BOSTON (AP) – A federal jury on Friday ordered a Boston University graduate student who admitted illegally downloading and sharing music online to pay $675,000 to four record labels.
Joel Tenenbaum, of Providence, R.I., admitted in court that he downloaded and distributed 30 songs. The only issue for the jury to decide was how much in damages to award the record labels.
politico: Five years after he put his money behind the Swift Boat ads that helped tank John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Senate Democrats gave T. Boone Pickens a warm welcome at their weekly policy lunch Thursday.
Or at least most of them did.
Kerry skipped the regularly scheduled lunch; his staff said the Massachusetts Democrat “was unable to attend because he had a long scheduled lunch with his interns and pages.”
More than half of children taking the swine flu drug Tamiflu experience side-effects such as nausea and nightmares, research suggests.
An estimated 150,000 people with flu symptoms were prescribed the drug through a new hotline and website last week, according to figures revealed yesterday.
AP: The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was appointed receiver of the five banks.
The agency shut down Integrity Bank of Jupiter, Fla., with $119 million in assets and $102 million in deposits, and First BankAmericano, based in Elizabeth, N.J., with $166 million in assets and $157 million in deposits.
Also closed were Peoples Community Bank, West Chester, Ohio, with $705.8 million in assets and $598.2 million in deposits; First State Bank of Altus, in Altus, Okla., with $103.4 million in assets and $98.2 million in deposits; and Mutual Bank of Harvey, Ill., with $1.6 billion in assets and $1.6 billion in deposits.
Headlining the new issue of Sporting News Magazine: our list of sports’ 50 greatest coaches of all time, as selected by a panel of 118 Hall of Famers, championship coaches and other experts.
John Wooden, who at UCLA won a record 10 Division I men’s basketball championships in 12 years, was a runaway winner. SN’s 1970 Sportsman of the Year picked up 57 first-place votes from the panel, which includes seven World Series-winning managers, four Super Bowl champion coaches and the winningest coaches in the NBA, NHL and college basketball.
LED-backlit TVs — an evolution of the standard LCD set — have been on the market since 2004. But the sets in this lab have something that could catapult the technology into the mainstream.
A far lower price.
This lab is deep inside the headquarters of Vizio Inc., the discount electronics company that became the biggest supplier of LCD TVs in North America through its aggressive pricing. When it lowers prices, other manufacturers often have to follow, even if they don’t go quite so low.
Source: Congratulations, we all just got wealthier today! Or I should say that according to the government, we got wealthier-not only today, but in the past as well.
The Commerce Department released its second-quarter GDP report this report and along with it, they revised ALL the GDP numbers going back to 1929.
Today, BEA is releasing revised statistics of gross domestic product (GDP) and other national income and product accounts (NIPAs) series from 1929 through the first quarter of 2009. Comprehensive revisions, which are carried out about every 5 years, are an important part of BEA’s regular process for improving and modernizing its accounts to keep pace with the ever-changing U.S. economy.
Paging Mr. Orwell, to the yellow courtesy phone.
These weren’t small changes either. Here’s a look at the old and new quarterly series which begins in 1947 (in trillions of dollars chained at 2000 prices):
(Fortune Magazine) — In Washington these days, the only topics of discussion seem to be how many trillions to throw at health care and the recession, and whom on Wall Street to pillory next. But watch out. Lurking just below the surface is a bailout candidate that may soon emerge like the great white shark in Jaws: Social Security.
Forbes: What started as a housing and financial crisis has turned into a manufacturing recession.
Even as signs grow that banks are steadying up and the housing market may be stabilizing, unemployment data show just how hard the recession has hit America’s manufacturing centers.
Nationwide, unemployment has jumped to 9.5% from 5.7% a year ago. But for cities focused on manufacturing, it’s been worse. The 10 cities where the unemployment rate has risen the most in the past year, according to data released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are all major manufacturing centers, many with ties to the automobile industry.
BOSTON (MarketWatch) – About a week from now, Eric Singer is going to move all of his mutual fund’s investment capital from the sidelines into the stock market. The money has been in Treasurys and money-market instruments for months, but Singer has one big reason why he’s sure it’s time to get in: Congress is going on vacation.
