Secrets Of The Mountain On Nbc: Video
Books-A-Million buys minority stake in Yogurt Mountain Holding for undisclosed price
April 1st, 2010 Books-A-Million buys Yogurt Mountain Holding stakeBIRMINGHAM, Ala. Books-A-Million Inc.
Ex publicist reveals Tyra Banks' secrets
March 1st, 2010 NEW YORK - Jon Paul Buchmeyer, who worked as a publicist for Tyra Banks during her 'Inside Out' book tour, has revealed some secrets about the former model in his new memoir. In 'Alphabet City', Buchmeyer wrote: "Chips with the fat substitute Olestra cause Tyra to have intestinal distress," reports the New York Post.
Britt Ekland to disclose life secrets on stage
January 31st, 2010 LONDON - Swedish actress Britt Ekland is set to disclose the secrets of her turbulent life on stage. "I am planning my one woman show.
Chinese Officials Deny Avatar Mountain Honour
January 29th, 2010 Chinese officials have laughed off reports they have renamed a mountain after JAMES CAMERON's sci-fi hit AVATAR, insisting posters suggesting a name-change were simply part of a promotional stunt. Reports surfaced on Tuesday (26Jan10) alleging South Sky Pillar in Zhangjianjie, southern China would now be known as Avatar Hallelujah Mountain on maps and guides because of its likeness to the peaks featured in the blockbuster film.
Minogues' Family Secrets Revealed
January 26th, 2010 KYLIE and DANNII MINOGUE's family history has been unearthed, revealing their mother was one of the Britons who set sail to Australia on a $16 (?10) ticket in 1955 to start a new life Down Under. The Aussie singers have learned their relatives' secrets after passenger lists from a 1950s emigration scheme listed their mother, Carol Jones.
Mountain Honour For Avatar
January 26th, 2010 JAMES CAMERON's blockbuster AVATAR has been given a sky-high honour in China - its own peak. As the film topples the moviemaker's Titanic as the highest-grossing movie of all time, Chinese officials renamed a mountain after the film.
Padma Lakshmi reveals 'Top Chef' secrets
January 12th, 2010 NEW YORK - 'Top Chef' host Padma Lakshmi has apparently divulged too many secrets from the show. She is said to have spilled the beans during a New York Times panel with fellow show judges Gail Simmons and Eric Ripert, reports the New York Post.
Bluegrass Star Cooke Dead At 72
December 4th, 2009 Bluegrass legend JACK COOKE has died at the age of 72. The bass player and singer with Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys passed away on Tuesday (01Dec09) after collapsing at his home in Virginia.
Dylan & Jagger Secrets Exposed In New Book
October 31st, 2009 The sex secrets of rock legends including BOB DYLAN, MICK JAGGER, and RINGO STARR are to be laid bare - notorious groupie CHRIS O'DELL has written her memoirs. The blonde had flings with folk legend Dylan and Rolling Stones frontman Jagger, and insists Beatles guitarist George Harrison wrote a song for her after she bedded drummer Starr when she worked at Apple Records in the '60s.
Ski resort company sets mandatory helmet after Natasha Richardson death
October 1st, 2009 Ski resort sets helmet rule after Richardson deathVANCOUVER, British Columbia Six months after actress Natasha Richardson died following a fall at the Mount Tremblant ski resort in Quebec, the company that operates the facility has announced helmet requirements at its North American resorts. Vancouver-based Intrawest said Thursday it will recommend all skiers and snowboarders wear helmets when the ski season begins in a few weeks.
It's official: Women can't keep secrets for more than 47 hours!
September 16th, 2009 LONDON - Most women cannot keep a secret for more than 47 hours, a new survey has revealed. In the survey involving 3,000 women aged 18 to 65, four in 10 respondents admitted that they cannot keep a secret, no matter how personal or embarrassing.
