French President François Hollande had been pushing for a 75% tax on the super-rich since his 2012 presidential campaign.
France's controversial "millionaire tax" is set to become law, allowing the government to levy a 75% tax on companies that pay salaries in excess of €1 million.
The tax was approved by France's constitutional council on Sunday after an earlier version was deemed unconstitutional last year.
President François Hollande introduced the tax as a way to force the rich to help France shrink its massive budget deficit and support the sagging economy.
It had originally been created as a tax on individuals, but was eventually shifted to a tax on companies paying high annual salaries.
According to the constitutional council, employers must pay the levy on salaries exceeding €1 million ($1.4 million) a year.
The tax will apply for two years -- 2013 and 2014 -- and will not be allowed to surpass 5% of a company's annual revenue.
Hollande has said the new tax is "symbolic" and designed to make a political statement about economic fairness.
The tax is not ultimately expected to be a big money-maker, with the French government estimating the tax will affect roughly 470 companies.
"This tax was born in the heat of Hollande's [2012] presidential campaign," said James Shields, a professor of French politics at Aston University in the U.K. "It's only a tax for two years. It's temporary. So yes, this is highly symbolic."
The tax proposals prompted a severe backlash from high-profile business people, movie stars and soccer clubs.
Earlier this year, French soccer clubs had threatened to boycott a number of matches after learning they would not be exempt from the tax, though the boycotts were later called off.
The initial tax proposal also prompted famous French actor Gerard Depardieu to take up Russian citizenship to protest against the tax.
Chile's president said Monday that conditions must improve in the country's mining industry, just days after 33 miners were rescued from a collapsed mineshaft at a copper mine in the country's remote Atacama Desert.
The Miners spent 69 days trapped in a shelter almost a half a mile underground before rescuers were able to reach them by drilling a hole wide enough to send a rescue capsule down.
"We cannot guarantee that another accident will never occur in the future," Chilean President Sebastian Pinera told CNN's Connect the World during a visit to Britain to meet Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron. "But we have learned our lesson and we are revising and changing our relations, our procedures."
He added that as a member of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) -- a forum of nations with a focus on helping governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalized economy -- Chile's new rules would be compatible with international standards.
"We will make sure they are enforced in the field because that's where it is important," he said. "And not only in the mining sector; we are revising our standards in many other sectors in order to guarantee that we are doing our best in terms of protecting lives, health, and integrity of our workers."
Pinera also described how, as the eyes of the world were fixed on Chile at the start of the dramatic story, he was coming to terms with personal tragedy.
As news emerged of the 33 miners trapped a half mile under Chile's Atacama Desert when the San Jose gold and copper mine collapsed, the president's father-in-law was gravely ill.
Days and nights were passing without any indication of the state of the men but Pinera spent the night of August 21 at the hospital, at his wife's side. His father-in-law told him: "Don't give up searching. It's your responsibility. It's your duty."
They were his last words. Pinera's wife encouraged her husband to immediately go to the mine. Something, she said, will happen today.
Pinera arrived at the mine near Copiapo to a handwritten message sent up by the miners through a probe. "Estamos bien," it said. We are well.
Pinera carries a copy of the message in his pocket always.
inner voice that told me, keep searching, keep searching, don't give up.
--President Pinera "It was an explosion of joy, happiness, tears all over the country, and I think all over the world," Pinera said Monday, recounting the mine ordeal to CNN's Becky Anderson during a visit to the United Kingdom.
It would be many weeks before a dramatic rescue would hoist all 33 miners to safety. The entire world watched, families rejoiced and Pinera emerged with a burnished image.
He has been smiling in relief since last week's rescue but on August 5, the day the mine caved in, the burden of life for the 33 miners rested on Pinera's shoulders.
"The private company that owns the mine was not able to undertake the search and rescue," Pinera told CNN. "So it was either us, the government, or nobody."
So Pinera launched a blind search, against all odds.
He said he held onto "profound conviction" and his faith in God.
"I feel that their families were so convinced that they were alive that each time I went to visit them at the mine during those 17 days of anguish, I was reinforced in our convictions that they were alive," Pinera said.
"I had a kind of inner voice that told me, keep searching, keep searching, don't give up."
He recalled when the energy secretary told him about three possible technologies that could be used in the rescue. Which one should they use?
Pinera's thought was: all of them.
"The machines can fail. We cannot fail," Pinera said.
Then on day number 69, Florencio Avalos became the first miner to make the long journey upward and step out of the rescue capsule.
