Summer Reading

Summer is here, it is time to plan for some relaxing reading!

• Beware. Other Nations Will Follow France With Their Own Digital Tax, The New York Times

 Last Thursday, the French Senate passed a digital services tax, which would impose an entirely new tax on large multinationals that provide digital services to consumers or users in France.

“Digital services include everything from providing a platform for selling goods and services online to targeting advertising based on user data, and the tax applies to gross revenue from such services. French politicians and media outlets have referred to this as a “GAFA tax,” meaning that it is designed to apply primarily to companies such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon — in other words, multinational tech companies based in the United States. (…)”. Read more…

• Seeing France’s Wild Mountains Through a Clouded, Classic Windshield, The New York Times

“In 1878, on something of a whim, the novelist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson crossed southern France’s Cévennes mountains, one of the wildest and most sparsely populated parts of the country, in the company of a slow-moving donkey named Modestine. In May, also on something of a whim, my wife and I crossed the Cévennes mountains, still one of the wildest and most sparsely populated parts of the country, in the company of a slow-moving automobile called a Citroën 2CV. (…)”. Read more…

• 76 billion opioid pills: Newly released federal data unmasks the epidemic“, The Washington Post

America’s largest drug companies saturated the country with 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012 as the nation’s deadliest drug epidemic spun out of control, according to previously undisclosed company data released as part of the largest civil action in U.S. history.” (…). Read more…

Please take a look at our last Transatlantic Forum on the opioid crisis with Bridget G. Brennan, NYC’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor.