Le Cirque du Soleil, réputé pour la qualité technique et scénographique de ses spectacles, a voulu rendre hommage dans un spectacle à l’un des plus grands danseurs pop de tous les temps: Michael Jackson, disparu il y a bientôt quatre ans. Un pari osé, tant les performances de l’artiste sur scène étaient uniques.

Enfilez vos chaussettes blanches et vos gants à paillettes: le revival Michael Jackson va (re)commencer.

Pendant deux heures, plusieurs tableaux se succèdent au rythme des musiques de Bambi, avec en toile de fond des images issues de clip ou d’émissions de télévision dans lesquelles Jackson a montré le meilleur de lui-même. Sur scène, des danseurs (exceptionnels, notamment le personnage principal vêtu de blanc comme un Monsieur Loyal, mais avec de curieuses bandelettes sur le visage) et des acrobates (sensationnels) s’agitent dans des chorégraphies surprenantes et laissent espérer une débauche d’émotions… Qui, hélas, ne viennent pas. Il manque toujours le personnage principal: Michael lui-même (il faut convenir que l’exercice est difficile).

L’ensemble du spectacle ressemble donc à un fabuleux concert de la star de la pop, mais sans la star de la pop. Autant dire un gâteau sans la cerise, Neverland sans son parc d’attractions. Les fans de MJ y trouveront cependant leur compte puisque la plupart des tubes de l’artiste sont mis en scène, avec quelques surprises comme la version espagnole d’un de ses grands titres. Quant aux passionnés de danse, ils découvriront une richesse de gestuelle d’une qualité rare. Kamel Ouali, Audrey Lamy et Florence Foresti, présents lors de la soirée du 3 avril ont certainement dû trouver là quelques bonnes idées pour leurs prochains spectacles.

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Morgan Freeman pris en flagrant délit en train de sommeil lors d’une interview pour une télévision américaine locale: la vidéo a fait le tour du web.

Tous les acteurs vous le diront. Les tournées promotionnelles sont parfois très longues et très fatigantes. Ce que confirme l’Américain Morgan Freeman, dans une vidéo diffusée sur internet.

On y voit l’acteur américain de 75 ans, en pleine promotion d’Insaisissables (Now you see me, en anglais), s’endormir. À côté de lui, son acolyte, l’acteur Michael Caine, ne semble même pas remarquer que Morgan l’a quitté pour les bras de Morphée.

Les questions des deux journalistes d’une chaîne locale de Seattle seraient-elles inintéressantes au point de piquer du nez? A priori, non. Il faut savoir qu’une tournée promotionnelle de ce type est très répétitive.

Le plus souvent, un ou deux acteurs sont assis dans un fauteuil avec l’affiche du film derrière eux, et doivent répondre aux questions posées par les journalistes qui défilent les uns après les autres dans la salle. Les interviews ne durent parfois que quelques minutes et les acteurs répètent sans cesse la même chose. On comprend bien que la fatigue puisse prendre le dessus…

Mais Morgan Freeman, actuellement au cinéma dans Oblivion, a une autre explication, qu’il livre à nos confrères de People : «En fait, je ne me suis pas assoupi. Je suis un testeur beta pour Google Eyelids. J’étais simplement en train de mettre à jour ma page Facebook». Et voilà, Morgan Freeman prouve qu’il a de l’humour, et en profite pour faire un clin d’oeil «magique». Car dans Insaisissables, Morgan Freeman incarne un magicien qui aide le FBI à comprendre le fonctionnement de quatre cavaliers afin de les arrêter.

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European drivers hoping to get even with Volkswagen are stuck in a legal slow-lane.

Unlike Americans, European VW owners lack the legal tools to set up a pan-EU class-action lawsuit. Not only that, Volkswagen has made it clear it has no intention of offering them the $1,000 goodwill gift it is handing to U.S. drivers affected by the emissions scandal.

Now lawyers and legal organizations across Europe are busy looking for ways to cash in on the scandal, seeing a business opportunity in the disparity between the treatment dished out to VW consumers on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

One of them is Michael Hausfeld, a Washington attorney working on the VW class action in the U.S., who said he plans to take on the German car-maker on its home turf and has lined up several clients.

