La scénariste et réalisatrice new-yorkaise est décédée ce mardi. Elle incarnait le renouveau de la comédie romantique dans les années 90 avec “Quand Harry rencontre Sally”, “Nuits blanches à Seattle” et “Vous avez un message”.
Harry et Sally orphelins. Nora Ephron a succombé à une pneumonie (provoquée par une leucémie) dans la soirée du 26 juin à New York. Elle avait 71 ans.
Ancienne écrivain, essayiste et journaliste pour le New York Post, Esquire, le New York Times Magazine ou le Huffington Post, Nora Ephron avait imposé sa patte à Hollywood depuis le début des années 80 comme scénariste, réalisatrice et productrice, en signant des comédies romantiques majeures (Quand Harry rencontre Sally, Nuits blanches à Seattle et Vous avez un message) et en consacrant des femmes fortes comme Meg Ryan ou Meryl Streep, avec qui elle avait débuté sa carrière cinématographique (Le Mystère Silkwood, La Brûlure) et avec qui elle la termine en 2009 (Julie et Julia). Elle a été nommée trois fois à l’Oscar du Meilleur scénario au cours de sa carrière.
Pour Michael Bloomberg, le maire de New York, cette disparition est “dévastatrice pour la communauté artistique de New York. De ses débuts dans la presse new-yorkaise à ses grands succès hollywoodiens, Nora a toujours aimé les bonnes histoires new-yorkaises et elle les racontait comme personne”.
Nora Ephron est l’auteur du roman à succès La Brûlure, récit même pas déguisé de son mariage bref et orageux avec Carl Bernstein (l’un des deux journalistes-stars des Hommes du president) qu’elle adaptera plus tard pour le cinéma sous la direction de Mike Nichols.
Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship, will present on Tuesday (23 October) her controversial plan for mandatory quotas for women on non-executive boards of listed companies, despite fierce opposition from many of the EU’s member states.
Reding will propose that companies should be forced by 2020 to ensure that at least 40% of their board members are women. Currently, the proportion is around 14%.
The commissioner has refused to drop the plans despite a letter sent last month to her and to José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, by nine national governments calling for a re-think. This level of opposition would be sufficient to block the plan becoming law but Reding is counting on strong support from the European Parliament, which also has to agree on the proposal, to persuade member states to change their approach.
Different approach
Ministers from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands and the UK stated in the letter that although they agreed that there needed to be a better gender balance on company boards, measures to improve the situation should be taken at the level of the member states rather than the EU.
France – which is bringing in its own law that will force companies based there to have 20% of women on its boards by 2014 and 40% by 2017 – has written to the Commission to say that it is in favour of EU legislation. Belgium and Austria have also given their support.
Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, is to be applauded for his efforts, but sadly this is not the long-term budget that was needed.
It could have been worse. The deal agreed between members of the European Council on the European Union’s budget for 2014-20 is at least a deal. If last week’s summit had broken up in acrimonious dispute then the damage would have been much worse.
So Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, is to be applauded for his efforts. Hindsight judges him correct to have called a halt to the first summit negotiations in November, and to have resumed the talks this month. In budget negotiations, as in so much else, ripeness is all.
Moreover, the conduct of the negotiations appears to have been firm but fair. The going was tough, but no one was humiliated. Some emerged with more of what they wanted than others, but dignity was preserved, which has not always been the case.
Yet a sense of relief should not blind anyone to the imperfections of the deal that was done. This is not the long-term budget that was needed. An opportunity has been missed, which the EU will come to regret – repeatedly.
The claims made for this budget – that it is forward-looking, that it is a budget for growth and jobs, that it is modern – are tendentious, not to say incredible. This is a budget full of contradictions, some of which were eminently predictable. But just because we can see something coming down the tracks does not mean it must be welcomed when it arrives.
