Investors got $315 million after accusing Merrill Lynch, a division, of BAC for misleading investors on mortgage products.
Comments »Carl Ichan Takes His bid for Commercial Metals to Shareholders
After the company rejected Ichan’s bid he will now solicit shareholders directly.
Comments »EU Antitrust Commission Accuses Apple and Publishers of Colluding Over E-books
Hollywood is Filled with Pedophiles
If a spate of recent allegations proves true, Hollywood may have a hideous epidemic on its hands. The past two weeks have brought three separate reports of alleged child sexual abuse in the entertainment industry.
Martin Weiss, a 47-year-old Hollywood manager who represented child actors, was charged in Los Angeles on Dec. 1 with sexually abusing a former client. His accuser, who was under 12 years old during the time of the alleged abuse, reported to authorities that Weiss told him “what they were doing was common practice in the entertainment industry.” Weiss has pleaded not guilty.
On Nov. 21, Fernando Rivas, 59, an award-winning composer for “Sesame Street,” was arraigned on charges of coercing a child “to engage in sexually explicit conduct” in South Carolina. The Juilliard-trained composer was also charged with production and distribution of child pornography.
Registered sex offender Jason James Murphy, 35, worked as a casting agent in Hollywood for years before his past kidnapping and sexual abuse of a boy was revealed by the Los Angeles Times on Nov. 17. Murphy’s credits include placing young actors in kid-friendly fare like “Bad News Bears,” “The School of Rock,” “Cheaper by the Dozen 2” and the forthcoming “Three Stooges.”
Revelations of this sort come as no surprise to former child star Corey Feldman.
Feldman, 40, himself a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, unflinchingly warned of the world of pedophiles who are drawn to the entertainment industry last August. “I can tell you that the No. 1 problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia,” Feldman told ABC’s Nightline. “That’s the biggest problem for children in this industry… It’s the big secret.”
Another child star from an earlier era agrees that Hollywood has long had a problem with pedophilia. “When I watched that interview, a whole series of names and faces from my history went zooming through my head,” Paul Peterson, 66, star of The Donna Reed Show, a sitcom popular in the 1950s and 60s, and president of A Minor Consideration, tells FOXNews.com. “Some of these people, who I know very well, are still in the game.”
“This has been going on for a very long time,” concurs former “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim. “It was the gossip back in the ‘80s. People said, ‘Oh yeah, the Coreys, everyone’s had them.’ People talked about it like it was not a big deal.”
Arngrim, 49, was referring to Feldman and his co-star in “The Lost Boys,” Corey Haim, who died in March 2010 after years of drug abuse.
“I literally heard that they were ‘passed around,’” Arngrim said. “The word was that they were given drugs and being used for sex. It was awful – these were kids, they weren’t 18 yet. There were all sorts of stories about everyone from their, quote, ‘set guardians’ on down that these two had been sexually abused and were totally being corrupted in every possible way.”
In fact it is the very nature of a TV or movie set that invites predators, experts tell Fox News.
“A set in Hollywood with children can become a place that attracts pedophiles because the children there may be vulnerable and less tended to,” explains Beverly Hills-based psychotherapist Dr. Jenn Berman. “One thing we know about actors, psychologically speaking, is that they’re people who like a lot of attention. Kids naturally like a lot of attention, and when you put a kid on a set who is unsupervised and getting attention from someone who is powerful, it creates a vulnerability for a very dangerous situation.”
Feldman, who claims he was “surrounded” by pedophiles when he was 14, says the sexual abuse by an unnamed “Hollywood mogul” led to the death of his friend Haim at the age of 38. “That person needs to be exposed, but, unfortunately, I can’t be the one to do it,” Feldman told Nightline.
“There’s more than one person to blame,” says Arngrim. “I’m sure that it was not just one person who sexually abused Corey Haim, and I’m sure it wasn’t only him and Corey Feldman that knew about it. I’m sure that dozens of people were aware of the situation and chose to not report it.”
Arngrim, a board member and the national spokeswoman for protect.org, an organization that works to protect children from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, says greed in Hollywood allows sexual predators to flourish. “Nobody wants to stop the gravy train,” says Arngrim. “If a child actor is being sexually abused by someone on the show, is the family, agents or managers – the people who are getting money out of this – going to say, ‘OK, let’s press charges’? No, because it’s going to bring the whole show to a grinding halt, and stop all the checks. So, the pressure is there is not to say anything.”
“It’s almost a willing sacrifice that many parents are oblivious to – what kind of environment do they think that they’re pushing their kid into?” said Peterson. “The casting couch is a real thing, and sometimes just getting an appointment makes people do desperate things.”