“We have been retained by a number of [European] businesses to represent their interests,” said Hausfeld, who built his reputation on extracting payouts for consumers worth billions from the energy industry, pharmaceutical companies and even Swiss banks on behalf of plaintiffs who have been affected by industry decisions.

Hausfeld said he will push to get the same deals for Europeans as American VW owners and investors, starting with the $1,000 payment that VW has ruled out for car owners on this side of the Atlantic. “There is no justification for not having similar payments for European consumers because the damage they have suffered is the same,” he said in a phone interview.

Hausfeld’s law firm, which specializes in cross-border disputes, opened a Berlin office this year and announced it had built up a €30 million war-chest with the help of Burwood Capital, a global finance firm that backs lawsuits. The firm says German VW customers alone could be entitled to claim up to €2.5 billion in damages.

Hausfeld, and any consumer wanting to take action against VW in a European court, faces an uphill road. While class actions are entrenched in the U.S. legal system, they are much more difficult to put together in the many different legal jurisdictions of the EU.

“The irony is that when it comes to consumer rights, the situation is usually better in the EU than it is in the U.S.,” said Ursula Pachl, the deputy director-general of the European consumer umbrella group BEUC. “But when it comes to enforcing those rights, the EU simply doesn’t have a uniform collective redress tool.”

Pachl said the European Commission’s 2013 recommendation that EU member countries introduce what is called “collective redress,” the EU definition of class action, went largely unheeded. As a result, fewer than half of the Union’s 28 justice systems allow for anything that would enable consumers to band together.

The weakness of the recommendation, BEUC argued, left European consumers more vulnerable than their U.S. counterparts. “It is not justified that EU consumers be treated so differently because they have suffered the same damage,” Pachl said. “VW should compensate European consumers in the same way.”

The collective alternative

Since the emissions scandal broke in September 2015, VW has made it clear it has no plans to extend to European car owners the conciliatory approach it used in the U.S.

VW argues the legal chasm between the EU and the U.S. means it cannot apply a one-size-fits-all approach and the class action filed in the United States District Court in San Francisco has no bearing on Europe.

When pressed on compensation for consumers during two meetings with Elżbieta Bieńkowska, the European industry commissioner, Volkswagen said the situation in the U.S. was “not automatically comparable” to other markets.

“[The compensation scheme] cannot simply be rolled out in other markets,” Volkswagen said in a statement, prompting Bieńkowska to vow to keep up the political pressure on the company to compensate EU consumers.

Lawyers working on the issue in Brussels said European consumers are unlikely to ever file a class action lawsuit similar to the one lodged in the San Francisco federal district court in February, which accused VW, Audi and Porsche of having created a “fraudulent scheme” to sell diesel cars.

That doesn’t mean European consumers have no means of redress. Under one possible scenario, competing law firms could band together to shepherd thousands of individual claims into a coherent, manageable group.

“These are not group actions, but firms cooperating with each other to aggregate their claims,” said Laurent Geelhand, Hausfeld’s Brussels managing partner.

In Germany the legal process is accelerating, slowly. In a victory for the industry, a district court in the western German city of Bochum ruled that a VW dealership was not obliged to take back a diesel car it had sold a customer, given that the deceptive software problem could be fixed in 30 minutes.

Although marginal in its significance, this was the first of what are likely to be many cases referring to Dieselgate to make its way to a German court.

In other parts of the EU, VW customers are taking what few class action provisions they can find, although this legal route is difficult.

Italian consumer group Altroconsumo is spearheading a complex class action brought against VW in a Venetian court. That legal action ran into problems when a judge threw out the case, prompting an appeal by Altroconsumo, which has used the situation to highlight what is says are the weaknesses of Italian class action provisions.

Lawyers working on the issue in Brussels said legal action brought by car owners is only the beginning.

“This is not just the moms and dads,” said Geelhand, a lawyer who specializes in the auto industry and the former European general counsel for Michelin. “You will see fleet holders, shareholders, suppliers, suppliers of suppliers coming forward. It will be very damaging not just for VW, but the entire car industry.”

Shareholders unite

European shareholders in VW — who have seen the value of their investments fall as a result of the manufacturer’s decision to install illegal software to deceive official emissions tests — are on firmer legal ground than the average owner, although shareholders are also uncertain they will be able to take legal action as a group.