Most glaringly, this budget sets back the cause of reforming European agricultural policy. In recent years there has been some intelligent thinking about how to make support for farmers more sensitive to the markets and more respectful of the environment. Some progress has been made. More was promised – through reform of the Common Agricultural Policy’s payments. But the European Council has undermined those reform efforts. The farming lobbies – stronger in some countries than others – have prevailed. They were fighting to conserve what they already have rather than to shape agriculture to Europe’s future needs. Those in the agricultural business who have been working from the inside for reform have been betrayed.
This is a cause for regret not just because the CAP is a distortion of the EU’s spending and will continue to be so. It is also a stumbling-block in the way of decent trading relations with the rest of the world. The summit’s fine words on the Arab Spring were mocked by the conservatism on CAP reform.
The way in which the sums earmarked for infrastructure development – the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) – were reduced during the budget negotiations is indicative of the national leaders’ lack of faith in the EU. They do not want to surrender control over spending decisions to the European Commission and they doubt their own ability to find the projects and funds to qualify for the CEF money. So they cut it back in favour of their familiar (individual) milch-cows: the structural funds.
The end result is a budget whose structure is very familiar from previous seven-year periods. The world is changing, but the EU’s budget adapts only slowly.
It could have been worse, but it should have been so much better.
Commission seeks to remove payments to fishermen who are not fishing.
European Union member states are likely to reject a European Commission proposal to scrap payments to fishermen who keep their boats idle in harbour.
The European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF) is being adjusted for 2013-20 as part of the Commission’s proposed reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The Commission wants to eliminate EMFF subsidies to fishermen who keep their boats docked when fish populations are low and funds for fishermen who modernise their engines to make them more efficient.
Campaigners argue that these payments create an incentive for overfishing. Markus Knigge, an advisor to the Pew Environment Group, said: “If you overfish, [there is no] risk that you will face economic challenges as a consequence.”
When EU fisheries ministers meet on Tuesday (23 October), France, Spain and Portugal will lead efforts to re-insert these payments into the adjusted EMFF. Northern European states including Germany, Denmark and the UK support the Commission’s proposal. Each side has enough votes to block an agreement, so the most likely outcome is a compromise in which the payments will continue but with new conditions attached – such as making fishermen pay 80% of engine replacement costs.
MEPs views
The European Parliament’s fisheries committee, which will vote on the issue early in 2013, is likely to support keeping the payments.
Alain Cadec, a French centre-right MEP who is guiding the proposal through the Parliament, called the over-capacity of the EU’s fishing fleet alleged in the Commission’s proposal a “questionable premise”.
“The EMFF should support the replacement of antiquated vessels by new, more energy-efficient, safer, more selective and less powerful vessels,” Cadec said.
Cyprus, which holds the rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers, hopes that a general approach can be agreed at next week’s meeting, but a Council official said the northern European countries would not accept a deal that did not at least “limit the damage” by attaching conditions to the payments.
Changes aimed at speeding up the way that the European Commission rules on state-aid cases will be proposed by Joaquín Almunia, the European commissioner for competition, on Wednesday (5 December).
One proposal would declare certain new categories of aid – such as funding for culture and innovation or in case of natural disasters – exempt from mandatory notification to the Commission.
A second proposal would change rules on the handling of complaints about state aid.
Almunia’s plans form part of his efforts to modernise the state-aid system. The Commission said that the proposed changes would allow it to “focus its enforcement on what matters most”.
Looking at the early days of a project intended to show how – and how much – national parliaments are using their powers to influence EU policymaking.
On paper, the Lisbon treaty significantly expands the influence of national parliaments in European policymaking. Parliaments are now fed more information directly from Brussels, have a right to participate in certain evaluation and control processes, and can object directly to the European Commission if they think legislative proposals compromise the subsidiarity principle.
Yet relatively little is known about whether parliaments are rising to this challenge, or if it is considered an unwelcome distraction from their work holding governments to account. The Observatory of Parliaments After Lisbon (OPAL) has been set up to find out, and to produce a systematic analysis of the way national parliaments engage in EU politics.
