•  Although it’s only 4,000 people over five years, an increasing number of Americans are giving up their citizenship to avoid U.S. taxes and the complexities of the tax system, according to a new report from the IRS’s “national taxpayer advocate.” (Whatever that is.)
  • The Obama administration has given 10 states exemptions from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind education law. Sane people — and all monkeys — knew from the beginning that this scheme would never work. The law was supposed to require that every student be proficient in math and reading by 2014, but there’s no system anywhere that can force that on every child.
  • A prominent leader in the Southern Baptist Convention says that if the law isn’t changed which requires every employer to pay for coverage of a range of controversial contraception, some Christians will go to jail rather than obey. “We will not comply,” he said.

  • The big banks that slowed their foreclosures while they negotiated with the states over allegations of mortgage fraud are set to resume the pace of taking houses from delinquent borrowers. So the deal which is supposed to be helping those borrowers is now going to cause short-term pain for quite a number of them. It might be good news in the long run for a housing recovery, though.
  • Conservative Islamic groups are gaining more and more power in Egypt. A film production company shooting a TV show at a Cairo university had its shooting shut down after students from the Muslim Brotherhood objected to the actresses’ costumes. This is the same party that dominates the new Egyptian parliament and says it’s ready to take over the government now.
  • The nuts at PETA got plenty of publicity by claiming that killer whales were “enslaved” at SeaWorld, but the claims didn’t get very far in court. A federal court judge in California dismissed the suit, saying that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applied only to humans. Give it another 50 years and it’ll apply to everyone. Hopefully monkeys, too.