One Netherlands-based shareholder challenge, the Dutch Volkswagen Settlement Foundation, is the European chapter of a shareholder lawsuit which is being managed in the U.S. by law firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann (BLBG). The American lawsuit refers to U.S.-traded securities while the Dutch Foundation targets investors with shares listed in Frankfurt.

“We are in a very strong position,” said the foundation’s senior adviser, Anatoli van der Krans. “We have the backing of BLBG and their approach is not to settle in the U.S., but to achieve a global settlement. And I think it is in Volkswagen’s interests to do so.”

Van der Krans says the foundation was established in the Netherlands because it is “the only legal system in the world in which a settlement can be declared globally binding” and, therefore, provides aggrieved investors with their best chance of redress.

“We are calling on institutional and retail investors,” he said. “But regardless how many sign our petition, they will still be entitled to compensation.”

Meanwhile, for investors who hope to take action through the German court system, time could be running out. “What you have to keep in mind… is the statute of limitations,” said Jürgen Kurz, from the German private investor association Deutsche Schutzvereinigung für Wertpapierbesitz.

The worst-case scenario, Kurz said, is that the statute of limitations could kick in as soon as September 2016, meaning anyone who had not filed a lawsuit before then would be “out of the game.”

However, a German court may also rule that multiple claims could be gathered into one, which would be more cost-effective for complainants and would turn the process into a de facto class action.

Volkswagen appears determined to scupper any class action put forward by shareholders as a group. Earlier this month the auto company submitted a statement to the Braunschweig District Court challenging a shareholders’ claim its management board had violated disclosure obligations under capital markets law.

Kalina Oroschakoff contributed to this article.

ISTANBUL — It’s 8 p.m. and 13-year-old Mohammed has just returned home from work in a remote Istanbul suburb, an hour-long bus ride away. His mother has anxiously been waiting for him, and is breastfeeding his infant brother.

Sweat runs down Mohammed’s temples, as if he had just been playing soccer with friends. Instead, he spent the day working in a textiles workshop, where he earns the money to feed his five other family members.

“It is not my will to work. I want to go to school,” he says, exhausted and avoiding eye contact as he brushes the hair away from his forehead.

*  *  *

Mohammed’s family fled Syria in 2014. He had been the top student in his district in Aleppo before Assad’s forces flattened the school. He has had no formal education since.

Now he looks after his 3-month-old brother, 11-year-old sister, 5-year-old brother, his mother and his father, who was blinded during a beating in an Aleppo prison. They live in a mold-infested one-room basement apartment in Istanbul’s Fatih neighborhood. He’s had to shelve his dreams of becoming a doctor.

There are 25 formal refugee camps in southern Turkey, but the vast majority of the nearly 2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey live outside the camps. Istanbul hosts the largest such Syrian community, and of the 330,000 Syrian refugees living in the city, 83,000 are school-age children. Only a quarter receive some form of education, according to the Syrian Education Commission, the de facto educational authority of the Syrian opposition active in Syria and Turkey. The system suffers from limited funds, facilities and infrastructure, and has left many children behind, say Syrian education activists.

Although the Turkish government has set out a policy to accommodate Syrian children in its public schools, the complex registration process and the language barrier discourage parents from signing their children up for a system that is already overloaded and offers no preparatory classes.

“I put my children into a Turkish school but Turkish children treated them badly, making fun of their limited Turkish,” said Eman Izi, 36, whose husband runs an Islamic clothing business in Istanbul. “They were going to school but without understanding anything so we had to put them into a Syrian school.”

Eman and her husband now pay 100 Turkish lira ($32) per month for each of their three children to attend a private Syrian education center, whose quality is far inferior to what they experienced in Damascus before the war began, Izi said. Compared to the price of private education in Turkey, these are modest sums. But many parents are unable to afford the expense. As a result, their children have no access to any kind of schooling.

Instead, they beg or sell tissues and bottled water in busy traffic at junctions and on highways throughout Istanbul. Others, like Mohammed, work in the backstreet sweatshops that are taking advantage of a growing pool of migrant labor.

*  *  *

Drugs and exploitation are a common threat for street children, but Syrian and Turkish education activists are now mostly concerned about the influence of extremist religious groups who target minors on the streets or at unofficial education centers that are not closely supervised by relevant authorities.