Partial list of video music award winners
September 13th, 2009 Partial list of video music award winnersA partial list of winners of the MTV Video Music Awards. BEST FEMALE VIDEO: Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me."BEST ROCK VIDEO: Green Day, "21 Guns."BEST POP VIDEO: Britney Spears, "Womanizer."BEST MALE VIDEO: T.I.
List of video music award winners
September 13th, 2009 List of video music award winnersA partial list of winners of the MTV Video Music Awards. VIDEO OF THE YEAR: Beyonce, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)."BEST FEMALE VIDEO: Taylor Swift, "You Belong With Me."BEST ROCK VIDEO: Green Day, "21 Guns."BEST POP VIDEO: Britney Spears, "Womanizer."BEST MALE VIDEO: T.I.
YouTube hopes to sell more video makers on the virtues of ads as site strives to make money
August 25th, 2009 YouTube's new sales pitch: join our ad programSAN FRANCISCO YouTube hopes to convert more amateur videographers into capitalists as it strives to show more advertising on its Web site and end years of uninterrupted losses. The Internet's top video channel will try to increase participation in its advertising program by actively recruiting the makers of widely watched clips.
Adriana Lima sizzles in new Victoria's Secrets lingerie campaign
June 25th, 2009 LONDON - Brazilian supermodel Adriana Lima has shown off her sexy curves in new Victoria's Secrets lingerie campaign. The 28-year-old beauty looked hot as she posed in light green two-piece.
Goldman Sachs Fraud Charges Are A Business-press Win : Cjr
The New York Timess Louise Story and Gretchen Morgenson score a major scoop this morning with news that the SEC is charging Goldman Sachs with fraud over its structuring of CDOs, saying the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.
This is a huge story. The SEC has found that its jaws still snap; Goldman, which has heretofore seemed virtually untouchable, is in the dock; it illustrates short-sellersJohn Paulson specifically hererole in creating the crisis and making billions off it; and the press and bloggers can claim a big victory, regardless of the ultimate outcome of the case. It also points the way to possible further SEC actions over the banks similar dealings with Magnetar, which ProPublica detailed so impressively last week.
Theres no doubt that press coverage was instrumental in this turn of events. On Christmas Eve, Morgenson and Story unleashed a terrific story zeroing in on how Goldman Sachs structured its Abacus deals so they would fail, all while betting against them.
As the Abacus deals plunged in value, Goldman and certain hedge funds made money on their negative bets, while the Goldman clients who bought the $10.9 billion in investments lost billions of dollars.
The SEC is charging is that Goldman misled investors by telling them one company, called ACA, was managing the CDOs, when it was actually letting hedge-fund king Paulson pick bonds for it. Heres the SEC, from its press release:
The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple, said Robert Khuzami, Director of the Division of Enforcement. Goldman wrongly permitted a client that was betting against the mortgage market to heavily influence which mortgage securities to include in an investment portfolio, while telling other investors that the securities were selected by an independent, objective third party.
And boy did Paulson know how to pick em:
According to the SECs complaint, the deal closed on April 26, 2007, and Paulson & Co. paid Goldman Sachs approximately $15 million for structuring and marketing ABACUS. By Oct. 24, 2007, 83 percent of the RMBS in the ABACUS portfolio had been downgraded and 17 percent were on negative watch. By Jan. 29, 2008, 99 percent of the portfolio had been downgraded.
Theres plenty of other thread to pull on in the Timess Christmas Eve piece, including a little-known company called Tricadia that created particularly toxic CDOs to allow clients to bet against them, and whose vice chairman up until a month ago was a senior adviser to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. ABC News from then:
White House visitor logs show Sachs was a regular in the West Wing, holding dozens of meetings with White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and with staff for the National Economic Council. The logs show he had at least five meetings with President Obama in the Oval Office last year, and had participated in the presidents daily economic briefing.
And this is hardly the only chicanery surrounding Abacus. Bloombergs Jody Shenn wrote an important story on Abacus in November that reported Goldman was using its sole discretion to pay junior tranches of the CDOs before senior onesthe opposite of whats supposed to happen.
