Pop icon Elton John has joined calls for a boycott of hotels owned by the Sultan of Brunei after the leader declared that homosexuality will be punishable by death under stricter adherence to Islamic Sharia Law.
Last week, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah announced that under new laws in the Muslim-majority country, anyone found guilty by a Sharia Court of sodomy, adultery, or rape would face the death penalty, including by stoning. Homosexuality is already punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
John, who is a long-standing LGBT rights activist alongside his partner David Furnish, said he was joining actor George Clooney in efforts to “send a message” to Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah that such treatment will not be tolerated.
“I believe that love is love and being able to love as we choose is a basic human right,” the 72-year-old wrote on Twitter. “Wherever we go, my husband David and I deserve to be treated with dignity and respect – as do each and every one of the millions of LGBTQ+ people around the world”
“I commend my friend, #GeorgeClooney, for taking a stand against the anti-gay discrimination and bigotry taking place in the nation of #Brunei – a place where gay people are brutalized, or worse – by boycotting the Sultan’s hotels,” he continued. “We must send a message, however we can, that such treatment is unacceptable. That’s why David and I have long refused to stay at these hotels and will continue to do so.”
Clooney made a similar call last week, denouncing Brunei’s laws as a new level of authoritarianism, despite the prevalence of similar Sharia Laws across the Islamic World.
“On this particular April 3rd, the nation of Brunei will begin stoning and whipping to death any of its citizens that are proved to be gay. Let that sink in,” Clooney said in a statement. “In the onslaught of news where we see the world backsliding into authoritarianism this stands alone.”
Follow Ben Kew on Facebook, Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at [email protected].
There were plenty of snubs in the Oscar’s annual In Memoriam segment Sunday night, but a political blacklist is the only possible reason for the Academy’s decision to shun the great R. Lee Ermey.
Stanley Donen? He died just hours prior to the telecast.
Oscar nominee Sondra Locke? She has been out of the public eye for decades.
John Mahoney? TV star.
Ricky Jay? Too few movies.
Verne Troyer? Too few movies.
Lee Ermey?
Lee freakin’ Ermey?
This snub is without question the act of Hollywood blacklisters who want the man erased, memory-holed, and forgotten… A man who’s personal political beliefs are verboten in an increasingly fascist industry.
Ermey was a Marine for 11 years and a decorated Vietnam veteran. When he retired from the Corps in 1972 due to injuries, he jumped into the motion picture business as a technical adviser. This led to a storied acting career that anyone with any aspiration in that field would envy.
Over the course of a 40-year career, Ermey stacked up 125 film and television credits. This includes roles in a number of popular and iconic movies, including Mississippi Burning (1985), Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Se7en (1995), Dead Man Walking (1995), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), and the Toy Story trilogy (1995 – 2010).
On television, he appeared in Miami Vice, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and a ton of other animated shows. He was also the star of his own reality shows.
Above all that, though, Ermey created one of the most iconic performances in the history of cinema as Gny. Sgt Hartman in director Stanley Kubrick’s 1987 masterpiece Full Metal Jacket. In fact, you could argue Ermey’s performance is the most iconic of that particular decade.
And yet… Watch right here on Sunday night as Hollywood blacklists Ermey for holding unacceptable political beliefs:
I don’t want to be in the business of naming all those who were honored Sunday night even though they are objectively less deserving than Ermey. Hey, God bless them, they all deserve it, as did those mentioned above, like Sondra Locke and Verne Troyer. In a three-plus hour show, this is where these bastards choose to cut?
Ermey is different, though, an iconic presence and voice who was a welcome part of our lives for decades. The Academy’s snub is inexplicable — unless you look at the fact that Ermey was a proud and open Republican and defender of the 2nd Amendment.
Here is TCM’s annual In Memoriam tribute, which has never engaged in blacklisting. Naturally, Ermey receives his due:
P.S. Forget about the politics for a moment and just compare the Oscar tribute to the TCM tribute — look at the quality of the work, which one is the most moving and compelling. How is it that a cable network simply blows away the Motion Picture Academy every year?
The Academy has access to the finest editors in the world, and their In Memoriam segment is bland, lifeless, hollow-eyed, and dull. Meanwhile, year after year after year, TCM wrenches our hearts.
The Oscars are broken forever.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
"It’s very unfortunate that for the past couple of years increasingly the Commission became a political body,” said government spokesperson Zoltán Kovács. | Patrick Seeger/EPA
Hungary blasts Commission’s double standards on Selmayr
Government spokesman takes aim at Brussels over promotion of Juncker’s chief of staff.
The European Commission is guilty of double standards by appointing Martin Selmayr to the civil service’s top post, a Hungarian government spokesperson said Wednesday.