“Some teenagers we interviewed last year talked about being subjected to Islamic State propaganda; ideas like the West killing Muslims instead of the Assad regime,” said Dr. Abdulrahman Kowara, the 58-year-old director of the Syrian Education Commission.

“We immediately took action, tried to revert the damage in constant dialogue with these children, but it’s physically impossible to track down these illegal centers one by one in a mega-metropolis like Istanbul with 14 million people.”

Turkey’s Education Ministry started to formally recognize temporary education centers established by Syrian aid organizations in September 2014. But there are still an unknown number of unregistered education centers that have yet to apply. So far, only 54 centers have been authorized in Istanbul, the local Education Ministry office said. The Syrian Education Commission supports these centers in providing free textbooks for children, developing a pool of Syrian teachers for recruitment and offering bursaries for children of low- or no-income families.

But students won’t receive a diploma or any proof of attendance. In a country where certificates are a prerequisite for a good job or a credible university education, parents come to consider these makeshift educational centers as a waste of time and effort.

The Education Ministry argues that it takes more than school premises and textbooks provided by the Syrian Education Commission — albeit in compliance with the Syrian national curriculum — to qualify for internationally acceptable diplomas.

“They have their own teachers, their own system, and all we do is superficial monitoring,” said a local education ministry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “For the sake of uniformity in Turkish education, these centers should be inspected thoroughly and not be allowed to turn into Trojan horses, bearing numerous risks, including ideological indoctrination.”

Turkish education activists criticize the lack of language support in public schools, something which would allow Syrian and other refugee children to benefit from licensed education. They also highlight the importance of closer monitoring of alternative Syrian education centers.

“There has recently been an educational void in Turkey. Nowhere is being inspected properly,” said Dikmen Onat, chairwoman of the All Teachers Syndicate, one of Turkey’s education labor unions. “As a teacher, I strongly support the right to education but demand thorough inspections of all Arabic education centers so that we do not end up with a phenomenon like the Islamic State in Turkey in the future.”

Syrian education activists agree.

“We try to keep tabs on these centers, but is it sufficient? Of course, not,” said Kowara of the Syrian Education Commission. “There might be unregistered centers out there funded by unknown foundations or parties. We inform the ministry as soon as we detect them but ultimately we need a better centralized system.”

The commission officials regularly stroll around main junctions and streets in Istanbul in an attempt to find school-age children who are out begging or working illegally, register them in schools, and help them to fill the gaps in their education before they find the opportunity to take up their studies with their age group again.

*  *  *

The secluded entrance of Efdalzade Mosque, located on a busy Fatih side street, opens out onto a tranquil courtyard. The sounds of children reciting their times tables can be heard through open windows.

Once used for public Koran studies, four tiny rooms in the 15th-century mosque have recently been converted to classrooms for Syrian children who could not join Syrian temporary schools because of the gaps in their education.

“Turkish schools said they had no places and Syrian schools are expensive,” said Ali Ezzo, 11, whose parents left Aleppo with six children two years ago. His Turkish is fluent. Wearing low-rise jeans, a red plaid shirt, an oversized red watch and a spikey hair-do, the boy had the style of a typical urban Turkish youth. “I used to sell water, now I translate for real estate agents. I want to come to school as long as they accept me there for free.”

Ali was seven years old when he stopped going to school in Aleppo. At age 9 he had lost all of his literacy skills and was selling bottled water when Syrian Education Commission officials spotted him on a street in Fatih. That was four months ago. He is now in third grade and joins morning classes for four hours every day before going to work to help his father support the family. Like his fellow students, Ali studies the Koran for half an hour and Arabic and other subjects for the rest of the morning.

Nine-year-old Ramazan Shabo, still struggles with first grade Arabic, and squints as he tries to follow his teacher’s writing on the board. He constantly fiddles with the broken glasses that are held together with tape.

“I go to the Fatih mosque to sell tissues after school. I like it here but have to work to pay our rent,” he said. “I miss Aleppo. It was a better life there.”

The Syrian Education Commission has set up 15 similar preparatory centers of its own in Istanbul. The goal is to establish at least 100, staffed with psychological counselors for children who have been traumatized by the conflict, Kowara said.

