How’s Norway this time of year?

All four Hebrew papers lead off with different front page packages Wednesday morning, some scary and some hopeful, but only one paper puts the joie de vivre of two young (and not at all bad-looking) French women locking lips smack front and center on A1.

Yes, every 14-year-old boy will be running out to get a copy of Haaretz Wednesday morning, obviously out of happiness for France, which legalized gay marriage on Tuesday. But if they are yeshiva students, and can read (of course they bought it for the tomes of knowledge contained therein), they will be shocked to find out that the government is looking to slash the budget of their school unless they start conforming to the rest of the school system. Sacre bleu!

The paper reports that the Finance Ministry will cull their funding by 50 percent if they don’t shape up and start teaching for the matriculation exams, though it notes that the ministry has yet to run the details past the Education Ministry, which is currently undergoing reforms to get rid of a large chunk of those same standardized tests. On the flip side, yeshivas that increase the amount of core subjects they teach will see their budgets make like a challah and rise.

Black hatters aren’t the only ones that will be feeling the pinch if the Finance Ministry’s proposed budget goes through. Yedioth Ahronoth leads off with a report that the proposed austerity measures will affect the average family of white stick figures by nearly NIS 13,000 a year, including a NIS 3,000 cut for allowances for their stick children, and another NIS 2,000 on taxes that will be levied on purchases of stick fruits and vegetables.

The story also includes a strange line buried halfway through that the ministry, which is apparently employing Captain Blackbeard, “discovered” a billion shekels hiding in the Jewish National Fund’s coffers, which will go into the state’s budget. Arrrrrrrrrrre we not going to hear any more about that? Apparently not, matey.

On the flip side, Israel Hayom focuses on the positive, leading off with news that Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, fresh off a victory of liberalizing the air travel market, will pass reforms that will make purchasing a car more affordable. How will he bring prices down by some 20 percent? Not by slashing the over 100 percent in taxes Israelis pay, but rather by opening up the market to competition, letting more than one vendor import the same car.

“This will be a serious and wide reform,” Katz is quoted saying. “There will be several importers for the same type of car, which will end exclusive import deals, which caused consumers to pay on their biggest purchase aside from their homes. I believe that the price of the standard car will drop by 20 percent.”

Katz would do well not to open up Yedioth in that case, which reports that the Finance Ministry plans to slash the Transportation Ministry’s budget for maintaining and building new roads down to the bone. So go ahead and buy that new cheap car. But don’t you dare move it from your driveway.

One look at Maariv, though, and you’ll want to take a nice long drive to say, northern Norway. The paper reports that A. Israel thinks Syria is using chemical weapons, though the US says that dog won’t hunt, B. Iran has crossed the red line we set for it and C. We don’t have enough soldiers.

Head for the hills! No, not the Golan Heights, other hills.

Writing about A and B, Amir Rappaport notes that it’s in everyone’s best interest that red lines stay flexible, so they won’t end up in a situation where they’ve forced themselves to act, hence the American quasi denial of the Syrian chemical weapons report, and the lack of Israeli Air Force jets taking off after Amos Yadlin’s speech where he revealed that Iran is closer to the bomb than we thought.

“Israel’s red line, it seems, is no less flexible than the American red line. At first, Israel’s red line vis-à-vis Iran was that it not move thousands of centrifuges from Natanz to the underground facility at Fordo, where an attack would not cause damage. Yet the line was crossed a while ago by the Iranians… and still Israel did not attack.”

As for C. The paper reports that the 2013 draft was the weakest in years and that there are hundreds of holes to fill in the fighting corps. But, the army tells the paper, by 2016 the problem will be solved, once the ultra-Orthodox begin joining up en masse. So you hear that, Syria and Iran? We are on time-out until 2016.

Haaretz may be all about the women, but former judge Shalom Brenner wants it to start raining men at one local water authority, Yedioth reports. According to the story, the mayor of Kiryat Ekron, who apparently stole Mitt Romney’s binders full of women, got a tongue lashing from Brenner, who says he’s one step away from having Lena Dunham come film his office after he appointed four women to the regional water authority.

“This situation does not pass muster with the obligation to give the job to the most suitable. Thus we request that the next hires be men,” the judge wrote. Mayor Arik Hadad’s response? “What does it bother him even if all the members were women? … I do not intend to listen to this request.”

Zionists at the Beeb?

In Israel Hayom, Yaakov Ahimeir writes about the recent promotion of James Harding, a pro-Israel Jew, to the head of the BBC’s news division. But he says hoping the BBC becomes an outgrowth of Israel National News is not the point. “We shouldn’t expect the new director to have all his news workers join Zionist movements, but we should demand that he bequeath them with news values so that the consumer, Jewish and not Jewish, will get a dose of reasonable truth in their news. No less and no more.”

Haaretz’s Ravit Hecht writes a meandering piece on Israel’s financial woes, opining that the Finance Ministry has to stop seeing raising the VAT sales tax as a one-stop shop for fixing economic problems. “Increasing VAT, already considered high, is the button traditionally pushed by Finance Ministry officials, who are responsible for the deficit in the first place. This is the most ruthless button of all because it hits the poor first — the people who are forced to use every shekel of their wages (and usually even more, leading them to a vicious debt cycle). The move also hurts the middle class — the people Lapid ostensibly hopes to help. These families are rocked by any extra expense of several hundred shekels.”