"I will never forget that moment," Pinera said. "It was so, so overwhelming. It was so impressive."
Pinera bear-hugged him. As he did all the others, all the way to number 33, Luis Urzua, the shift foreman who chose to be the last out.
Urzua told Pinera: "I am handing the ship over to you."
Pinera replied: "You have been a very good chief. A very good captain. Because you never abandoned your ship until all your men were safe. You were the last one. That was your duty and I'm so proud for that."
Pinera has been credited for his leadership; for his media savvy -- he used to own Chilevision TV -- and even for what some are calling a badly needed new image for Chile.
In England, Pinera alluded to the speech delivered by Winston Churchill when he first became prime minister in 1940. "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat," Churchill said.
"And it was similar that we have the same motivation, faith, and commitment," Pinera said. "Therefore, we kept searching.
"And I think that the lessons that we can take from this accident is when a country is united and committed with faith, with hope, using the best possible technologies and the best possible human teams, we are able to achieve goals that for some people seems as impossible," he said.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has visited the crash site where Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s plane plunged to the ground.
Putin was joined at the disaster zone near Smolensk in western Russia by his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk. Kaczynski’s twin brother Jaroslaw has also been at the scene.
Putin has promised to take personal responsibility for the investigation into the causes of the tragedy.
The black box flight recorder has already been recovered. A key question that needs answering is why the pilot attempted to land in thick fog in an aeroplane that was not equipped for such a manoeuvre.
Russian air traffic control has said the pilot ignored repeated instructions to divert to another airport. The plane is believed to have hit trees on the third attempt to land.
In similar poor weather conditions two years ago in Georgia, President Kaczynski himself instructed his pilot to land the plane, overruling danger warnings from Georgian air traffic control.
He died en route to the most sensitive mission possible — a visit to the place that has driven a wedge between Poles and Russians for three generations.
The death of Lech Kaczynski, Poland's president and dozens of his high-level countrymen in a plane crash, and the purpose behind the journey, laid bare the deep divisions that remain between two nations still struggling to be more than uneasy neighbors who watch each other with skepticism and suspicion.
Saturday's planned visit to the Katyn forest was somber in purpose but underscored his suspicious eye of the massive neighbor and former taskmaster to the east. The memorial service was to mark the 70th anniversary of the killing of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals by the Soviet secret security during World War II.
Katyn. The site of the massacre of Polish military officers, priests, shopkeepers. Men shot in the back of the head by Josef Stalin's NKVD, the precursor of the KGB.
"It is an accursed place," former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski told TVN24 after the crash.
'An event Moscow would like to forget' Janusz Bugajski of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that Saturday's crash has put Katyn at the center of Polish-Russian relations.
"It brought to the forefront again an event that Moscow would like to forget or, if not to forget, to sideline," he said, noting that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took a significant step by attending the Katyn commemorations last Wednesday with Polish counterpart Donald Tusk.
The ancient city of Smolensk has long played a significant and somewhat symbolic role in Russian-Polish relations.
Russian and Polish rulers fiercely fought over it for centuries, as well as over other contested territories in today's Ukraine and Belarus, and the Russian takeover of the city in the mid-17th century preceded Moscow's takeover of eastern Polish lands.
Earlier this week, Poles took deep satisfaction in Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's presence at the memorial for the 22,000 killed there.
Putin was the first Russian leader to commemorate the Katyn massacres with a Polish leader and noted that both nations' "fates had been inexorably joined" by the atrocities that saw 22,000 Polish officers, prisoners and intellectuals massacred by Stalin's secret police in 1940 in and around Katyn, a village near Russia's border with Belarus.
"In our country there has been a clear political, legal and moral judgment made of the evil acts of this totalitarian regime, and this judgment cannot be revised," he said, but he did not apologize or call it a war crime.
Listening to the remarks was the Polish prime minister, Tusk, not Kaczynski who, as president, was not invited to the event.
"It was a step forward. He could have not shown up, he could have not invited Tusk," Bugajski said.
Instead Kaczynski, along with others, made their own trip Saturday for Polish-only commemorations.
"I think in a way this is a God-given opportunity to really talk honestly about Katyn and what led to Katyn," Bugajski said. "We know who killed these people."
For half a century, Soviet officials claimed that the mass executions had been carried out by Nazi occupiers during the Second World War. But the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev's rule admitted in 1990 that the crimes had been committed by Stalin's NKVD secret police.
