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The New York Times points out something rather interesting about an otherwise mundane business story. Wal-Mart's fourth-quarter earnings report tells the tale of how changes in the tax code has both helped corporations and hurt them.

As the Times puts it, during the fourth quarter of last year, "the tax code gave and the tax code took away."

The paper explains:

"The company reported higher-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings on Thursday of $1.67 a share, up from $1.51 a share a year ago, largely because of tax credits that brought its corporate tax rate lower than usual.

"But the recent payroll-tax increase and an Internal Revenue Service delay in processing tax returns hit consumers, and that affected the holiday period and sales in February. For the fiscal fourth quarter, which ended Jan. 31, sales at stores open at least a year rose 1 percent at Wal-Mart stores in the United States; analysts had expected a 1.7 percent increase."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai issued a decree in 2009 banning violence against women. But the parliament, which is currently on its winter recess, has been unable to pass it and give it permanence as a law.

There's major disagreement on key provisions where Islamic and secular law come into conflict. And activists say the gains made in women's rights since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 are slipping away.

Masooda Karokhi, a female member of parliament, has been pushing to get the proposal through the male-dominated legislature.

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Friends in Karachi had me over for a beer Sunday evening. It wasn't hard for them to do. Alcohol is broadly outlawed in Pakistan, but with so many exceptions and so little enforcement, you can usually find something — in this case, tallboy cans of Murree's Millennium Brew from a Pakistani brewery.

Several of my friends were fathers, raising kids in a city where the number of homicides exceeded 2,000 last year. They told me they're not comfortable letting their younger children go out to play. Instead the kids play cricket, the national obsession, in apartment building hallways. One father is holding off buying furniture so his kids can push their bikes around the dining room.

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There is no end, it seems, to revelations of corruption in Spain, exacerbated by the country's economic crisis. The latest scandal threatens to topple the pedestal on which Spain's royals have long stood.

The newest suspect is the king's son-in-law, who is accused of embezzling millions of dollars in public funds, and faces a judge this weekend.

The story begins back in 1997, when the wedding of the year involved Spain's youngest princess, Infanta Cristina. She married the tall, handsome Iaki Urdangarin, an Olympian she met at the Summer Games a year earlier in Atlanta. Society magazines said it was love at first sight. Urdangarin got the royal title "Duke of Palma."

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