Francois Hollande really can’t catch a break. One of the most memorable election promises he made was to raise marginal tax rates on the very rich—those making €1 million or more—to an eye-popping 75%. His government has, alas, finally decided to scrap that particular pledge. The Wall Street Journal has details: The notion of slapping a […]

Xi Jinping accomplished what he set out to do when he made Moscow his first destination abroad as China’s president: He got the press corps to run stories about how the two outsider powers are set to more explicitly cooperate in limiting Western influence in world affairs from here on out. PR success? Perhaps. But […]

Fresh ideas may be coming to the Democratic Party from the unlikeliest of places: Newark, New Jersey. The NYT profiles Newark’s Democratic mayor Cory Booker, whom the piece calls a “politician of the future.” Booker is running for the Senate, and his campaign has already started to make waves for its futuristic tenor. Much of this seems like style rather […]

The Nanny Staters are at it again, and this time they want to stop honest Americans who only want to enjoy some good roadkill. The Christian Science Monitor has a fun little article on the subject occasioned by Montana’s move to make roadkill salvage legal as of next Tuesday.Though the article assures us that “roadkill salvage and […]

A survey result raised our eyebrows this Saturday morning: Saudi Arabia apparently leads the world with 51% of its population being active Twitter users. The Riyadh Bureau blog notes that this is causing headaches for the Saudi government, who are finding censoring the flow of information too difficult. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, who last year issued […]

Illinois has finally taken the first halting steps toward resolving its pension crisis. On Wednesday the Illinois Senate passed a measure to reform teachers’ pensions, to the tune of $18–40 billion in savings over the next three decades, as Reuters reports.The bill doesn’t amount to full fiscal health, of course, and it came only after […]

There have been two significant breakthroughs as a result of President Obama’s trip to the Middle East. First, as most of the news outlets are reporting today, President Netanyahu picked up the phone to apologize to Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan over the flotilla issue. The New York Times writes: In the call, Mr. Netanyahu expressed regret […]

Watch out, Mexico: there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s cleaning up. New President Enrique Peña Nieto’s bill to increase competition in the television and telecom industries (as well as allow more foreign ownership) has just sailed through Mexico’s lower house of Congress and is now one step closer to becoming a reality. The FT has […]

Stocks and currencies continued to see-saw today based on the latest news (or even rumors) coming out of Cyprus. Plan A (the EU led bailout with haircuts for depositors) was rejected by the Cypriot Parliament; Plan B (magic money from Russia) has been, so far, rejected in Moscow; and Plan C (magic money from the […]

Let’s not talk about sex, baby. That’s the message Tennessee lawmakers sent when they pulled most of the funding from the University of Tennessee’s “sex week.” Knoxnews reports: The weeklong series of events and panel discussions planned for the UT’s Knoxville campus, beginning April 5, has drawn unwanted attention from some state legislators, who have […]