REGULATION

ANTI-TAX PRESIDENT RAISES FEES

While President Bush is adamantly against raising taxes, he’s increasingly comfortable with imposing billions of dollars in new government fees, as the airline, commodities, and shipping industries have discovered.

Mr. Bush’s 2007 budget proposal would raise more than $47 billion over the next five years by imposing, raising, or extending expiring fees on everything from airline tickets to oil drilling to commodity transactions to ships passing through the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Administration officials said the fees shift the costs of programs from taxpayers to the industries and individuals that receive government services. Opponents call the new charges thinly veiled tax increases that are unlikely to be approved by Congress.

– Bloomberg News

IN THE COURTS

HIGH COURT LIMITS ANTITRUST SUITS

The U.S. Supreme Court put new limits on antitrust suits against patent holders, giving companies more power to bundle products together for sale to customers.

The court yesterday unanimously set aside a ruling that had let Illinois Tool Works be sued for requiring purchasers of its patented industrial printheads also to buy the company’s ink.The justices said a lower court shouldn’t have presumed that Illinois Tool Works’s patents gave the company so much market power that it should be limited in its ability to package products.

The decision furthers a trend toward a more market-based approach in American antitrust law, effectively overturning a pair of decades-old precedents that a lower court said rested on “wobbly, moth-eaten foundations.”

– Bloomberg News

MAGAZINES

ATLANTIC MONTHLY NAMES NEW EDITOR

The Atlantic Monthly magazine, recently moved to Washington, named a New York Times reporter as its new editor. Thirty-nine-year-old James Bennet, who has served as the newspaper’s bureau chief in Jerusalem, resigned yesterday and will start the job in about two weeks, the Times reported on its Web site last night.

Mr. Bennet’s appointment follows a prolonged search. He will be the magazine’s first editor since Michael Kelly, who had given up the editorship in 2002 to write when he was killed in Iraq.

– Staff Reporter of the Sun