"Without a doubt, there is evident symbolism in this tragedy that we cannot even grasp now," Slawomir Debski, the head of Poland's Institute of International Affairs, said. "At a time when it seemed we were reaching a conclusion of the Katyn issue between Poland and Russia, after the ceremonies and good gestures, we have another tragedy."
Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, said Kaczynski's death could fuel anti-Russian sentiments among some Poles.
"There will be certain people who'll say 'It was Russians who organized the whole thing,'" Lukyanov was quoted by the gazeta.ru news portal as saying.
He said only an open investigation by the Russian authorities could put to rest any suspicion but there was optimism, too.
"But we may also look for a grain of hope in that it can mend our relations because it is such a tragedy that we may see a kind of catharsis," Anna Materska-Sosnowska, a political scientist with Warsaw University.
Moving in different directions
Russia and Poland have always kept a wary eye on each other. Poland, after communism's collapse, eagerly embraced the west, joining the European Union and NATO, partly to anchor itself in Europe and give itself a security blanket against Russia.
Now Katyn, which has long divided the two countries, could further erode already testy national relations or, analysts said Saturday, could provide the chance for them to move forward and extend hands.
"We cannot understand why people representing the Polish state died at the same place where thousands of Poland's officers had been murdered," Debski said. "Apparently this soil must like Polish blood."
The body of President Lech Kaczynski was returned to Poland on Sunday, where it was greeted by grieving dignitaries and thousands of Poles lining the route from Warsaw's airport to the presidential palace.
The plane carrying Kaczynski's body arrived from the airport in Smolensk, Russia, where he and 95 others had been heading Saturday to honor 22,000 Polish officers slain by the Soviet secret police in 1940 in the western Soviet Union.
Kaczynski's twin brother, Jaroslaw, knelt on the ground and pressed his head against the flag-draped coffin before rising and crossing himself.
The coffin was escorted by 10 soldiers from the back of the plane as somber music played. Warsaw Archbishop Kazimierz Nycz was among seven priests and military chaplains who led prayers at the airport and sprinkled holy water on the coffin.
There was no sign of the twins' ailing mother Jadwiga, who has been hospitalized. The president had canceled several foreign trips lately to be by her side. Also on the tarmac were Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Marta Kaczynska, the only child of the president and his wife, Maria, who also perished in the crash.
Thousands of people stood silent in the streets to mourn Kaczynski and the dozens of political, military and religious leaders killed in the plane crash that ravaged the top levels of Poland's elite.
Church bells pealed at noon and emergency sirens shrieked for nearly a minute before fading into silence. Hundreds bowed their heads, eyes closed, in front of the presidential palace. Buses and trams halted in the streets.
The death of the president and much of the state and defense establishment in Russia, en route to commemorating one of the saddest events in the neighboring nations' long, complicated history, was laden with tragic irony.
"He taught Poles how to respect our traditions, how to fight for our dignity, and he made he made his sacrifice there at that tragic place," said mourner Boguslaw Staron, 70.
Among the dead were Poland's army chief of staff, the navy chief commander, and heads of the air and land forces. At the Field Cathedral of the Polish Army in Warsaw, hundreds gathered for a morning Mass and left flowers and written condolences. Government spokesman Pawel Gras said the country's armed forces and state offices were operating normally despite the devastating losses.
The acting president, Parliament Speaker Bronislaw Komorowski, said he would call for early elections within 14 days, in line with the constitution. The vote must be held within another 60 days.
Kaczynski had indicated he would seek a second term in presidential elections this fall but was expected to face an uphill struggle against Komorowski and his governing party, the moderate, pro-business Civic Platform. Kaczynski's nationalist conservative Law and Justice Party could benefit, however, from the support of a country mourning the loss of their president, particularly with elections now set to take place by late June.
In Moscow, Russia's transport ministry said that Russian and Polish investigators had begun to decipher flight data recorders of the aging Soviet-built Tu-154 airliner that crashed while trying to land in deep fog in Smolensk.
Russian officials had said 97 people were killed but revised the figure to 96. Poland's Foreign Ministry also confirmed the figure.
The Smolensk regional government said Russian dispatchers had asked the Polish crew to divert from the military airport there because of the fog and land instead in Moscow or Minsk, the capital of neighboring Belarus.
Former president, Solidarity founder and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa, said it was too soon to cast blame.