“It is a two-way system,” explains Thomas Christiansen, professor of European institutional politics at Maastricht University and OPAL’s academic co-ordinator. “One line of inquiry is to ask what can and do parliaments achieve at the European level. People are quite sceptical about that, and so are we, but we will study it. The other line of inquiry is to ask what the system does at the national level. How does this change the behaviour of national parliaments? How does it change political debates within member states?” This second question has received relatively little attention from researchers. “We start with the hypothesis that there is a potential for transforming national politics,” he says.
As well as Maastricht, OPAL involves academics from Cologne and Cambridge universities and the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (otherwise known as Sciences Po) in Paris. The three-year project, with a budget of around €2 million, is funded by social-science research councils in Germany, France, the UK and the Netherlands.
Each academic centre has chosen an aspect of the post-Lisbon situation to examine (see page 18), drawing on a common body of data that will be assembled by the project as a whole. This ranges from quantitative information collected across the EU, plus Croatia, to more detailed qualitative information on specific EU member states.
EU expertise
The bedrock of the project will be a database of activity relating to EU affairs, since the Lisbon treaty came into effect, in 40 national parliamentary chambers. This includes debates, resolutions and mandates, opinions and activities about inter-parliamentary co-operation, relations with other member states or EU institutions, and hearings with private actors and experts. Collecting this data from parliamentary websites and documents is down to Sciences Po, extending the expertise it has gained from running an observatory of European institutions.
More detailed quantitative data will then be collected in eight countries: the researchers’ home nations plus Denmark, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. This will involve interviews with MPs, committee clerks and party-group experts, covering both European affairs committees and a selection of other standing committees. Meanwhile, at the European level, there will be interviews with parliaments’ permanent representatives, staff at COSAC (the conference of EU affairs committees) and key figures in the European Commission, Council of Ministers and European Parliament.
OPAL’s initial plan was to ask general questions about how these parliaments scrutinise EU issues and participate in mechanisms such as the early-warning system on subsidiarity. But then the researchers decided something more substantial was required. “Potentially, all of these things are a bit empty of content,” says Christiansen. “So maybe we can bring them to life by telling some stories about how different parliaments deal with different kinds of decisions.”
So three case studies were selected, covering different policy areas and types of EU decision-making, to illustrate how the parliaments operate. The first study is of the proposed directive on seasonal workers, which is a legislative case covered by the early-warning system on subsidiarity and an issue with potential to create tension between national and EU interests. “We chose it because people had already expressed concerns about it,” Christiansen explains. “We didn’t want something that was just waved through without any debate at all. We wanted something that causes an element of friction and that therefore can bring us some results.”
The second is Operation Atalanta, a naval mission to curb pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, which was launched in 2008 under the Common Security and Defence Policy. This is a non-legislative case where national parliaments have limited powers. The third is the sovereign-debt crisis, an area where increased EU activity affects national parliaments’ core budgetary powers. Here the idea is to see how parliaments participate in the negotiation, implementation and execution of measures to combat the crisis and provide longer-term fiscal-policy co-ordination.
Engaging with such a vast issue is not straightforward. “Do we worry more about the bail-out stories or the multi-annual financial framework that is now going through? Do we look at the six-pack? How much do we privilege the euro zone over the non-euro zone? There is still a lot of discussion,” says Christiansen.
While many of the questions on OPAL’s agenda could have been addressed by academics working alone, the scope of the project is unique. “Our ambition is to be comprehensive in our empirical analysis, to look at all 27 parliaments – 28 with Croatia — and nobody could have done that on their own,” says Christiansen.
The division of labour has been a challenge, but the consortium has come up with a matrix structure in which each centre plays to its disciplinary strengths while sharing other tasks. For example, each of the teams will study two countries in depth, but interview questions will cover all four thematic strands and all three case studies. Setting up the structure has taken about a year, but the researchers are now embarking on their fieldwork. There have been some bumps along the way – such as the Dutch general election, which made it difficult to pin down interviewees.
There was also a surprise when, earlier this year, the Commission received its first ‘yellow card’ under the early-warning system on subsidiarity. Twelve national parliaments complained that proposed legislation on workers’ right to strike overstepped the mark. The proposal was subsequently withdrawn, although the Commission said its decision was a response to government objections rather than the yellow card. Even so, Christiansen sees the event as significant. “We can chalk it up as the early-warning system having been activated and having delivered some sort of result. That may be surprising for those who were talking it down to start with.”
