The leaders of Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia will meet on Tuesday to discuss protecting the European Union’s borders against illegal migration, including through new solutions, the Slovak government office said on Monday.

Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who have long taken hard lines against migration, will meet Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in Komarno, Slovakia, to discuss ways to counter illegal flows.

Cooperation with Serbia and other western Balkan states is key to stemming illegal migration flows, the Slovak government office said. This includes measures to strengthen border protection, supporting partner countries’ asylum procedures and aligning visa policy with the European Union.

“An innovative solution could be external centres, so-called hotspots for processing asylum applications outside the EU, which is currently being put into practice, for example, by Italy in cooperation with Albania,” the office said.

Italy reached an accord for migrants to be processed in Albania, a scheme some European countries have said could be used as a model.

EU leaders met last week and agreed to use all their leverage to speed up the return of those illegally entering the bloc.

Serbia, which is not an EU member, has long been an entry point into the bloc for migrants coming along the Balkan route from the Middle East and North Africa.

But the number of illegal crossings in the western Balkans has fallen 79% in the first nine months this year to just under 17,000, almost three times fewer than some Mediterranean routes, according to border agency Frontex’s data.

Since June, data from Hungary’s police show a rise in the number of illegal migrants stopped before or after crossing the border, with weekly figures increasing into the hundreds.

The highest number of stops were reported at the end of September, when 531 people were prevented from crossing the border illegally and 394 people were detained within the borders of Hungary and sent back to Serbia.

John Ashton, the veteran character actor who memorably played the gruff but lovable police detective John Taggart in the “Beverly Hills Cop” films, has died. He was 76.

Ashton died Thursday in Fort Collins, Colorado, his family announced in a statement released by Ashton’s manager, Alan Somers, on Sunday. No cause of death was immediately available.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ashton was a regular face across TV series and films, including “Midnight Run,” “Little Big League” and “Gone Baby Gone.”

But in the “Beverly Hills Cop” films, Ashton played an essential part of an indelible trio. Though Eddie Murphy’s Axel Foley, a Detroit detective following a case in Los Angeles, was the lead, the two local detectives — Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Ashton’s Taggart — were Axel’s sometimes reluctant, sometimes eager collaborators.

Of the three, Taggart — “Sarge” to Billy — was the more fearful, by-the-book detective. But he would regularly be coaxed into Axel’s plans. Ashton co-starred in the first two films, beginning with the 1984 original, and returned for the the Netflix reboot, “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” released earlier this year.

Ashton played a more unscrupulous character in Martin Brest’s 1988 buddy comedy “Midnight Run.” He was the rival bounty hunter also pursuing Charles Grodin’s wanted accountant in “The Duke” while he’s in the custody of Robert De Niro’s Jack Walsh.
Speaking in July to Collider, Ashton recalled auditioning with De Niro.

“Bobby started handing me these matches, and I went to grab the matches, and he threw them on the floor and stared at me,” said Ashton. “I looked at the matches, and I looked up, and I said, ‘F—- you,’ and he said, ‘F—- you, too.’ I said, ‘Go —- yourself.’ I know every other actor picked those up and handed it to him, and I found out as soon as I left he went, ‘I want him,’ because he wanted somebody to stand up to him.”

Ashton is survived by his wife, Robin Hoye, of 24 years, two children, three stepchildren, a grandson, two sisters and a brother.

We are at the apex of “Saturday Night Live” appreciation. Now entering its 50th year, “SNL” has never been more unquestioned as a bedrock American institution. The many years of cowbells, Californians, mom jeans, Totino’s, unfrozen caveman lawyers and vans down by the river have more than established “SNL” as hallowed late-night ground and a comedy citadel.

So it’s maybe appropriate that Jason Reitman’s big-screen ode, “Saturday Night,” should arrive, amid all of the tributes, to remind of the show’s original revolutionary force. Reitman’s film is set in the 90 minutes leading up to showtime before the first episode aired Oct. 11, 1975.

The atmosphere is hectic. The mood is anxious. And through cigarette smoke and backstage swirl rushes Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), who’s trying to launch a new kind of show that even he can’t quite explain.

“Saturday Night,” which opens in theaters Friday and expands in the coming weeks, isn’t a realistic tick-tock of how Michaels did it. And, while it boasts a number of fine performances, I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone hoping to see an illuminating portrait of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players.

No, Reitman’s movie is striving for a myth of “Saturday Night Live.” Michaels’ quest in the film — and though he never strays farther than around the corner from 30 Rock, it is a quest — is not just to marshal together a live show on this particular night, it’s to overcome a cigar-chomping old guard of network television. (Milton Berle is skulking about, even Johnny Carson phones in.) In their eyes, Michaels is, to paraphrase Ned Beatty in “Network,” meddling with the primal forces of nature.

In mythologizing this generational battle, “Saturday Night” is a blistering barn-burner. In most other ways (cue the Debbie Downer trombone), it’s less good. Reitman, who penned the script with Gil Kenan, is too wide-eyed about the glory days of “SNL” to bring much acute insight to what was happening 50 years ago. And his film may be too spread thin by a clown car’s worth of big personalities. But in the movie’s primary goal, capturing a spirit of revolution that once might have seized barricades but instead flocks to Studio 8H, “Saturday Night” at least deserves a Spartan cheer.

A clock ticking down to showtime runs as ominously as it might in “MacGruber” throughout “Saturday Night.” Nothing is close to ready for air. John Belushi (Matt Wood) hasn’t signed his contract. Twenty-eight gallons of fake blood are missing. And, most pressing of all, the network is poised to air a Carson rerun if things don’t take shape. An executive pleading for a script is told, “It’s not that kind of show.”

What kind is it? Michaels, himself, is uncertain. He’s gathered together a “circus of rejects,” most of them then unknown to the public. There is Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula) and Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien). Also in the mix are Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun), who spends much of the movie complaining about the untoward things the cast has been doing to Big Bird, Andy Kaufman (Braun again), Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany) and the night’s host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys).

It seems to be an unfortunate truth that dramatizations of “Saturday Night Live” inevitably kill it of laughter. That’s true here just as it was in Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” The exception to that, of course, is Tina Fey’s “30 Rock,” which was smart enough to abandon all the “SNL” mythology and focus on what’s funny.

This “Saturday Night” may have a legacy of its own; a lot of this cast, I suspect, will be around for a long time. And, ultimately, when the show finally comes together, it’s galvanizing. The cleverest thing about Reitman’s film is that it ends, rousingly, just where “SNL” starts.

“Saturday Night,” a Columbia Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language throughout, sexual references, some drug use and brief graphic nudity. Running time: 108 minutes. Three stars out of four.