“In light of the recent developments in the household of the Commission, if I might say so, we see that preaching about the rule of law and following the guidelines or the rules is not authentic when it is coming from the Commission,” Zoltán Kovács said during a press briefing in Brussels.
Asked whether he was referring to the sudden elevation of Selmayr, Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief of staff, to the role of secretary-general, head of the Commission’s 33,000-strong civil service, he said: “Double standards, that’s my comment on this.”
Selmayr’s appointment has resulted in a growing backlash, with the European Parliament to hold a debate on the subject on Monday. Even most European commissioners were told about the promotion only minutes before their meeting last week.
Kovács criticizing the Commission is not new, with Budapest and Brussels regularly at loggerheads over migration and the rule of law. He also had harsh words for a Commission report on Hungary published Wednesday as part of the European Semester Winter Package, which scrutinized the economies of 27 EU countries (the exception being Greece, which is subject to a bailout program).
The report on Hungary is a political statement issued just a few weeks ahead of Hungary’s April 8 election, Kovács said.
“Unfortunately it is very obviously a political report,” he said. The Commission “has basically made a political statement, a campaign statement,” he added, referring to parts of the report criticizing the country’s judicial system and its failure to integrate the Roma community.
“It’s a political report from a political body. It’s very unfortunate that for the past couple of years increasingly the Commission became a political body.” Creating a more political Commission was a stated aim of Juncker.
Now, Kovács said, it’s a Commission that doesn’t even follow its own rules: “The statements, the country specific reports, the recommendations are coming from a body which, again, is a political body which increasingly is not even following its own lines, so it’s going beyond its original confines.”
Transgender activists have set their sights on film industry database website IMBD.com for publishing the birth names of trans actors. The activists have created a brand new term for it by accusing IMBb of “deadnaming” people with names no longer in use.
At least two trans actors have reportedly demanded that Internet Movie Database (IMDb) remove their original names and replace them with their new name adopted after becoming transgender. But the site has thus far refused to comply, according to Deadline Hollywood.
Activists even claim that IMDb did not change the listings even after the actors’ managers tried to contact the site to request the name changes.
One trans actor claimed that IMDb replied that the information on the site is public information and that they “do this with everyone.” A second actor said it took months for IMDb to add his trans name, but he is upset that his birth name is still in the biography section.
Registered members of IMDb can make certain edits to pages, but not everything on an entry is open for alteration.
For its part, IMDb insisted in a statement that its rules are there for a reason: accuracy
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston.
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.”
Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People's Party (EPP) arrives at 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May in London, Britain, November 15, 2017 | Andy Rain/EPA-EFE
Brexit talks stalled on Ireland and citizens’ rights, says Manfred Weber
EU is ‘concerned’ about ‘stalled’ negotiations on protecting EU citizens and Irish border issue, says MEP.
Down-to-the-wire Brexit talks remain stalled on the issues of the Northern Irish border and protections for the rights of EU citizens, according to Manfred Weber, the leader of the European People’s Party in the European Parliament.
Weber’s pessimistic assessement on Twitter was echoed by the Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney and the country’s European Affairs Minister Helen McEntee Monday morning. Coveney told RTE that “we’re not quite yet where we need to be,” while McEntee told the BBC’s Today Program, “we are not there yet.”
The downbeat responses suggest that negotiations will continue right up to a crucial lunch meeting between Prime Minister Theresa May and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels.
May will fly in this morning aboard an RAF plane with her Brexit Secretary David Davis for the crunch lunch — a key moment in her bid to persuade the EU27 that sufficient progress has been made in the Brexit talks to move them forward to the discussion about the U.K.’s future relationship with the bloc.
Weber, who is a close ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, wrote on Twitter that the EU will not change its “red lines” as “the lives of millions of families are at stake.” Although the two sides are close on the issue of citizens’ rights the future role of the European Court of Justice in the U.K. remains a sticking point. At the weekend, a group of leading Brexiteers wrote to May to urge her to stick to her red line on removing the court’s jurisdiction over the U.K.
“In #Brexit negotiations, money is one of the problems, but it is not the biggest one,” the MEP said on Twitter, adding the EU was “much more concerned about the fact that negotiations are stalled on the protection of EU citizen’s rights & on the Irish case.”
Asked if the talks were close to a breakthrough, McEntee said, “No. I don’t believe we are.”
“We are certainly not looking to veto anything. Ireland wants to move on to phase two in the same way the UK and rest of the 26 EU member states do. However, it is absolutely impossible for us to allow negotiations to move to phase two when we don’t an absolute concrete commitment from the UK government that we will not have a hard border on the island of Ireland.”
She said the Irish cabinet was meeting at 9 a.m. “Unfortunately, I don’t think that we will have an absolute final text that we will be able to approve however for us there are a number of key issues that we have wanted to see progress on that I know progress has been made over the weekend,” she told the BBC.