The commission raises awareness for projects that require funding through an international network of contacts, and has received large donations from private donors and international aid groups. Almost all have been blocked by the United States’ monetary authorities.

“When the description on the wired U.S. dollar amount says ‘Syria,’ the transfer gets blocked or sent back,” Kowara said. “If we had received all the funds wired to us without any problem last year, two-thirds of our children would not have been out in the streets today. We’re fully transparent, all about education and cannot comprehend such restrictions.”

The commission tries to fill the gap with donations from locals or the Turkish state, which has already spent more than $4.5 billion on Syrian refugees since the beginning of the conflict in 2011.

The European Union Trust Fund, a new initiative part of the pact’s regional strategy to combat the ISIL threat, launched its first project to support Syrian refugees on September 14: €17.5 million to improve access to education and provide psychosocial support to more than 200,000 Syrian children in Turkey.

“Syria is losing a whole generation to war and exile,” said Federica Mogherini, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, in a written statement. “A pen and a book can give hope to Syrian children. They are the best weapon against hatred and radicalization.”

At least 320,000 of Turkey’s nearly 2 million Syrian refugees have no plans to return to Syria, and want to either stay in Turkey or resettle in Europe or the U.S., according to a recent survey by the Xsight Social Research Institute based in London, education of these minors was no longer an issue for Turkey alone, activists claimed.

“These children, if left uneducated, will harm Syria, Turkey and the entire world in the future,” Kowara said, flipping through the pages of Arabic textbooks that had arrived from the printing house.

“I see these children as time bombs, ready to explode any time. I see the expression of detachment on their faces. It is up to the world to help the future generations of Syria as much as their own.”

Sebnem Arsu is an Istanbul-based journalist who has been covering Turkey and its region for the New York Times, Reuters and Associated Press for over 15 years.

This is the first in a POLITICO special report on vaccines: the accomplishments, history, controversy and business challenges.

The march of modern medicine promises each generation better health than their parents, but fatal diseases from bygone eras are beginning to creep back as public trust in vaccines takes a hit.

After eradicating diseases such as smallpox, vaccines may be the victims of their own success: Worldwide coverage is 86 percent, below the World Health Organization’s global target of 90 percent. And although steady at a global level, the average masks very low vaccination rates in some areas, for example 30 percent in Southeast Asia.

Some countries are experiencing a “historic breakdown in public trust in vaccines,” said Heidi Larsen, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “I would say that hesitancy is increasing in pockets around the world.”

Because vaccines work via herd immunity — coverage needs to hit a certain rate to stop transmission of infection and begin to eradicate infectious diseases in populations — big pockets of resistance can threaten disease protection within a community.

Reports of adverse events, marginalized populations suspicious of governments and corporations, pushback from elites seeking more “natural” remedies and opposition from those with an agenda beyond public health are among the culprits of resistance, she said.

Larsen’s group has surveyed nearly 6,000 parents from the U.K., India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Georgia about whether confidence, convenience or complacency were the main reasons for their hesitation to vaccinate. Confidence — not trusting the vaccine or provider — was the biggest reason in all the countries surveyed.

These three factors define vaccine hesitancy as a behavior, according to the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention.

Apples-to-apples comparisons are not yet available across countries. Philippe Duclos, senior health adviser for the WHO’s immunization, vaccine and biological department, said officials are in the early days of quantifying skepticism on a global level.

Hesitant Europe

Fear of vaccines is probably as old as vaccination itself, one famous example being Brazil’s 1904 riots over compulsory smallpox vaccination.

Throughout the 20th century, however, vaccines were credited with protecting populations from a host of diseases that used to kill and cripple. Still today, vaccines save between 3 and 6 million of lives each year, according to estimates from the WHO and health economist Jenifer Ehreth.

Hesitancy is putting Europe behind global targets on reducing diseases.

Take measles. A highly contagious disease caused by a virus that affects membranes lining various cavities in the body and then spreads throughout the body, global health experts expected it to be eliminated in Europe by 2015. Some 15 EU countries have managed to do so, according to the WHO. Among them: Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Hungary and Latvia. A few others are in the process of eliminating it.

But measles remains endemic in eight EU countries, a WHO report released in early April showed. They are Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland and Romania.