Arngrim, who revealed her own sexual abuse in her 2010 autobiography, “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch,” explains: “I’ve heard from victims from all over the country. Everyone tells the same kind of story, everyone is told to keep it secret, everyone is threatened with something. Corey Feldman may have opened a can of worms by speaking out, but yes, this does go on.”
Even though Feldman spoke candidly about the abuse, he hasn’t named the predator. “People don’t want to talk about this because they’re afraid for their careers,” says Peterson. “From my perspective, what Corey did was pretty brave. It would be really wonderful if his allegations reached through all of the protective layers and identified the real people who are a part of a worldwide child pornography ring, because it’s huge and it respects no borders, just as it does not respect the age of the children involved.”
CFTC Creates More Restrictions on How Brokerage Firms Can Use Client Monies
In the wake of MF Global tighter limits were approved today to limit how client monies can be used.
Comments »THE ARAB SPRING FOR DUMMIES {PHOTO}
Strip Clubs Find Female Dance Professor to Stave Off Government
Judith Hanna, a 75-year-old grandmother and anthropology professor, spent an afternoon in 2005 on a beach in Jacksonville, Florida, photographing women’s swimsuited backsides.
Hanna, who has spent almost 50 years studying the cultural expression of dance, called the fieldwork “interesting.” Her pictures, meant to demonstrate local enthusiasm for exposed flesh, became evidence in a nightclub’s fight against an ordinance requiring strippers to better cover their derrieres. Since 1995, Hanna, a University ofMaryland researcher, has helped clubs repel efforts to tax, regulate or close them, arguing more than 100 times that striptease is just as much an art as ballet.
Next year, her lap-dances-are-art argument will be part of an appeal before New York’s highest court. A stripper in heels is like a ballerina en pointe, she says, and her communication of feeling is no different than that of the New York City Ballet — and no less protected by the First Amendment.
“Patrons of gentleman’s clubs aren’t just there to look at nude bodies,” Hanna, who lives in Bethesda, said in a telephone interview. “They want to read into it. It’s not just the eroticism, it’s the beauty of the body, and the fantasy they create.”
Hanna says she has observed at least 1,500 ecdysiastic performances in her defense of the $12 billion U.S. exotic-dance industry, which comprises about 4,000 clubs. When a city or state passes a law to kick the clubs out of town, owners turn to Hanna. She sends clients an average bill of about $3,000, and estimated that she has 45 wins to 21 losses.
Voice of the Industry
Hanna “plays a really important role in letting people see our side,” said Eric Langan, chief executive officer of Houston-based Rick’s Cabaret International Inc. (RICK), which operates adult websites and clubs in Texas and Minnesota.
Opponents say her sophistry defends the indefensible.
“You can’t just trump the law by saying a naked dancer’s erotic message is protected by free speech,” said Scott Bergthold, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, attorney who helps municipalities craft and defend adult-business regulations. “We’re dealing with cases where cities are outlawing touching between naked dancers and customers that involve prostitution acts and she’s coming in with these opinions. It’s ridiculous.”
Hanna’s prominence has grown with the spread of stripping, Bergthold said in a telephone interview.
“The industry has exploded, and they’re now in towns and cities that 20 years ago didn’t have strip clubs,” he said.
‘Secondary Effects’
The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed crime rates around clubs to be used as cause for regulation. This year, the Missouri Supreme Court and a federal appeals court in Ohio upheld laws against touching customers. The Texas Supreme Court upheld a $5 per customer tax on nude clubs that serve alcohol. The so-called secondary effects doctrine, which allows laws restricting activities regarded as protected expression so long as they are aimed at deleterious side effects such as crime, was applied in all three.
At trial, Hanna’s testimony is often accompanied by that of sociologists who dispute crime data as the industry recasts itself as classy entertainment.
“Sex, drugs and heavy drinking have been replaced by good- looking women, $300 chairs and bright lights,” said Langan whose company has a market capitalization of about $77.6 million and whose stock has outperformed the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index by almost 1 percentage point this year.
And there is nothing new under the bustier, Hanna said.
“Exotic dance has nudity and is marginalized and stigmatized for it,” Hanna said. “It’s really old hat. It’s in musicals, operas, and theater.”
Grace and Violence
The New Testament tells of Salome, who “danced and pleased” her stepfather Herod, the ruler of Galilee, and then asked for John the Baptist’s head. Herod sent an executioner.
Vaslav Nijinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” ballet sparked a riot when its depiction of fertility rituals debuted in Paris in 1913.