This also indicates that OPAL is working at the beginning of a new system of political relationships within the EU. “In some ways Lisbon seems a long time ago, but it took a while for national parliaments to set things up,” Christiansen explains. “We’ve come in just at the point when they’ve started to become more active.”
With one year to set up and two years to collect data, this makes the project’s window of observation frustratingly narrow. Ideally, the team would like to run the project for longer, to see how the system evolves and identify highs and lows of activity.
Given extra resources, they would also have compared parliamentary activity before and after the Lisbon treaty, and before and after the crisis. “But what we are doing is already quite significant, for the first time going in depth into all 27 countries,” Christiansen says.
The researchers will start writing up their findings and presenting their work at conferences next year. Several major publications are planned, including “The Palgrave Handbook of National Parliaments and the European Union”, due in 2014, and a special issue of the journal “West European Politics” devoted to the performance of multi-level democracy in Europe.
RESEARCH THEMES
Domestic watchdogs
Sciences Po will ask whether parliaments are able to influence their governments when it comes to EU affairs, how this happens and, in the absence of influence, whether their activity has other impacts.
Lead academics: Katrin Auel, Olivier Rozenberg, Renaud Dehousse
Non-legislative processes
Cambridge University will look at parliamentary involvement in non-legislative EU policy processes, particularly involving the Common Security and Defence Policy.
Lead academics: Julie Smith, Geoffrey Edwards
Beyond the domestic
Cologne University will look at parliamentary activity beyond the domestic arena, such as inter-parliamentary co-operation and contacts with EU institutions.
Lead academic: Wolfgang Wessels
Parliamentary administrations
Maastricht University will look at the role of parliamentary administrations in EU affairs, including the structures and appointed officials that parliaments employ in order to exercise their functions.
Après l’étalage de ses infidélités, Jesse James suivrait un traitement contre son addiction sexuelle.
« Le Programme pour le Rétablissement de Trauma Sexuel (PSTR) fournit le traitement adapté aux individus souffrant d’addiction sexuelle (incluant la dépendance Internet). » C’est ainsi que débute l’argumentaire du luxueux site web du non moins luxueux centre Sierra Tucson où se ferait traiter Jesse James, le mari un peu lourd mais carrément volage de
qui a choisi cette « approche bio-psychosociale et spirituelle » pour arrêter de s’envoyer en l’air avec des bimbos tatouées.
C’est TMZ, le site américain, qui l’affirme: c’est en se rendant dans ce centre de désintoxication sexuelle (mais qui reçoit aussi des alcoolique, des drogués et des fumeurs!) que Jesse James s’est fait interpeller par un officier de police sur l’autoroute 10, Blythe, en Californie. Car l’encore-mari de Sandra Bullock aimant le dénuement, il roulait sans plaque d’immatriculation avant et avec des fenêtres teintées.
Et, se voulant soudain transparent, Jesse James a dit à l’officier qu’il allait en Arizona essayer de sauver son mariage avec Sandra Bullock. Et il s’agirait donc du centre de Tucson.
TMZ a donc appelé Sierra Tucson où un médecin aurait confirmé que Jesse s’était installé mardi soir pour débuter son traitement. Trop tard?
a réussi son effet de surprise en annonçant une liste de trente pour la Coupe du Monde de Foot 2010, et en écartant des joueurs-vedettes tels que Karim Benzema et Patrick Vieira.
Raymond Domenech avait promis une surprise en exclu au JT de 20h de ce mardi sur TF1. Et, pour commencer, ce fut le nombre de Bleus. Au lieu de la liste de 23 attendue, il a donné 30 noms… tout en admettant que 7 seraient forcément mis hors jeu de la Coupe du Monde 2010. Voici la liste énumérée à l’antenne:
Côté gardiens, on retrouve Hugo Lloris (évoluant à l’OL), Steve Mandanda (OM), Cédric Carrasso (Bordeaux), Mickaël Landreau (Lille).
