The week at a glance...Europe

London

Bribing officials: James Murdoch resigned this week as head of News International, the British division of his father Rupert’s media empire, in the wake of damning revelations regarding the group’s flagship tabloid, The Sun. Sue Akers, the high-ranking police official who is leading the investigation into News International newspapers, told a government panel that employees of the tabloid paid “a network of corrupted officials” in the British police, military, and government hundreds of thousands of dollars in return for gossip and other inside information. Rupert Murdoch said that the practices Akers described “are ones of the past, and no longer exist at The Sun.”

Paris

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Soak the rich: François Hollande, the Socialist candidate for the French presidency, made a leap to the left this week with a proposal to create a 75 percent tax bracket for income above $1.35 million. Hollande, who is leading President Nicolas Sarkozy in polls ahead of the April election, has said he considers his “true adversary” to be not Sarkozy, but the financiers who precipitated the global financial crisis. The current top tax rate in France is 41 percent. Critics warned that a steep hike in taxes could drive wealthy French citizens abroad, as happened when François Mitterrand, the last Socialist president, was first elected in 1981.