Almost 4,000 cases of measles in Europe were reported to the ECDC, with more than half from Germany. About 85 percent of those who contracted measles were not vaccinated.

In early April, the Romanian health ministry called on all local health authorities to mobilize urgently for the measles-mumps-rubella vaccination campaign, following a measles outbreak involving 79 cases in two western Romanian counties.

It is not just children suffering from diseases they are not vaccinated against, according to Lucia Pastore Celentano, head of the ECDC’s vaccine preventable disease program. A third of the measles cases detected in Europe in 2015 involved adolescents and young adults, she said.

“Measles is not a childhood disease anymore,” she said.

The death of an unvaccinated three-year-old girl from diphtheria in March in Belgium showed that universal immunization was the only effective way to prevent the disease, according to the ECDC. There has also been an increase in diphtheria cases in Europe since 2011, it said.

The skepticism cuts across class lines.

“We see an increase in the number of well-educated parents who believe that vaccines are not so important because they don’t see the disease around anymore,” the ECDC’s Pastore Celentano said. “They don’t see diphtheria, polio anymore or they believe that varicella and rubella are childhood diseases and are not dangerous anymore.”

Each government has to tailor communication and social marketing campaigns to specific groups to respond to this behavior, she said.

Andrea Rappagliosi, the president of the industry organization Vaccines Europe, said drugmakers need to be part of the discussion as well, providing evidence of safety, for example.

“This is not something that we have to fight; we have to facilitate this conversation,” said Rappagliosi, who also sits on the executive committee of the joint venture of Sanofi Pasteur and MSD. “We need to fill the gap between the deep technical knowledge and expertise and how we can take this information to real people to make it valuable for them.”

Anti-vaxxers

While there are some who believe vaccines are no longer necessary, there is a small but vocal group who see them as dangerous and in some cases see those that promote them as having sinister motives.

For example, a lack of communication led some in Romania to claim a vaccine to protect against cervical cancer was being nefariously tested on Romanian children, said Alexandru Rafila, president of the country’s Society of Microbiology and adviser to the current health minister. Studies done in the country afterwards show that vaccine distrust started then, he said.

Many who claim vaccines don’t work or are harmful cite the now-retracted and disputed work of former British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 published findings from a tiny study of 12 people purporting to show a link between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism.

In addition to being retracted by the British medical journal the Lancet, an investigation found Wakefield falsified facts and failed to disclose he got funding from lawyers working for parents suing vaccine producers. But that didn’t come until 2010. The impact of that article still lingers.

A recent documentary accusing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of covering up the link between the vaccine and autism was pulled from the Tribeca film festival in the U.S., after it initially garnered support from the event’s co-founder Robert De Niro, the parent of an autistic child. The controversy may have only made the documentary more appealing, with crowds turning up to watch it.

Wakefield is not the only doctor who questioned vaccines. According to an ECDC report, more studies are now showing that health care workers themselves can be vaccine hesitant, whether considering vaccination for themselves, their children, or their patients.

Despite their ability to grab headlines, anti-vaccination campaigners are not rising in numbers. “The anti-vaccination groups are stable over time: They represent usually 2 percent of the people who refuse to vaccinate,” said ECDC’s Pastore Celentano. Working to convince them otherwise is hard, she said, noting that the efforts should focus on people who are hesitant about vaccination rather than completely against it.

Supply issues

Given the rising numbers of people who do not end up getting vaccinated, for whatever reason, one would expect that there are enough vaccine supplies on hand to cover needs.

But over the past year, nine countries in the EU and the European Economic Area have had to adjust their immunization programs due to a shortage of vaccines containing whooping cough (pertussis) immunization, according to the ECDC.

“There are two manufacturers today in the world that are able to produce this vaccine and for different reasons they had manufacturing problems, which were completely different,” said Vaccines Europe’s boss Rappagliosi. Some vaccine lots did not pass the final tests for the pertussis part, he said. This, combined with rigid public tenders through which vaccines are usually purchased, led to the shortage, which has now been solved, he said.

At the Commission, a recent concept paper will be discussed with the Health Security Committee, a gathering of national representatives from EU countries addressing cross-border health threats. The aim is to “further identify and specify policy challenges to deal with the shortages,” one Commission official said.

Natalie Huet and Kim Dixon contributed reporting.