“Exotic dance shares with virtually all dance genres the fact that it is a purposeful, intentionally rhythmical, culturally patterned, nonverbal, body movement communication in time and space,” Hanna writes in “Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right,” to be released next year. It “conveys meaning by the use of space, touch, proximity to an observer, nudity, stillness and specific body movements.”
Preparing Temptation
Stripping can transcend the carnal, said Toni Bentley, an author who danced for choreographerGeorge Balanchine’s New York City Ballet before a hip injury ended her career.
“It’s hard to make the argument that just thrusting your pelvis is art,” Bentley said in a telephone interview. “You have a much better chance at doing something beautiful with work and preparation.”
The key to eroticism is careful planning, said Jennifer McCumber, 28, a retired stripper who runs a website from her Houston home where she teaches business concepts to dancers.
“To make a lap dance work, I had to combine concepts from gymnastics, things I learned from pole dancing, belly dancing I learned in college and even martial arts,” McCumber said in a telephone interview. “You have to have physical and mental agility to perform, while also making it seductive and alluring.”
Choreography is at the heart of the case in New York, where a club in Latham, near Albany, is arguing that most of its sales should be tax-free because of the state’s exemption for entrance fees to “dramatic or musical art performances.”
‘Stunningly Sweeping’
Andrew McCullough, a lawyer for Nite Moves, gave the court videos that dancers use to “adapt new techniques into their choreography.” And he hired Hanna to “get the message across” to the Tax Appeals Tribunal, he said.
It didn’t get there.
“To accept Dr. Hanna’s stunningly sweeping interpretation of what constitutes choreographed performance, all one needs to do is move in an aesthetically pleasing way to music,” tribunal Commissioners Carroll Jenkins and Charles Nesbitt wrote in their April 2010 ruling against the club.
The case is headed to the New York Court of Appeals, which said in October it will hear arguments next year.
In 2002, Bentley, the former ballet dancer, published “Sisters of Salome,” a study on early 20th Century strippers. As research, Bentley did a striptease of her own at a New York City club.
“There’s no definition to art and it’s eternally debated,” Bentley said. “Like the Supreme Court with obscenity, I know it when I see it. And from going to all kinds of strip clubs, some of it is and some of it is not.”
Comments »Taking Steps to Go Green: OPEC Concerned Over Climate Change
FLASH: HERMAN CAIN SUSPENDS HIS CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT
FLASH: $SAP to Buy SuccessFactors $SFSF for $3.4 Billion
SAP of Germany announced plans on Saturday to buy SuccessFactors, a Web-based enterprise software company, for $40 a share, or $3.4 billion.
The all-cash transaction, which is expected to close early next year, offers SuccessFactors’ shareholders a 52 percent premium above Friday’s closing price.
“The cloud is a core of SAP’s future growth, and the combination of SuccessFactors’ leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse,” Bill McDermott, the co-chief executive of SAP, said in a statement on Saturday.
Deal activity is heating up in the enterprise software industry, as giants like SAP hunt for smaller companies that provide services through the so-called cloud. In late October, for instance, rival Oracle, agreed to purchase RightNow Technologies, a maker of customer service software, for $1.43 billion. It was Oracle’s largest acquisition, since the takeover of Sun Microsystems last year.
SuccessFactors, a provider of employee management software, helps companies assess the performance of their employees, manage recruitment and fulfill other human resource needs. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, which reported revenue of $91.2 million in the third quarter, has more than 3,500 customers spread across nearly 170 countries.
Comments »ROGER AILES STRIKES AGAIN: Hot Blonde Melissa Francis Ditches CNBC for Fox Business
TVNewser has learned Melissa Francis is leaving CNBC and joining Fox Business Network.
Francis was a co-anchor of daytime programs “Power Lunch” and, before that, “The Call.” The Harvard grad has been on TV since she was one year old, staring in a Johnson & Johnson commercial. She would later play the role of Cassandra Cooper Ingalls on “Little House on the Prairie.”
CNBC spokesman Brian Steel confirms the departure telling TVNewser, “We thank Melissa for her years of hard work and wish her well.”
Comments »NYC Janitor’s Union Threatens Strike
REALITY TV: Trump to Moderate Republican Debate
It’s officially a reality television Republican primary now.
Donald Trump is pairing up with Newsmax, the conservative magazine and news Web site, to moderate a presidential debate in Des Moines on Dec. 27.
“Our readers and the grass roots really love Trump,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media. “They may not agree with
him on everything, but they don’t see him as owned by the Washington establishment, the media establishment.”
Mr. Trump’s role in the debate, which will be broadcast on the cable network Ion Television, is sure to be one of the more memorable moments in a primary season that has already delivered its fair share of circus-like spectacle.
