The film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival Monday — on the very day France once again slipped into recession.

As GlobalPost's Senior Correspondent for Europe Paul Ames reported, "The symbolism of Cannes opening with Baz Luhrmann's extravagant 3-D evocation of millionaire decadence in roaring '20s New York, did not go unnoticed."

But there are other important things "The Great Gatsby" can teach us about economics, aside from how much fun those West Egg parties must have been.

In short, there's a key lesson in here about economic inequality.

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The Barack Obama administration finds itself under attack from both the left and the right this week as it struggles to deal with three major scandals: the news that the Department of Justice had staged an unprecedented raid on The Associated Press’ phone records; the revelation that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting right-wing groups; and the ongoing fallout from the September attack in Benghazi, Libya.

It is the AP story that has most galvanized the media, threatening to disrupt the generally sympathetic coverage that the White House has enjoyed from large swaths of the press.

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We at GlobalPost live by a third certainty: The world is a weird and wondrous place. However, we didn't realize until recently how much the promises of weirdness and taxes overlap.

From extra charges on flavored vodka in the US to beards in Russia, here are the top six wackiest taxes we've found around the world:

1. Tax on smartphones and laptops in France

French President Francois Hollande is considering a tax on smartphones, laptops and tablets to finance the country's celebrated exception culturelle, or "cultural exception," a precious French principle enshrined in law.

The exception essentially requires that anything considered to be of cultural value to French society must be protected from erratic market forces and the pernicious spread of non-French cultural items — namely, American and other English-language influences.

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Specifically, we're talking salmon caught in the Baltic Sea. The EU banned the export of Baltic salmon from Sweden back in 2002 due to the fact that they were found to be heavily contaminated with dioxins.

But that didn’t stop Swedish firms from selling 200 tons of the fish to companies in France, Denmark and the Netherlands.

A French firm that bought 103 tons of the Baltic salmon in 2011 and 2012 said they did their own tests which did not reveal dioxins in the fish.

"Nobody told us it was illegal," chief executive Francois Agussol told AFP.

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With urgency in his voice, he refers to children being murdered and women being raped at the hands of the enemy.

“We really need you here. This is your opportunity for paradise.”

“Paradise” via the distinct possibility of death on a Syrian battlefield, he means.

The man is calling for recruits to join the Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaeda affiliate that makes up part of Syria’s fragmented armed opposition fighting the government forces of President Bashar al-Assad.

As unappealing as that “opportunity” may sound to the average European, the message has resonated with hundreds of youths here who have disappeared from their schools and homes and turned up in Syria.

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If these reports are true, and if this case took place in the UK, no other evidence would be needed to arrest and prosecute Russell, 24.

Simply having a copy of Inspire — or any other materials deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” — is a crime here.

Under Section 58 of the UK’s Terrorism Act, a 2000 law granting sweeping powers to law enforcement, it is a criminal offense to download, copy or otherwise possess Inspire. Same goes for bomb-making instructions, extremist speeches, or any number of materials that in the United States are protected under the First Amendment.

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During the height of the Iraq war, no combat operation would be complete without a bomb-sniffing dog leading the way. During downtime on huge bases the dogs and their military handlers were generally sequestered away from other soldiers to minimize the chance of accidents or injuries.

In Afghanistan, a soldier's life is very different. The outposts are austere and remote, and there is no separate area for the working dogs. If there is a working dog at the outpost, it is part of the infantry family there, as much a soldier as any of them.

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A few shady characters nearby are eavesdropping, he says. This neighborhood is the territory of one particularly violent faction of "yakuza," the powerful criminal underworld of Japan.

Every month, bargaining with the mid-level mobsters and shakedowns have become draining tasks.

“The yakuza have a hand in all sorts of industries, and working with them is just a part of doing business in this city,” admits the executive, who himself was a mafia-connected negotiator for a construction company for almost 40 years.

But times are changing.

“We used to have a sort of harmony with these bosses,” he laments. “They were enforcers, protectors who asked for our money to smooth out permits and deals, but who kept the battles to themselves. Now they’re out of control.”

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But the real story is hidden behind the headline: The buying and selling of children is alarmingly commonplace in India.

“The numbers are shocking now,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer who works with the Save the Childhood Movement, a New Delhi–based nonprofit that fights child trafficking and other forms of exploitation.

According to official government estimates, around 90,000 children went missing in India in 2011 alone. And while police contend that many are runaways whose return home is never reported, nearly 35,000 remain untraced, and only 15,000 of the total cases were ever investigated.

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In a report to Congress released Thursday, the US Defense Department said that North Korea's recent advances in missile technology, as showcased at the height of its standoff with South Korea, were "in line with North Korea's stated objective of being able to strike the US homeland."

"North Korea will move closer to this goal, as well as increase the threat it poses to US forces and allies in the region, if it continues testing and devoting scarce regime resources to these programs," the report said.

The Pentagon has no reason to expect that North Korea will halt its costly and controversial nuclear tests or rocket launches, the report said, since Kim Jong Un's regime appears to believe that building up a nuclear arsenal will protect it from outside attack and help undermine South Korea's alliance with the US.

