As America’s political and media elite partied in Washington, DC, following Donald Trump’s inauguration at the start of the year, one event in particular drew the great and the good.

The Free Press, an online news publication founded by outspoken US journalist Bari Weiss, teamed up with Uber and Elon Musk’s X for a party that played host to famous faces, including the Republican senator Ted Cruz, controversial Irish UFC star Conor McGregor and former prime minister Liz Truss.

The star-studded bash was a coup for Weiss, the former New York Times journalist who in recent years has become one of the hottest names in US media.

Now, though, her star – and her fortune – have risen further after Hollywood giant Paramount inked a deal to buy The Free Press for a reported $150m price tag.

The takeover embeds a news startup at the heart of one of America’s largest media empires.

More controversially, however, the deal will also see Weiss take up the role of editor-in-chief of CBS News in a move that could herald the biggest overhaul in the Paramount-owned network’s near-100-year history.

In blue cities across America — Portland, Oregon, especially — often violent protesters now seek to surround ICE facilities to stop federal officers from fulfilling their assigned and legal duties of arresting illegal aliens.

Some 10 million or more illegal aliens were allowed to enter the U.S. during the Joe Biden years — illegally and thus without criminal or health checks.

Neither Antifa nor liberal urban America objected to such a flagrant disregard for the law. But both are now as intent on obstructing the legal enforcement of the law as they were earlier in favor of its illegal non-enforcement.

Much less did they care about the consequences of sending millions of foreign nationals into cities and counties where they swamped social services, spiked crime, and flooded emergency rooms and schools.

ICE has repeatedly presented data that show in its first rounds of deportations, it is concentrating on removing either criminal illegal aliens or those who have already been processed with deportation orders, somewhere between 70 and 90% of all current apprehensions.

No matter.

Left-wing protesters are swarming ICE headquarters in Portland to violently oppose all deportations, even those of known criminals and those who have already exhausted efforts to remain here illegally.

President Donald Trump loves a Sharpie pen, and now he has all the more reason to love the company that makes them.

The president signed the flurry of executive orders he issued the day he returned to office with a Sharpie.

He's used them for years, finding them more reliable than fancier pens.

Now we know they have another merit, too: They're almost entirely made in America.

Only the felt tip of a Sharpie comes from abroad -- it's made in Japan, according to the Wall Street Journal's Natasha Khan, who published an eye-opening article on the penmaker last week.

What makes Newell Brands, the corporation behind the Sharpie, so newsworthy is its success saving money -- and holding down consumer prices -- by making the pens in America.

Newell was once as dazzled as other manufacturers by the prospect of making its products more cheaply in Asia.

But in 2018, CFO Chris Peterson looked into producing the latest Sharpie, a gel version, at the company's factory in Maryville, Tennessee.

The new pen required updating the plant and training workers to operate and maintain the new machines.

Yet that's what made the project a triumph: investment, in an American factory and the Americans working there.

At the beginning of September, I told you how French President Emmanuel Macron was on the hunt for Prime Minister Number Four after yet another French government went le poof like a deflated soufflé.

It's always entertaining to watch the turgid burps of the excitable Gallic political process as they go about trying to form and reform governments, with cranky citizens (and others) taking to the streets in rowdy, car-b-quing mobs expressing either their delight or disgust.

Public unions often join the fray in generally making things even more difficult by striking various aspects of the national service industries.

Macron settled on a fellow named Lecornu as his Prime Minister, and things seemed to settle down, which made those watching more than merely the political upheaval breathe a small sigh of relief.

Stability in France has many in Brussels and beyond very concerned right now, as the French are in quite possibly one of the worst financial pickles they have been in decades - some say since the founding of this latest iteration of government in the early 1950s. Without a settled government, they are paralyzed as far as taking any action to correct it.

Hopes of breaking the impasse and moving on to restoring some fiscal sanity were dashed when No.4, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, resigned twenty-seven days after accepting the office and about fourteen hours after Macron finally named his new cabinet.

YOU ALL ARE CRAZY AND I'M OUT OF HERE