Former Tory cabinet minister Owen Paterson told the same program, “It would be disastrous for the Belfast agreement to put a line down the Irish sea and to have Northern Ireland hived off with separate standards as some people in Dublin are asking for.”
“There can be no special agreements for Northern Ireland separated from the rest of the UK,” he said.
Last month, Weber told May in London that there needed to be a noticeable negative impact on her country on the day it leaves the bloc. Weber also said the European Parliament would not let the United Kingdom have a smooth “cut-and-paste” transition into a post-Brexit era.
Wednesday on ABC’s “The View,” co-host Meghan McCain responded to President Donald Trump’s ongoing criticisms of late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ).
McCain said, “I think if I had told my dad seven months after you’re dead, you’re going to be dominating the news and all over Twitter, he would think it was hilarious that our president was so jealous of him that he was dominating the news cycle in death as well. Do not feel bad for me and my family. We are blessed.”
“We are a family of privilege,” she continued. “Feel bad for people out there who are being bullied that don’t have support, that don’t have women of ‘The View’ to come out and support their family. There are kids committing suicide because of cyber-bullying online. There are people going through rough times. There are veterans who come back—we have 20 veterans a day committing suicide. Focus on these issues. These are the issues I beg the White House to pay attention to.”
Medical devices regulations need action to begin relay race
Foot-dragging by Commission could start a chain reaction disrupting supply of tools.
Leaking breast implants and shoddy metal hips prompted 336 pages of new medical device regulations for the European Union.
Action this fall is key for meeting implementation deadlines that are still years away, especially on rules related to assessing whether devices are safe. Industry officials warn that foot-dragging by the Commission could start a chain reaction of missed targets and hurt the availability of products ranging from syringes to defibrillators when the new rules take effect.
The sweeping changes add new responsibilities and standards for virtually every player in the medtech sector. Even though the final implementation deadline isn’t until mid-2020 or mid-2022, depending on the type of product, the industry and its regulators are racing to comply.
It’s more like a relay race, they say, because one link in the supply chain must reach a certain point before the next can really start. A significant delay at any stage could ultimately mean medical devices and diagnostic tools, which pinpoint diseases and drive treatment decisions, get pulled from the shelves. Later runners are already getting impatient with the earliest players, particularly the European Commission.
It will take between 14 and 80 pieces of supplemental legislation to actually implement the regulation, and “the European Commission has been particularly unforthcoming as to the priorities of those implementing and delegating acts,” said Phil Brown, technical and regulatory director of the Association of British Healthcare Industries. “We don’t know which ones are going to be implemented when.”
These issues are especially pressing for Brown’s membership: Brexit will be official in 2019, midway through the compliance period, likely prompting a regulatory gray zone.
But the 25,000 manufacturers around the Continent are wary of the deadline too: New rules for medical devices will take effect three years after their May 5, 2017 publication in the EU’s Official Journal. In vitro diagnostics — items like pregnancy tests and laboratory tools that may never touch a patient’s body, and have generally been less subject to regulation in the past — have five years.
All of these products must have an official evaluation of their quality and safety based on the new standards, even if they’ve long been on the market.
Evaluating the evaluators
Before those products can be evaluated for safety, the evaluators have to go through their own appraisal to show they are indeed qualified to make these judgments. That’s the next big milestone this autumn: The so-called notified bodies that assess safety can formally submit applications starting November 26 to national regulators.
The scrutiny of notified bodies is one of the first concrete outcomes of 2011’s PIP breast implant scandal, when silicon meant for industry, not medicine, ruptured inside women. As European patients clamored for someone to take responsibility, they realized not all of the Continent’s 56 notified bodies — mostly private companies — met the same standards. But since they all had equal power to grant a CE mark, and thus Continent-wide market access, ill-intentioned devicemakers could shop for a notified body more likely to let sloppiness slide.
The new device regulations clarify liability when something goes wrong for notified bodies and the national regulators that allow them to operate. There’ll also be a new system to track devices once they’re on the market, and a database for experts and the general public alike to monitor medtech.
But for now, to show they’re living up to the more stringent standards, notified bodies must reapply to continue operating. They wanted Brussels to publish implementing legislation, including application forms, earlier in the summer. After all, even the most well-prepared application is likely to take at least 10 months to evaluate, said Françoise Schlemmer, head of Team-NB, the association of notified bodies in Europe. That leaves even less time available to review 500,000 types of medical devices.
“If we are not submitting our applications very soon, it is clear that the whole sector will be missing availability to get the certificates. That is why we are in a hurry,” Schlemmer said.
Waiting for the road map
National authorities and the Commission are moving deliberately for a reason, said Niall MacAleenan of Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority.