The European Commission on Tuesday leveled antitrust charges against Qualcomm, alleging it sold 3G and 4G mobile chips at discounted prices to drive rivals out of the market.

The move hit Qualcomm’s share price, which dropped 4 percent after U.S. markets opened with investors taking stock of yet more regulatory woes for the San Diego-based chip-maker.

EU antitrust regulators said Tuesday Qualcomm’s sales tactics may amount to an abuse of a dominant position. Qualcomm is the world’s largest supplier of baseband chipsets, which connect devices to the mobile Internet.

“I am concerned that Qualcomm’s actions may have pushed out competitors,” said Margrethe Vestager, the European commissioner for competition. The Commission said it suspected Qualcomm stifled innovation.

“Qualcomm’s sales practices have always complied with European competition law,” said Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm general counsel and executive vice president, adding the company would cooperate with the Commission.

The Commission’s charges relate to chips for 3G and 4G mobile phone technology. Those chips are used in more than three billion phones worldwide and sales total an estimated €18 billion annually, according to research firm Strategy Analytics.

In 2014 Qualcomm had a two-thirds chunk of those sales, and over 80 percent when it comes to the narrower market for 4G chips. But its market share has been falling in the face of competition from Chinese chip-makers. Strategy Analytics estimated its market share mid-2015 for 4G at 66 percent.

The probe, which became public in July, will stoke a view from across the Atlantic that EU antitrust officials are persecuting U.S. tech firms in order to protect weaker European rivals. The Commission’s current targets include Google, Apple and Amazon.

Yet Qualcomm’s 30-year rise from a research boutique founded by university scientists to a €23.4 billion company whose inventions include much of the technology underlying 3G has attracted antitrust scrutiny across the globe.

In a rare reversal for the Commission, the San Diego firm beat back a European probe into how it priced its 3G patents in 2009.

But tensions between Brussels and San Diego have simmered ever since, while phone manufacturers have continued to complain about Qualcomm’s tough approach to licensing out its patents.

Regulators in the U.S. and in South Korea are also probing Qualcomm’s business practices. In February, Qualcomm paid €895 million to settle a Chinese probe into its patent licensing business.

Tuesday’s announcement outlined two sets of charges against Qualcomm.

One set of concerns relates to a supply contract between Qualcomm and a “major smartphone and tablet manufacturer.”

The Commission, which declined to name the manufacturer, alleges that Qualcomm made payments to the producer to ensure its loyalty.

“This conduct [may have] reduced the manufacturer’s incentives to source chipsets from Qualcomm’s competitors and has harmed competition and innovation in the markets for [3G] and [4G] baseband chipsets,” the Commission said in a statement.

The second set of concerns relates to a 2010 complaint filed by Icera, a U.K.-based subsidiary of Nvidia, a U.S. semiconductor company.

Icera, says the Commission, started challenging Qualcomm’s market position in a narrow chip segment.

Antitrust officials allege Qualcomm reacted by offering two customers chips below-cost, so as to cut demand for Icera, a smaller rival which would not be able to sell at a loss over the medium term.

In theory, Qualcomm could face a maximum fine of about €4 billion, or 20 percent of annual revenues, although fines are generally much less.

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Left-wing documentary filmmaker Michael Moore dismissed mounting concerns surrounding Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) health and age during a “Bernie’s Back Rally” in New York City on Saturday, declaring that he is “glad” that Sanders is 78 years old and arguing that he would rather “talk about the health of this planet that’s dying” than Sanders’ heart attack.

The Sicko director dismissed concerns over Sanders’ age — he would be the oldest president to take office if elected — and argued that he is “glad” that Sanders is 78-years-old.

“I’m glad he’s 78, and we will benefit for his wisdom and his experience and his knowledge and his love for the American people,” Moore said. “It’s actually a gift that we have a 78-year-old American running for President of the United States. You know why that’s a gift?”

“What has a 78 year old seen? Bernie has seen many of the things we’ve never seen,” the filmmaker said, naming pay raises, pensions, and the defeat of fascism and white supremacy.

The Oscar-winner also added that it is the Electoral College — not Sanders — that is old and outdated.

From there, Michael Moore pivoted to Sanders’ heart attack and dismissed all concerns related to the socialist senator’s health.