Goes to show you what good, tough journalism can do. Fraud charges have finally hit Wall Street, and The New York Times was instrumental in digging it out.
Masterzico.com: Paulson Co Institutional Investor Background
Paulson & Co. is an investment management company founded in 1994 by John Paulson, the firm's current president and senior fund manager for all funds under management. Prior to founding the firm, Mr. Paulson was a General Partner of Gruss Partners, a merger arbitrage specialist, and a Managing Director in Mergers and Acquisitions at Bear Stearns. PCI manages domestic and offshore merger arbitrage/event driven funds for institutional and high net-worth clients.
Paulson Investment Company, Inc., a full service brokerage firm engaged in the purchase and sales of securities from and to the public and for its own account and in investment banking activities. Paulson Investment Company, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Paulson Capital Corp., a publicly traded company since 1971, and trades on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the symbol "PLCC".
Since 1978, Paulson Investment Company, Inc. has built a strong and unique reputation as a leading investment banker specializing in small and emerging growth companies with capital needs of $5 million to $50 million. Paulson Investment Company, Inc. has served as a manger or lead underwriter for over 160 offerings, raising over $1 billion for clients.
At Paulson Investment Company, Inc., we invest in synergy, seek out and join forces with progressive companies and smart investors who want to be part of a dynamic partnership - a partnership that has the power to fuel innovation, to infuse new energy into our communities, and to create new wealth for everyone involved.
Whether you're the investor with money to invest...the entrepreneur who has an idea worthy of investment...or the broker or banker who helps put the two together, our team will work with you to achieve success.
The firm employs merger arbitrage, long/short, and event-driven strategy to make its investments. It employs fundamental analysis to make its investments. The firm benchmarks the performance of its investments against the S&P 500 Index. It conducts in-house research. Paulson & Co. was founded in July 1994 and is based in New York, New York.
Newsdaily: Goldman Sachs Charged With Fraud By Sec
Goldman Sachs charged with fraud by SEC
By Jonathan Stempel
and Steve EderPosted 2010/04/16 at 5:27 pm EDT
NEW YORK, Apr. 16, 2010 (Reuters) Goldman Sachs Group Inc was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over its marketing of a subprime mortgage product, igniting a battle between Wall Street's most powerful bank and the nation's top securities regulator.
The civil lawsuit is the biggest crisis in years for a company that faced criticism over its pay and business practices after emerging from the global financial meltdown as Wall Street's most influential bank.
It may also make it more difficult for the industry to beat back calls for reform as lawmakers in Washington debate an overhaul of financial regulations.
Goldman called the lawsuit "completely unfounded," adding, "We did not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money."
The lawsuit puts Goldman Chief Executive Lloyd Blankfein further on the defensive after he told the federal Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in January that the bank packaged complex debt, while also betting against the debt, because clients had the appetite.
"We are not a fiduciary," he said.
The case also involves John Paulson, a hedge fund investor whose firm Paulson & Co made billions of dollars by betting the nation's housing market would crash. This included an estimated $1 billion from the transaction detailed in the lawsuit, which the SEC said cost other investors more than $1 billion. Paulson was not charged.
Fabrice Tourre, a Goldman vice president whom the SEC said was mainly responsible for creating the questionable mortgage product, known as ABACUS, was charged with fraud.
Goldman shares slid 12.8 percent on Friday, closing down $23.57 at $160.70 on the New York Stock Exchange. The decline wiped out more than $12 billion of market value, and trading volume topped 100 million shares, Reuters data show.
The news dragged down broad U.S. equity indexes, which fell more than 1 percent. The perceived risk of owning Goldman debt, as measured by credit default swaps, increased. Treasury prices rose as investors sought safe-haven government debt.
MORE SEVERE THAN EXPECTED
"These charges are far more severe than anyone had imagined," and suggest Goldman teamed with "the leading short-seller in the industry to design a portfolio of securities that would crash," said John Coffee, a securities law professor at Columbia Law School in New York.
