Word: auction
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...Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation into whether some buyers in the first-ever government auction of wireless licenses last month were up to no good. At issue: the FCC says some companies may have falsified information about their ability to pay for licenses they bid on, and some may have falsely claimed to be minority- or female-owned to gain special bidding preferences. The probe was begun after 27 of 178 winning companies failed to make down-payments for "interactive" licenses, which permit companies to offer customers two-way video and data services -- like video on demand...
...chief Marvin Miller knew well the laws of supply and demand. If all players are on the market, he reasoned, most will be relatively cheap. If 20 left-handed hitting outfielders are available, teams that need one won't have to pay much. If only two are up for auction, the bidding will be fierce...
...paging and messaging companies raised their bids through 47 rounds of an auction and ended up paying the Federal Communications Commission $617 million for 10 radio-frequency licenses. It was the FCC's first such auction of the airwaves, but it promises more...
...rare scientific manual by the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci has been placed on the auction block by its owner, the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The 72-page codex contains more than 300 drawings representing the artist-scholar's revolutionary ideas on astronomy and mechanics. The manuscript was purchased, amid complaints from Britain, in 1980 for $5.13 million from an English earl, and is expected to fetch an even more astronomical price this time around...
...liberal causes. Along with The Normal Heart (subject: AIDS), Streisand is also producing a TV movie about Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was booted out of the military for being a lesbian (Glenn Close will star). She donated her Malibu ranch to an environmental conservancy and put up for auction millions of dollars' worth of art and furnishings that she had collected since the '60s. "I don't want to spend so much time being preoccupied with objects," she wrote in the Christie's catalog that offered the items, "and I don't want so many things anymore...