"Someone must have been taking decisions on that plane. I don't believe that the pilot took decisions single-handedly," he told reporters. "That's not possible. I have flown a lot and whenever there were doubts, they always came to the leaders and asked for a decision, and based on that, pilots took decisions. Sometimes the decision was against the leader's instructions."
Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently after being poisoned for decades over the slaying of some 22,000 officers and others in Katyn forest and in other areas. About 4,000 Polish army officers were killed in the forest by Josef Stalin's NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, in 1940
Russia never has formally apologized for the murders but Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's decision to attend a memorial ceremony earlier this week in the forest was seen as a gesture of goodwill toward reconciliation. Kaczynski wasn't invited to that event because Putin, as prime minister, had invited his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.
Kaczynski, 60, was the first serving Polish leader to die since exiled World War II-era leader Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski was killed in a mysterious plane crash off Gibraltar in 1943.
Kaczynski's twin brother flew to Smolensk on Saturday evening and identified the body of his brother and sister-in-law.
In Warsaw's historic center, large sections of the street were blocked to traffic to allow the flow of people expressing their grief. Mourners carried candles and roses and joined a long line to sign a book of condolences in the palace.
Also aboard the plane were the national bank president, the deputy foreign minister, the army chaplain, the head of the National Security Office, the deputy parliament speaker, the Olympic Committee head, the civil rights commissioner and at least two presidential aides and three lawmakers.
Some on board were relatives of the officers slain in the Katyn massacre. Also among the victims was Anna Walentynowicz, whose firing in August 1980 from the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk sparked a workers' strike that spurred the eventual creation of the Solidarity freedom movement.
Walesa was among those who signed a condolence book in Gdansk.
"The elite of our country has perished," he said the day before.
Children also placed simple drawings and messages of mourning: "I love our president," said one, alongside a picture of a human figure and a cross.
Polish television carried black-and-white montages of those killed in the crash and devoted nonstop coverage to the crash, including lingering looks at Kaczynski and his wife, Maria.
President Dmitry Medvedev declared Monday a day of mourning in Russia.
The Tu-154 was the workhorse of Eastern Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 1980s. Poland has long discussed replacing the planes that carry the country's leaders but said it lacked the funds.
According to the Aviation Safety Network, there have been 66 crashes involving Tu-154s in the past four decades, including six in the past five years. The Russian carrier Aeroflot recently withdrew its Tu-154 fleet from service, largely because the planes do not meet international noise restrictions and use too much fuel.
The Polish presidential plane was fully overhauled in December, the general director of the Aviakor aviation maintenance plant in Samara, Russia, told Rossiya-24. The plant repaired the plane's three engines, retrofitted electronic and navigation equipment and updated the interior, Alexei Gusev said. He said there could be no doubts that the plane was flightworthy.
(Afghan President Karzai declared winner. Election officials declare President Hamid Karzai the winner of Afghanistan’s disputed election. NBC’s Richard Engel reports.)
Daoud Ali Najafi gave no details, but a second senior official on the commission also confirmed the second round has been called off.
President Hamid Karzai had already effectively secured a second term when his only challenger, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, dropped out of the race Sunday because he said the vote would not be free or fair. The first round was marred by massive fraud.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a surprise visit to Afghanistan on Monday and said that the world body's work will continue despite the slayings of U.N. staff in Kabul last week.
Ban told reporters in the capital that "we cannot be deterred, we must not be deterred. ... The work of the United Nations will continue."
Last Wednesday, insurgents stormed a guest house in Kabul where U.N. election workers were staying, killing five U.N. staffers and three Afghans.
On Monday, the world body announced it would suspend long-term development work in areas of Pakistan along the Afghan border because of violence.
Election fraud
It has been more than a month since the Aug. 20 balloting that aimed to strengthen the Afghan government but instead undermined its credibility both at home and with key allies like the United States.
The vote was characterized by rampant ballot-box stuffing, and fraud investigators threw out nearly a third of Karzai's votes. That move dropped Karzai below the 50 percent threshold needed to win outright, forcing the runoff vote.
A bevy of international figures, including U.S. Sen. John Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, were involved in convincing Karzai to accept the runoff vote.
U.N. and U.S. representatives were still involved in negotiations with the two about a power-sharing deal as recently as Sunday morning, according to a Western diplomat who was familiar with the talks but spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
Abdullah has said his decision not to participate in the runoff is final. But in a sign of how much the situation is in flux, a spokesman said Monday that they could be open to still having a second round if it is delayed to put in safeguards to prevent fraud.
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