Developers have turned a house into an island in China after the owner refused to move out.

The villa now stands alone in a 30ft deep man-made pit in Chongqing city...

The Chongqing Zhengsheng Real Estate Company wants to turn the area into a £40m 'Broadway' square, including apartments and a shopping mall.

But the owner of the villa says he won't move out unless the company pays his price - the equivalent of £1.3 million.

"The villa owner refuses to move, so the real-estate developer has had to dig out all around it to force him to," says a saleswoman at Weilian Real Estate Sales Company.

"He wants 20 million yuan, or he'll stay till the end of the world."

A Chinese appeals court has upheld a ban on a company from selling land on the moon, ruling that "celestial bodies" could not be anyone's property, state media said.

Lunar Embassy to China, a Beijing-based company that sold plots of lunar land to individuals...offered to sell individuals ownership of an acre of lunar land for 298 yuan...each.

"Within three days of opening for business, it was reported that 34 clients had bought 49 acres of land, earning the company more than 14,000 yuan.

"There was no indication if the company provided discounts to clients who bought multiple plots."

Expanded Mission Means a Sturdier Stool

They The group, which includes a political action committee called Working For Us and a nonprofit entity named They Work For Us, carries the backing of people like Steve Rosenthal, a past political director at the AFL-CIO, Tom Matzzie, the Washington director of Moveon.org and -- most intriguingly -- blogger icon Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the influential Daily Kos Web site.

Working For Us is modeled explicitly on the Club For Growth, an independent organization that over the last several election cycles has transformed itself into an electoral force by endorsing fiscally conservative candidates in contested primaries and then pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into districts to help those candidates win.

Democratic senator Max Baucus and congressman Charlie Rangel are the twin gatekeepers of free trade, one of the most important policies enabling individuals and companies to build such a prosperous economy. Some of their fellow Democrats want to cajole and intimidate Baucus, especially on trade issues.

Baucus and Rangel tend to be “yes, but” supporters of free trade. Most of the time they are mostly for it but with conditions to placate certain political factions on the center-left (not the far left). It’s sadly time to get out the book on speaking “triangulation.”

...Max Baucus, as Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, will play a key role in the legislation to re-authorize fast-track before it expires in June.

Today, They Work for Us, an independent 501(c)(4) organization, launched a radio ad campaign in Montana targeting Baucus on fast-track...

Even steep losses at The New York Times didn't stop its family owners from enriching themselves and insiders with bonuses for making "profits" when there were none.

Although its board acknowledged in filings yesterday that the media company lost $3.76 per share in 2006, directors revised its bottom-line bonus formula to exclude embarrassing write-downs, converting millions in losses into instant profits of $1.58 per share.

As a result, the revisions triggered a payday clause to unleash 75 percent of the cash bonuses targeted for top executives and family members that otherwise would have been lost, filings said.

CEO Janet Robinson, 56, got an 11 percent pay raise, including stock awards, to collect $4.4 million even though the company's stock lost about 12 percent in 2006. Separately, she's amassed another $4.13 million in restricted stock.

Chairman Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger, 55, failed to meet his company's original targets based on earnings per share, but the board voted anyway to let him collect as much as $3.4 million in bonus and stock awards by using more optimistic cash flows instead of final earnings per share.

Line by Line Item of Tax Increases Facing Expiration and their Cost (income, cap gains, dividends, estate, AMT, small business expensing, etc). Taxes will be raised $545 billion through 2012 and $2.1 trillion by 2017.

Tax Cuts for the Wealthy? The new IRS data shows a dramatic increase in progressivity from 1996-2004 despite $764 billion of tax cuts for the wealthy including a slashing of the capital gains tax rate from 28 to 15 percent.

Recent experience of Japan and China’s equity markets in response to higher capital gains taxes.

Any hope that the Clinton Administration would operate a Justice Department free of political taint -- or even the appearance of political taint -- grew dim yesterday when the White House confirmed that it would dismiss the U.S. Attorney investigating one of its chief Congressional allies.

When Attorney General Janet Reno first announced the blanket dismissal of about 70 United States Attorneys who are Bush Administration holdovers, her aides said she might exempt those needed to wrap up significant investigations. But...Those booted out would include U.S. Attorney Jay Stephens of the District of Columbia, who...is in the middle of an investigation of irregularities in the House of Representatives and a detailed financial auditing of one of the most powerful House Democrats, Dan Rostenkowski, chairman of Ways and Means.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:57 PM | link    

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:42 PM | link