Mr. Trump’s own flirtation with running for president this year seems almost quaint (whose birth certificate was he all worked up about?) compared with more recent distractions – like allegations of adultery and sexual harassment, gaffes that seemed scripted from a late-night comedy show, and a six-figure line of credit at Tiffany & Co.
But despite being derided by liberals – President Obama likened Mr. Trump to a “carnival barker” for his repeated assertions that the president was actually foreign-born – the real estate mogul is seriously influential in manyRepublican Party circles. And that sway seems especially deep with the party’s conservative base, which will be a decisive factor in the early primaries that are likely to determine the nominee. The debate, which unlike many recent ones will not be limited to a specific topic like national security or the economy, is set to happen just a week before the Iowa caucuses.
Newsmax sent candidates the invitation on Friday afternoon. It began, “We are pleased to cordially invite you to “The Newsmax Ion Television 2012 Presidential Debate,” moderated by a truly great American, Mr. Donald J. Trump.” Spokesmen for several candidates did not immediately respond to questions from The New York Times about whether they would accept.
Though presidential candidates may initially balk at the idea of appearing in a debate where Mr. Trump – with his bombast and The Hair – is the one posing the questions, they may ultimately see it as an invitation they can’t refuse. In fact many of the candidates have already met with him, some more publicly than others. Representative Michele Bachmann has sat down with Mr. Trump several times this year. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had dinner with him at Jean Georges, the posh Manhattan restaurant. And Mitt Romney paid a visit but carefully avoided being photographed.
And Newsmax is a powerful player itself. It has a broad reach into the conservative base, with monthly Web traffic second only to Fox News among sites with conservative-leaning audiences.
Mr. Trump has been a popular attraction at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering in Washington. He was such a successful presence in the eyes of Fox News executives that they added a special weekly segment to their morning show “Fox and Friends” for him called “Mondays With Trump.”
Whether his professed presidential ambitions are genuine or merely a publicity stunt seems not to matter in terms of the news media attention Mr. Trump can command. His highly publicized flirtation with running this year coincided with a Trump-branded product that stood to benefit from all the attention – a new season of his highly rated NBC show “Celebrity Apprentice.”
The arc of his noncampaign was similar in 1987 and 1999 – when Mr. Trump also said that he was considering running for president, episodes that are often forgotten.
His book ”Trump: The Art of the Deal” was published in November 1987 and reached The New York Times best-seller list by December. But by the time theRepublican National Convention rolled around in August 1988, he had opted out.
”Everybody wants me to do it,” he declared then. ”But I have no interest in doing it.”
And in late 1999, just before his book ”The America We Deserve” went on sale, he began courting support as a candidate on the Reform Party ticket. He even toured the country with his girlfriend, Melania Knauss, now his wife. The outcome? You guessed it.
Comments »CAIN DROPPING OUT? Campaign Says to Announce “Major Decision” Tomorrow
Herman Cain campaign says they will be making a “major announcement” in Georgia tomorrow. #Decision2012
SOURCE: NBC NEWS TWITTER FEED
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Postal Worker Went Postal Inside Post Office
he man accused of firing shots inside the main post office in Alabama’s capital city was a postal employee who was carrying two guns when he reported for his shift.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Clark Morris, said Friday the man showed up for work and began firing shots in the mail processing room about 6:30 p.m. Thursday in Montgomery.
No one was injured. Police took the man into custody within 10 minutes of getting a 911 call from the post office. Federal and local officials said it’s unclear what the suspect’s motive may have been.
Officials originally said he had three guns, but later changed it to two.
He is being held in jail in Montgomery pending charges.
Comments »EFFICIENT OR DESPERATE? Parents Can Rent XMas Toys At New Website
When you are a kid on Christmas morning, it’s all about volume. But when you are a parent, cruising the aisles of the toy-store in December, it’s about trying to balance a happy holiday with a reasonable budget.
Paul Reinsmith of Boston has found a great way to have plenty of toys under the tree, and all year, without breaking the bank.
Paul and his wife Pam discovered what they call the ‘Netflix’ of toys. It’s called Toygaroo, a website that lets parents rent toys for a fraction of what they would cost to buy.
Comments »Zynga Plans a $925 Million IPO
Google Is Aiming To Challenge Amazon
The Web-search giant is in talks with major retailers and shippers about creating a service that would let consumers shop for goods online and receive their orders within a day for a low fee, said people familiar with the matter. Full Story
Comments »Same Store Sales Were Up 3.1% Overall; Or You Could Say Lumpy
Lumpy depending on what you did. Same old model got you crushed while midnight openings and other gimmicks got you paid.
Comments »Limited Brands to Pay a Special $2 Divi
With the announcement of great same store sales they announced a special dividend.
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