Singer runs the Congressional Effect Fund, which opened in May 2008 with a simple, straightforward strategy: Invest in the stock market only when Congress is out of session.
Boston Herald:Before we cut David Ortiz [stats] any slack because the test was supposed to be anonymous or because he is, you know, a wonderful guy, let us consider the deal his union made in 2003.
The players agreed to one drug test - one quick pee in a cup - and that likely would be it. If fewer than 5 percent of the players tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, it would be done, ostensibly forever.
Gene Orza and Donald Fehr must have felt like they had pulled another one over Bud Selig’s eyes. All the players had to do was stay clean during the offseason and into spring training when they would pass their one and only test, and then they would be free to do more drugs than Amy Winehouse.
What - no more Brett Favre? Just like that, in a New York Jets minute, he’s gone? Really gone? Or just gone? Wink, wink.
Gone just long enough to miss training camp. Gone just long enough to miss the drudgery, repetition and tedium of training camp. Gone for at least a couple of months.
Be honest. You miss him already. You miss the soap opera. You miss the shots of his two-day-old stubble. How does he do that anyway - maintain his stubble at precisely two days old?
Buffalo News:The Pete Rose argument has always been easy for me. Simply, he bet on baseball, he knew the consequences of betting on baseball, he broke the rule and therefore was banned for life from baseball. There was no gray area for interpretation based on performance or popular opinion.
Nobody would question his credentials. Take away years of compulsive gambling and lying, and he coasts into the Hall of Fame. It’s a slam dunk. He has 4,256 hits, the most of all time. He won three World Series titles. He’s one of the best players ever.
CBS:
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell is a better man than I am. You already knew that, right? Fine. But this is sincere stuff. It’s no time to be snarky.
It’s no time to be vindictive, either, and when he ruled on Michael Vick, Roger Goodell wasn’t that. He wasn’t vindictive. He was forgiving. Which means he’s a better man than baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who refuses to forgive banished hit king Pete Rose.
Nor is it time to grandstand — and what do you know? Goodell isn’t doing that, either. Which means he’s a better man than Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who is playing to the masses or the media or the voices in his head when he insists that former New York Giants receiver Plaxico Burress should spend years in jail for the crime of shooting himself on accident.
By Art Spander
Day by day, leak by leak, Barry Bonds keeps looking better and baseball worse. Bonds didn’t ruin the game. Bonds didn’t poison pigeons or fail to stand for the national anthem. He simply used performance enhancing drugs.
So, we learn, did a great many others, A-Rod, the Rocket, Manny and now, according to one of those anonymous reports, this one on the New York Times web site which makes it considerably more credible than others, David Ortiz.
CBS: LOS ANGELES — It’s been since 2005 that Reggie Bush played at USC.
More than three years since Yahoo! Sports blew the roof off the sucker with the report that Bush accepted cash and benefits worth $300,000 from some would-be agents.
Fifteen months since an investigation of basketball star O.J. Mayo was made public
THE STRATEGIES were sound, the costs reasonable, the gestures noble, the risks low and the rewards potentially high. Each team made the right call.
There should be no regrets in Oakland for signing Jason Giambi, and none in San Francisco for signing Randy Johnson.
But these are not the farewell tours anybody hoped for. Not the A’s, not the Giants, not their fans - and certainly neither of the players.
Johnson and Giambi take pride in their willingness to prepare, physically and mentally, for the demands of a 162-game schedule.
It seems almost certain at this point that whatever health reform legislation is ultimately enacted by Congress, its principal funding will come from a surtax on the top 1% or so of taxpayers. This is a very bad idea for reasons that have little to do with the economic effects of taxation.
July 31 (Bloomberg) – The Androids are coming. Brace yourself.
Between now and the end of the year, a wave of new wireless smart phones running Android, Google Inc.’s much-discussed but so far little-seen operating system, will crash onto U.S. shores from makers such as Motorola Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc.
“China has a huge amount of investment in the United States, mainly in the form of Treasury bonds. We are concerned about the security of our financial assets” was the way China’s assistant finance minister put it. Briefing reporters at the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, he added, “We sincerely hope the US fiscal deficit will be reduced, year after year.” Quite sincerely, one suspects, given a US budget shortfall this year that is slated to reach $1.85 trillion
