Free Republic

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Andrew Fastow, the former chief financial officer of bankrupt energy trader Enron Corp., and his wife, Lea, are negotiating plea bargains that could send the couple to federal prison, the Houston Chronicle reported Wednesday. Federal prosecutors are discussing a 10-year sentence for Andrew Fastow and a five-month term for Lea Fastow, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources. The deals could still collapse, as earlier negotiations with Lea Fastow did in November, the paper reported. A representative for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Texas was not reachable for comment. John Keker, Andrew Fastow's...

Investigators into the collapse of the Italian dairy giant Parmalat are turning the spotlight on America's big investment banks. Italian magistrates and officials from the powerful Securities and Exchange Commission are examining the role of lenders to Parmalat - which collapsed into administration last month following the disclosure of an €8 billion (£5.6bn) hole in its finances. These lenders include some of the US's largest financial institutions. An SEC source said that while at this stage an investigation did not imply wrongdoing by the investment banks, it was focusing on placements of notes and bonds in the US. But he...

MOSCOW, Dec. 30 (UPI) -- Copies of a book linking Russia's FSB security service to apartment blasts in 1999 have been seized by the Russian police, the book's sellers say. Over 4,000 issues of "FSB Blows Up Russia" were confiscated in western Russia on Sunday, Alexander Podrabinek of the Prima news agency told the BBC. Podrabinek said "the books were seized as anti-government propaganda." The FSB denies any involvement in the blasts that killed nearly 300 people and led to the second war in Chechnya. Instead, it has blamed Chechen rebels for organizing the September 1999 bombings -- two in...

Tweedy Browne suing Hollinger Top shareholder seeks legal fees Investigated payments to Black Hollinger International Inc. is facing a lawsuit from a New York investment firm that helped blow the whistle on millions in unauthorized payments made to Conrad Black, other executives and parent company Hollinger Inc. of Toronto. Tweedy Browne Co. filed suit yesterday seeking reimbursement of legal fees its Global Value Fund incurred investigating possible wrongdoing at the company that owns London's Daily Telegraph, the Chicago Sun-Times and Jerusalem Post. The lawsuit against Chicago-based Hollinger International was filed in Wilmington, Del., in the state's Chancery Court. "Lord Black...

MOSCOW — After every suicide attack in Russia — and they are increasingly commonplace — his name is whispered by a nervous public. ''Was it Shamil?'' someone always asks. The answer, more often than not, is yes. Little known in the West, Shamil Basayev is a household name in Russia, where he is often compared to another terror mastermind, Osama bin Laden. Like the al-Qaeda leader, Mr. Basayev is a charismatic figure with a deadly interpretation of Islam, who has managed to both avoid capture and strike fear into the residents of a major world capital. "They are both charismatic,...

<p>The Securities and Exchange Commission has told Massachusetts Financial Services, the 11th-largest mutual fund company in the United States, that it could face civil charges for failing to disclose market-timing practices.</p> <p>The firm - a subsidiary of Canada's Sun Life, which has $348.5 billion in assets under management - is the latest in the $7 trillion industry to be named in the ever-widening investigation into improper mutual fund trading practices. Regulators including the SEC and New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer are examining both late trading and market timing.</p>

<p>A couple of stock ownership reports hit the in basket at the Securities and Exchange Commission last week, and together they serve as a handy reminder of just how deep the corruption on Wall Street really runs - and how completely inept the feds are proving to be in weeding it out.</p>

<p>One of the Democratic Party's top fund-raisers threw his support yesterday behind the presidential bid of Sen. John Kerry after being courted by all the top contenders.</p> <p>New Yorker Robert Zimmerman, a managing director of Al Gore's 2000 campaign in New York, said he's not worried about polls that show Kerry (D-Mass.) slipping.</p>

<p>Strong Financial founder, chairman, CEO and chief investment officer Richard Strong resigned from his company yesterday.</p> <p>The move comes as regulators are investigating his fund complex and his own trading activity in the firm's funds.</p> <p>A majority investor, Strong will also seek to divest himself of voting control of the firm, a company statement said.</p>

<p>The Securities and Exchange Commission is widening its investigation of New York Stock Exchange specialists and has requested data from the Big Board for trades in 1998 and 1999, The Post has learned.</p> <p>In mid-September, the exchange announced it would bring disciplinary action against five of its seven specialist firms for improper trading in 2000, 2001 and 2002. The infractions allegedly included trading ahead and getting in the middle of customer orders.</p>