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“With a very high degree of confidence, we now believe that Jim was most likely abducted by a pro-regime militia group and subsequently turned over to Syrian government forces,” GlobalPost CEO and President Philip Balboni said during a speech marking World Press Freedom Day.

“We have obtained multiple independent reports from very credible confidential sources who have both indirect and direct access that confirm our assessment that Jim is now being held by the Syrian government in a prison or detention facility in the Damascus area. We further believe that this facility is under the control of the Syrian Air Force Intelligence service. Based on what we have learned, it is likely Jim is being held with one or more Western journalists, including most likely at least one other American.”

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According to a report published by nonprofit online newspaper the Washington Free Beacon, the hacker, possibly using stolen username and password credentials, accessed the National Inventory of Dams (NID) and siezed information not normally available to the public.

The NID database contains comprehensive information about 79,000 dams throughout the US, including the estimated number of deaths there would be if a given dam failed.

“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson Pete Pierce told the Washington Free Beacon.

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Bae, also known as Pae Jun Ho, is accused of attempting to "topple" North Korea, according to state-run media. He has supposedly admitted the charges.

"The Supreme Court sentenced him to 15 years of compulsory labour for this crime," North Korea's official news agency announced Thursday.

Bae, 44, was detained in the northeast city of Rason on Nov. 3 after entering North Korea on a tourist visa.

According to reports, he is a Korean-American who runs a travel company and was in the country to lead a tour group. A devout Christian, he had made several previous trips to North Korea to do humanitarian work, friends told the Associated Press.

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Some New Zealand parents were getting so creative devising unique names for their newborns that the country's Department of Internal Affairs has stepped in to stop the shenanigans.

New Zealand released an official list of rejected names on Wednesday that includes "4Real," "Mafia No Fear" and "Anal." Other gems — like "." and "*" — didn't even bother with the alphabet. All of the names on the list were at some point proposed by parents, soon to be rejected by the government, which deemed the names too offensive.

In some cases, parents appeared to have lost any inspiration for coming up with a moniker for their offspring, naming the family's latest addition simply "2nd", "3rd" or "5th."

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So this week, reporters and Korea watchers are pouring ink over what could happen to Bae and how he got himself in the knotty situation. Was he caught handing out Bibles in a country nervous about foreign Christian influences? Will he go to prison for life? Get the death penalty?

And the big-picture questions. Will Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter make a visit to secure his release? Will Bae be used as a bargaining chip in nuclear negotiations?

The problem is, in the strange absence of any specific statement from North Korean media, we really have no idea why Bae is being put on trial. On Saturday, the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) only said this:

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The already-rampant poaching trade — fueled by high ivory demand from Asia and responsible for the slaughter of between 20,000 and 30,000 elephants a year in Africa — has been further exacerbated by the ousting of President Francois Bozizé last month, Reuters reported.

"The situation is really quite dangerous," Bas Huijbregts, the World Wildlife Fund's head of policy in the region, told Reuters.

The World Wildlife Fund, which has been working on conservation projects in the CAR since the 1980s, reported that the poaching is occurring in protected areas like the Dzanga-Sangha, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Although it did not offer exact numbers, the WWF said in their statement that "initial reports indicate [the slaughter] may be extensive" and that poachers were openly selling elephant meat in local markets.

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Syukri says he now suffers from short-term memory loss, pointing to a zigzag scar beneath a shock of thick, black hair.

“I didn’t feel anything,” he said, recalling the lengthy interrogations. “It felt like I was already dead.”

His story is one of thousands involving kidnap, torture, rape and murder at the hands of the Indonesian military, which some victims here say was aided by US oil giant ExxonMobil.

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As more cases appear, the death toll rises and so does the fear. But are the fears founded?

GlobalPost talked to Dr. Neil Fishman, associate chief medical officer at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, about where to focus efforts to quell the outbreak, how the press is handling the news and just how likely it is that humans will one day transfer the virus to other humans.

GlobalPost: The current flu strain has been found in disparate areas of China. How does the wide spread of cases affect efforts to combat the virus?

Dr. Neil Fishman: There’s two critical things that are promising. One is that the virus has not been isolated in migratory birds. It’s only been found in chickens, ducks and pigeons in live poultry markets, so that makes it potentially easier to manage.

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Astronomers claim that the water was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which collided with the planet in 1994.

A European Space Agency mission, along with NASA, found that there was more water closer to Jupiter's southern hemisphere where the comet struck than its northern hemisphere.

The water is particularly concentrated where the comet entered the planet's atmosphere.

Water at the bottom layers of its atmosphere is easily explainable but upper level atmosphere water was not until now.

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Yet the mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects has not returned to the United States from the Russian republic of Dagestan to bury the oldest boy or to care for the youngest — despite her claims they are innocent.

The reason could be Zubeidat Tsarnaeva’s own legal problems: she could be arrested on an outstanding warrant for shoplifting if she sets foot on US soil.

An official from the Natick District Court told ABC News that Tsarnaeva — her last name is slightly different from her sons' because in Russian, all female names end in "a" — failed to appear in court on Oct. 25 to face charges she stole $1,600 worth of designer clothing from a department store.

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