Is the Party Over for the Champagne Cork?

To cork, or not to cork, that is the question in the French winemaking region of Champagne ever since the unveiling earlier this month of a gutsy new Champagne stopper prototype. The Maestro opening system, developed by Alcan Packaging Capsules, is composed of a concealed crown bottle cap fitted with an aluminum lever.

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Women win parliamentary seats for first time in Kuwait

Kuwait elected its first female lawmakers in the conservative Gulf state where men have dominated parliament for nearly five decades. Four women won parliamentary seats in the general elections Saturday, the official Kuwait News Agency said

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Firing Line: Tough New German Gun Laws Could Ban Paintball

To its fans, paintball may seem like a harmless enough sport, a game of skill and tactics in which teams of players shoot colored paint pellets at one another. But under controversial new gun laws and other measures being considered by the German government, games that are deemed to “simulate the killing” of your opponent — which, according to some, could include paintball — may be banned.

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In Defense of Bristol Palin, Abstinence Spokeswoman

Bristol Palin — Sarah Palin’s 19-year-old-daughter and unwed mother of 4-month-old Tripp — has been blog-blistered this week for her debut as an Abstinence Ambassador for the Candies Foundation. She made the rounds of the morning shows, appeared at a town hall meeting for National Teen Pregnancy Awareness Day and declared herself committed to discouraging behavior that would leave other girls in the same predicament she finds herself in. “Regardless of what I did personally,” she told Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America, “abstinence is the only …

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Three Things Obama Could Learn From Thatcher

When Margaret Thatcher, then 53, appeared at the door of 10, Downing Street exactly 30 years ago today, hubris and self-doubt were not things that worried her. Having won the first of what would be three general election victories, her address to the British people was not modest and self-deprecating in the traditional fashion. She clothed herself, rather, in the words of a Saint — Francis of Assisi

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Tribunal: Opposition leader wins Panama presidential race

Opposition leader and supermarket mogul Ricardo Martinelli has won Panama’s presidential election, the head of the country’s electoral tribunal said Sunday. Martinelli, of the conservative Democratic Change party, edged out former Housing Minister Balbina Herrera of Panama’s governing Democratic Revolutionary Party, said Erasmo Pinilla of the electoral tribunal

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