Browsing through today’s headlines, I notice …

• the Israeli people seem fed up with conflict and voted in a government that might actually help bring about peace, despite the Palestinian people having recently voted in a bunch of extremists, so maybe there’s hope for that region after all.
• that while a few hundred union heavies is the best we Aussies can do when there’s changes to labour laws, over in Paris they can clog city squares with hundreds of thousands of people (and for much less radical workplace changes, too).
• there are signs in India suggesting there might be some distant hope of ending the problem of selectively aborting female foetuses in that part of the world.
• WA is the second highest-taxing state government, on par with NSW and Victoria — although no one mentions that these three states subsidise the other states and territories through Federal taxes quite significantly, so it’s reasonable that our state governments would have to impose harsher taxes.