Your customized headlines for Sun, Mar 18, 2012

PARIS — The Socialist candidate in France's presidential election, Francois Hollande, promised recently that if elected he would impose a whopping 75 percent income tax on all earnings over a million euros.

For investment bankers, 2011 started with a shout and ended with a whimper — causing fees to shoot up in the first half, then fizzle at year's end.

Early on, AT&T and Deutsche Boerse announced bold plans to acquire competitors across the Atlantic. Initial public offerings surged in the first half to levels not seen since before the U.S. financial crisis in 2008. Pipeline operator Kinder Morgan went public with a $3.3 billion IPO in February of last year that raised $1 billion more than projected.

If not cleverly named, the app is a fun game for players of all levels of artistic ability. A sort of Pictionary for your smartphone, Highlight lets users draw one of three words of varying difficulty for another player to guess. The harder a word is to visualize, the more in-game coins it's worth — meaning "yield" is worth more to your score than, say, "barn." Players alternate turns. You can set up random matches with strangers or find friends by user name or Facebook account. Free with advertisements or 99 cents for iOS and Android devices.

Nobody mentioned tobacco last week when the U.S. Senate adopted an amendment to the $109 billion federal highway bill.

But tucked into the 5,600-word amendment to provide aid for rural schools was a single paragraph that would settle a two-year-old fight between Big Tobacco and a small Ohio company that builds a do-it-yourself machine that allows smokers to get their cigarettes a lot cheaper.

Like the "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate, which eventually toppled a president, the Sulaimon Brown affair has metastasized into a wide-ranging scandal that threatens to paralyze District politics and government.

Time zones have outlived their usefulness. At least, a few academics seem to think so. Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and economist Steve Hanke argue that we should have just a single time zone for the entire world, all set to Greenwich Mean Time. Those of us in Washington, D.C. could still wake up at the same time relative to the sun — the clocks would just be flashing "2:00 a.m." rather than "7:00 a.m."

Scott O'Malia, one of two Republican commissioners at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, doesn't believe that his agency's standards are up to snuff when it comes to Wall Street reform. "We don't do proper economic analysis," O'Malia tells me. His main concern is that regulators have failed to conduct a proper cost-benefit evaluation of the new financial regulations. And O'Malia has taken the unusual step of appealing to the Obama administration to examine the CFTC's practices.