“One of the most difficult things which could happen would be that every member state’s authority starts to go off in different directions and implement the regulation in a slightly different way,” MacAleenan said. Unlike the previous EU directive on medical devices, the new regulations don’t need to be translated into national laws, but there’s still room for differing interpretations, he said.
The main forum for alignment is a network of national-level regulators, the Competent Authorities for Medical Devices (CAMD). With the Commission, it released a draft road map in March outlining how they’ll break down the overhaul into incremental parts and what sort of guidance they’ll provide. Since then, CAMD has “digested” feedback from industry, manufacturers and interested parties.
The Commission is planning an October meeting to discuss the final version with CAMD and industry.
That final version won’t have “any significant shifts” from the draft, said MacAleenan, a member of the CAMD’s management arm, just “more detail in the latest versions on the specific topics that are underlined, and then more granular detail about timelines.”
That’s likely to assuage the industry, which expected the final version in June.
Manufacturers are especially concerned about new clinical requirements and making sure there’s support for all the new documentation devicemakers will have to supply, said Oliver Bisazza, who joined the industry’s EU lobby, MedTech Europe, as regulatory affairs director in August.
The road map section on IVDs also will require special scrutiny. “We want to make sure that all of their specificities are being taken care of, and they’re not just relegated to a little afterthought or a small group of experts to work on them,” Bisazza said.
While most conventional medical devices need to be re-evaluated, some 85 percent of the 40,000 IVDs will have to pass muster with a notified body for the first time.
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said that Disney should be spending its $1 billion-plus profits from the Avengers: Endgame film on paying all it’s employees middle-class wages.
“What would be truly heroic is if Disney used its profits from Avengers to pay all of its workers a middle class wage, instead of paying its CEO Bob Iger $65.6 million – over 1,400 times as much as the average worker at Disney makes,” Bernie Sanders said.
Sanders’ statement comes after Roy Disney’s granddaughter Abigail Disney criticized Disney CEO Bob Iger over his salary.
“When [Iger] got his bonus last year, I did the math, and I figured out that he could have given personally, out of pocket, a 15% raise to everyone who worked at Disneyland, and still walked away with $10 million,” she said. “So there’s a point at which there’s just too much going around the top of the system into this class of people who–I’m sorry this is radical–have too much money. There is such a thing.”
Avengers: Endgame certainly has been a huge box office success — earning over $1 billion globally in its opening weekend. Of course, the stars of the film, like many in Hollywood, have used the popularity of the movie to promote their social justice views.
Don Cheadle joked about snapping President Trump out of existence, while Brie Larson used her spotlight to lecture viewers on the need for more diversity.
“Diverse storytelling matters, the female experience matters, and these are markers,” she said, also saying that Marvel has “gotta move faster” with diversity in film.
Sanders, who announced his 2020 campaign in February, continues to have strong polling numbers, though he is still lagging behind Joe Biden, the presumptive front-runner.
The democratic socialist set off a media frenzy last week after he said convicted felons, including terrorists, should have to right to vote in American elections.
“So, I believe people who commit crimes, they pay the price and they get out of jail, they certainly should have the right to vote,” the Vermont senator said. “But, I believe even if they are in jail, they’re paying the price to society, but that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.”
German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (right) and French Economy, Finance Trade Minister Bruno Le Maire | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
Paris, Berlin to propose new tech tax to save face
New proposal effectively kills European Commission’s proposed ‘digital services tax.’
France and Germany will Tuesday propose a new advertising tax for tech giants like Facebook and Google in another desperate attempt to reach a compromise at EU level.
The new proposal — obtained by POLITICO — effectively ends the European Commission’s proposed “digital services tax” (DST), which EU finance ministers were expected to vote down Tuesday in Brussels at this month’s ECOFIN meeting.
The new Franco-German draft levy would target tech companies at a rate of 3 percent “on a tax base referring to advertisement,” according to the proposal, which Paris and Berlin completed late on Monday night following talks at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires over the weekend.
The document makes no reference to taxing company revenues, which was a central concern to countries like Denmark with regard to the DST.
France’s Bruno Le Maire is set to unveil the new proposal to his peers together with Germany’s Olaf Scholz and urge them to agree on it by March 2019 “at the latest.”
The levy would “enter into force on January 1, 2021, if no international solution has been agreed upon,” the proposal said. It would then “expire by 2025.”
EU tax initiatives require unanimity before they can become law, and it’s unclear whether the new proposal will satisfy Denmark, Finland, Ireland and Sweden, which rejected the DST for “political reasons.”
“We know some member states have reservations, these have been made clear in recent months,” an official said. “But we believe it is essential to find an agreement that is both fair and effective and responds to citizens’ concerns.”