Free Republic

Homemaking diva Martha Stewart will pay about $195,000 and cannot serve as the director of a public company for five years under a settlement announced Monday on civil insider trading charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under the settlement, the founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., a multimedia empire dedicated to stylish living, agreed to make a payment relating to losses the government said she avoided on her sale of ImClone Systems Inc. stock in December 2001. Stewart agreed to pay $45,673, the amount of losses she avoided from her insider trading, plus $12,389 in interest. But the...

<p>NEW YORK — As the critical holiday shopping season nears, Kmart will bring back the face of design diva Martha Stewart in TV ads rolling out Saturday during World Series programming.</p> <p>In three ads, Stewart promotes her Everyday line, a Kmart exclusive and still among its best sellers. She goes to trial in January on securities charges, but she is smiling in the ad, surrounded by Everyday sheets and towels in a Kmart store. In one ad, she also signs the letter "K" and says, "It's in the K."</p>

Just hours after she was indicted, Martha Stewart launched MarthaTalks.com, a website aimed at bringing her side of the story to the masses in a controlled platform. Although the web is an amazing marketing and PR tool, it also shows how easilly it could backfire. Hours after the original site was published, someone registered the domain name MarthaStewartTalks.com & posted a rather unflattering parody of her original site. They are obviously counting on traffic meant for Martha's legitimate website & it seems to be working. The operators of the site claim to have had over 5 million visits, roughly a...