“Next thing they say,” Moore began — “they” being those who tout “false” narratives” about Sanders — “is what about his health?”

“How about we talk about the health of this planet that’s dying. That’s the health I care about,” Moore said before joining the crowd in chanting, “Green New Deal!”

“What about the health of the kids in Flint, Michigan,” Moore continued. “What about their health? Talk about that on cable news. What about the health of 40 million people who live in poverty?”

“The only heart attack we should be talking about is the one Wall Street is going to have when Bernie Sanders is President of the United States,” he said.

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Christophe Hondelatte fait peu à peu son retour cathodique. Non content d’animer une émission hebdomadaire sur Numéro 23, le journaliste sera à la tête de So France sur D8 comme le révèle Europe 1.

Ces derniers mois, Christophe Hondelatte avait davantage fait parler de lui pour ses clashs à répétition que pour sa carrière de journaliste.

Après avoir quitté France 2 et RTL, l’ancien présentateur de Faites entrer l’accusé, a pris son temps mais il semble aujourd’hui décidé à refaire de l’antenne. En plus de son émission plus confidentielle sur Numéro 23, le Basque va hériter d’un nouveau programme sur la nouvelle chaîne qui monte: D8. Le site de Jean-Marc Morandini précise: “le journaliste sera à la tête de So France, un magazine d’enquêtes produit par Capa sur le patrimoine français. Huit numéros seront diffusés cette année à 20h50. Christophe Hondelatte présentera les plateaux de lancement de ces reportages. Le premier numéro devrait être consacré aux business des châteaux.” Une arrivée sur D8 qui était en tractation depuis plusieurs semaines. Le journaliste n’en faisait d’ailleurs pas mystère. « L’hypothèse que je finisse par aller sur Direct 8 est assez probable », confiait-il ainsi au quotidien 20 Minutes en octobre dernier. Pour l’instant, l’intéressé n’a pas encore confirmé l’heureuse nouvelle. Sur son compte Facebook où il est d’ordinaire très actif, CH a posté ce message il y a une vingtaine d’heures: « Bonne année les amis! Et on démarrait 2012, avec CYBERNIGHT dans les oreilles? » Preuve que le journaliste n’est pas non plus prêt à mettre de côté sa carrière de chanteur!

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Lady Gaga est sous le feu des critiques. Son soutien-gorge mitraillette a suscité de nombreuses réactions alors qu’elle s’est prononcée en faveur d’une régulation des armes après la tuerie de Newtown.

Elle nous avait habitués à des dérapages vestimentaires, mais celui-là pourrait bien lui coûter cher. Samedi, dans le cadre de sa tournée The Born This Way Ball, lors d’un concert à Vancouver au Canada, Lady Gaga arborait un soutien-gorge noir orné de fausses mitraillettes. Devant elle, un public surexcité par sa prestation.

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L’image en a choqué certains alors que la veille, Joe Biden, le vice-président des Etats-Unis rencontrait le Congrès et l’association de défense des armes aux USA, la NRA, pour discuter du meilleur contrôle des armes suite à la tuerie de Newtown, en décembre, qui a fait 26 morts, dont vingt enfants de 6 et 7 ans.

D’autant plus choquant pour ses détracteurs que la Mama Monster s’est positionnée en faveur d’un plus grand contrôle des armes suite à la fusillade. Et c’est sur Twitter que la star de Poker Face a essuyé de vives critiques: «Je suppose que lorsqu’on a pas assez de talent pour garder l’attention des gens, il faut porter un pistolet».

À l’issue du concert, Lady Gaga leur a répondu en twittant à son tour : «Le monde réel est cruel, pourquoi ne pas essayer de le changer en un endroit meilleur? Je suis une activiste. Personne ne prend les adolescents au sérieux. Moi si».

La polémique arrive alors que ce n’est pas la première fois que l’interprète de Born this way arbore ce soutien-gorge mitraillette. La chanteuse l’a déjà porté en 2010, dans le clip Alejandro et le magazine Rolling Stone.

Mais si la robe steak qu’elle portait en 2010 lors des Video Music Awards a fait beaucoup rire, après la tuerie de Newtown, le port du soutien-gorge mitraillette semble beaucoup moins fun. Parfois, ce n’est qu’une question de timing.