Dans la catégorie défenseurs, sont élus Bacary Sagna (Arsenal),
Abidal (Barcelone), William Gallas (Arsenal), Patrice Evra (Manchester United), Rod Fanni (Rennes), Adil Rami (Lille), Sébastien Squillaci (Séville), Gaël Clichy (Arsenal), Marc Planus (Bordeaux), Anthony Reveillère (Lyon).
Pour ce qui est des milieux de terrain, Raymond Domenech a révélé les noms de Jérémy Toulalan (OL), Lassana Diarra (Real Madrid), Alou Diarra (Bordeaux), Yoann Gourcuff (Bordeaux), Abou Diaby (Arsenal), Yann M’Vila (Rennes), Florent Malouda (Chelsea).
Enfin, les attaquants compteront Sidney Govou (OL),
(Bayern Munich), Thierry Henry (Barcelone), Nicolas Anelka (Chelsea), Djibril Cissé (Panathinaïkos), André-Pierre Gignac (Toulouse), Mathieu Valbuena (Marseille), Hatem Ben Arfa (Marseille) et enfin Jimmy Briand (Rennes).
On notera l’absence dans cette sélection des Lyonnais Boumsong et Cissokho mais aussi de Karim Benzema ainsi que de Patrick Vieira. Lequel, sur Canal+ Sports, a lancé ce petit missile à Domenech: « Ça manque de tact, de classe. C’est ça qui me chagrine, c’est d’apprendre ça comme ça au dernier moment. C’est plutôt un problème d’homme que de sélectionneur. »
Indiana Jones emporte le cœur de l’avocate d’Ally Mac Beal. Après quasiment 10 ans passé ensemble, les deux acteurs ont décidé de se dire officiellement « Oui » !
La frêle
est donc aujourd’hui l’épouse du célèbre aventurier
. Les deux acteurs se sont rencontrés en 2002 et vivent depuis une véritable idylle. A tel point que les moins avertis les pensaient déjà mariés.
Après s’être fiancés l’année dernière, les deux amoureux se sont dit « oui » mardi dernier à Santa Fe, au nouveau Mexique.
Ce mariage est le troisième pour Harrison Ford qui est également père de quatre enfants, fruits de ces précédentes unions. De son côté Calista Flockhart, est la mère adoptive d’un petit Liam âgée de 9 ans, qu’elle élève aujourd’hui aux côtés de son acteur de mari.
Alors que la mode hollywoodienne fait la part belle aux femmes « cougars », très intéressées par les jeunes garçons (façon
– Jesus Luz…), la célèbre interprète d’Ally Mc Beal prend la mode à contre pied. A 45 ans, l’actrice préfère la sécurité avec son homme, un monsieur de 67 ans, tout de même. Mais aussi le charme d’un ténébreux aventurier désormais si sage en amour.
Passée par Paris et Bonn, la grande exposition dédiée à Romy Schneider s’installe à Cannes, au Palais des festivals, pour 2 mois. Visite guidée en compagnie d’Isabelle Carré et Jean-Pierre Lavoignat, commissaire de l’exposition.
Il y a quelques mois, l’Espace Landowski à Boulogne consacrait une exposition à Romy Schneider. Après être passée par Bonn, elle s’installe aujourd’hui, et pour 2 mois, à Cannes, dans un lieu emblématique : le Palais des Festivals. L’occasion de découvrir ou de redécouvrir ces 500 photos, documents, affiches et objets retraçant la vie et l’oeuvre de l’artiste.
Nous avions visité les lieux, à l’Espace Landowski, en compagnie de deux passionnés, l’actrice Isabelle Carré et Jean-Pierre Lavoignat, commissaire de l’exposition. Retour sur cette visite guidée en vidéo !
La Piscine
Propos recueillis par Laetitia Ratane
Infos pratiques : Exposition Romy Schneider, du 2 juillet au 2 septembre 2012
Palais des festivals de Cannes, ouvert tous les jours de 10h30 à 20h30, gratuit pour le moins de 16 ans.