"The greatest penalty for Goldman is not the financial damages -- Goldman is enormously wealthy -- but the reputational damage," he said, adding that "it's not impossible" to contemplate that the case could lead to criminal charges. Coffee spoke on Reuters Insider.
Goldman vowed to defend itself.
"The SEC's charges are completely unfounded in law and fact," it said. "We will vigorously contest them and defend the firm and its reputation."
The SEC lawsuit concerns ABACUS, a synthetic collateralized debt obligation that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities, and which the regulator said Goldman structured and marketed.
According to the SEC, Goldman did not tell investors "vital information" about ABACUS, including that Paulson & Co was involved in choosing which securities would be part of the portfolio.
The SEC also alleged that Paulson took a short position against the CDO in a bet that its value would fall.
In a statement, Paulson & Co said it did buy credit protection from Goldman on securities issued in the ABACUS program, but did not market the product.
Tourre was not immediately available for comment.
Goldman had not disclosed that the SEC was considering a lawsuit but had known charges were possible and had urged the SEC not to file them, people familiar with the situation said on Friday. The sources requested anonymity because the probe was not public.
To better understand CDOs, the SEC in 2008 approached some hedge funds, including Paulson & Co, whose investment Paulo Pellegrini was among those to talk with the regulator.
COMING OUT SWINGING
The lawsuit is a regulatory and public relations nightmare for Blankfein, who has spent 18 months fending off complaints that Goldman has been an unfair beneficiary of taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street.
Blankfein became chief executive less than a year before the product challenged by the SEC was created.
"This could be the beginning of a period where you have a regulatory cloud over Goldman Sachs, and perhaps even the entire investment banking industry," said Hank Smith, chief investment officer at Haverford Trust Co in Philadelphia.
John Paulson is not related to Henry "Hank" Paulson, who was Blankfein's predecessor as Goldman chief executive and later become U.S. Treasury secretary.
The SEC lawsuit represents an aggressive expansion of regulatory efforts to hold people and companies responsible for the nation's financial crises.
It could help the regulator rehabilitate its reputation after missing other high-profile cases, including Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
"The SEC has come out swinging," said Cary Leahey, senior managing director of Decision Economics in New York.
Robert Khuzami, head of the SEC's enforcement division, said John Paulson was not charged because it was Goldman that made misrepresentations to investors, not Paulson.
Still, Khuzami called Paulson's firm "a hedge fund that had a particular interest in the securities performing poorly."
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Hot Current News Trends: Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn
In 2010 marks the 175 anniversary of the birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to us and Mark Twain. It is also the 125th anniversary of Twains original work was published, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the 100th anniversary of his death, which falls on April 21. At the national level, where they lived by, or spent time, large or major communication to the Twain and his work, including the Berkeley, CA Elmira, New York, Hannibal, MO and Hartford, CT, will be celebrated this author vibrant and perhaps one of the most important thing by bloggers to travel the Internet with special events.
Since being rolled out the red carpet, its great to visit some sites Twain. There are two museums dedicated to this major American writer, one substance . Not surprisingly, in the northeast in the state of Connecticut, and the right of the River Mississippi in the Midwest, which is one of the most associated with the author in Hannibal, Missouri. In addition to this, and other sites dedicated to Twain is an extensive library and museum in Virginia City, Nevada, and his past and his final resting place in Elmira, New York, and archival papers Twain and work at the University of California at Berkeley. There is also the site of his birthplace in Florida, Mo, but this is temporarily closed.
The Mark Twain House and Museum (Hartford (Conn.) House Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens Langhorne) 1874 ??? 1891. A house on the Victorian style is a 19-room apartment and Gothic. This is the place where Twain wrote most of his major works, including the age Golden, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi River, Huckleberry Finn, Tramp and abroad, and there are Yankee Connecticut in the court of King Arthur. House Twain, which is open year-round for tours, and attracts more than 60,000 visitors annually from every state in the United States, as well as from more than 70 countries around the world. and is located in theMark Twain House and Museum 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut.