<p>Forget about the mob - the big money in New York's criminal underworld is going to Russian fraudsters who've turned auto-insurance scams into a $500 million monopoly.</p> <p>FBI agents Kevin O'Grady and Jack Campanella revealed to The Post the results of a three-year undercover investigation that smashed eight Russian fraud rings in New York City.</p>

Associated Press 11-08-2002 Dateline: PARIS American billionaire investor George Soros, on trial in a 14-year-old insider trading case, told a court Friday that he didn't have privileged information when he bought shares in French bank Societe Generale. Soros and two other businessmen are on trial at the Paris Criminal Court, accused of benefiting from insider knowledge when they bought the bank's stock in 1988 before a failed takeover that pushed up the price. "I have been in business all my life and I think I know what is insider trading and what isn't," said the president of Soros Fund Management,...

Pound surges to five-year high against US currency. Buffett also said to be betting against greenback ________________________________________________ The pound surged against the dollar yesterday amid speculation that Warren Buffett and George Soros, the world's most famous speculators, are betting the US currency will plummet. Sterling powered to a five-year high against the dollar for a second day as concerns over the US current account deficit continued to outweigh evidence of a rebounding economy. Traders believe selling the dollar is a one-way bet, and some latched on to rumours that speculators were building "short" positions on the dollar - betting it...

Tbilisi — It was back in February that billionaire financier George Soros began laying the brickwork for the toppling of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze. That month, funds from his Open Society Institute sent a 31-year-old Tbilisi activist named Giga Bokeria to Serbia to meet with members of the Otpor (Resistance) movement and learn how they used street demonstrations to topple dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Then, in the summer, Mr. Soros's foundation paid for a return trip to Georgia by Otpor activists, who ran three-day courses teaching more than 1,000 students how to stage a peaceful revolution. Last weekend, the Liberty Institute...

What is now going on in Georgia is a good illustration of one of the main reasons for that NATO tactic. When the situation is no more under control the moslems will be used as shock troops. From BBC : An estimated 10,000 supporters of Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze have gathered in the capital, Tbilisi. The leader of the Revival Party, Aslan Abashidze - who is allied to Mr Shevardnadze's political bloc - is expected to address the crowd. Tuesday's gathering by pro-Shevardnadze demonstrators was the first of its kind since the 2 November election. Most of those attending had...

LONDON -- Russian forces have suffered more casualties in the past year in Chechnya than at any time since war resumed in 1999, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said Wednesday in its key annual report. The report undermines Moscow's assertion it has largely pacified the mainly Muslim region it sent troops back into after a two-year period of de facto independence. The British-based think tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Russian forces "suffered 4,749 casualties in 2002-03, the highest figure in one year since the current Chechen conflict began." The report's editor, Sir Christopher Langton,...

<p>There are deaths that weigh no more than a feather. Entire peoples who don't count. They have only one right, the right to disappear. They are absent from our concerns and from our television screens, even before the tanks, the bombs, the raids and the landmines reduce them to nothing. The Chechens live in absolute solitude, surrendered to the pleasures of a massacring Russian army. And no one -- not the United Nations, not world public opinion, not any one of the democracies that are so proud of their principles -- cries bloody murder!</p>

Sun September 28, 2003 10:43 AM ET By Ron Popeski MOSCOW (Reuters) - The acting president of Chechnya was seriously ill in hospital from an unidentified poison just a week before an election critical to Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin's peace plan for the region, officials said on Sunday. Anatoly Popov, who was appointed prime minister of Chechnya earlier this year, was taken to hospital on Saturday evening after a gas pipeline opening ceremony. He served under the head of the region's pro-Moscow local administration, Akhmad Kadyrov, and took over as acting president during the campaign for the October 5 presidential...

Geneticists Report Finding Central Asian Link to Levites By NICHOLAS WADE Published: September 27, 2003 A team of geneticists studying the ancestry of Jewish communities has found an unusual genetic signature that occurs in more than half the Levites of Ashkenazi descent. The signature is thought to have originated in Central Asia, not the Near East, which is the ancestral home of Jews. The finding raises the question of how the signature became so widespread among the Levites, an ancient caste of hereditary Jewish priests. The genetic signature occurs on the male or Y chromosome and comes from a few...

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) -- The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe will send 400 observers to monitor Georgia's parliamentary elections this fall, the observation mission's chief said Tuesday. "The forthcoming elections are crucial for the future democratic development of Georgia," said Julian Peel Yates, who will lead the group's mission to monitor the Nov. 2 vote. He said the OSCE mission would report its conclusions a day after the vote. Earlier this month, Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze appointed a human rights activist whose candidacy had been suggested by the OSCE to head the Central Elections Commission.