that the objective of the rally is to pressure lawmakers into supporting Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s (R-NY) “Green New Deal.”

According to one study, the deal could $93 trillion, over four times America’s national debt, with the aim of phasing out the use of fossil fuels within the next 30 years.

“Any real solution to climate change must have a strong commitment to environmental, gender and racial justice at its core,” Fonda wrote in a recent blog post.

After being arrested at four of the previous rallies, the 81-year-old Academy Award-winner confirmed that she would not get arrested again over increased penalties, involving court appearances and up to 90 days in jail.

“I have been advised that, because I’ve had 4 arrests in a short period of time and I have a court date coming up mid-November concerning those arrests, if I get arrested again before then, I risk 90 days in jail,” she explained. “I can rebel and be more effective outside of jail.”

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Fonda’s demonstrations come after she took a break from acting and moved to Washington D.C. to pursue environmental activism and “be at the epicenter of the fight for our climate.”

Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected]