Word: courtly
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...first real crackdown against the practice came in 1909, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that that a director of the Philippine Sugar Estates Development Company committed fraud when he bought stock in his company without sharing information with the seller that soon boosted its value. But it wasn't until after the 1929 stock-market crash that Congress passed laws to limit such trading (although it didn't move to ban it outright) and created the Securities and Exchange Commission to enhance market oversight. As the stock market expanded in the 1960s, the SEC grew more aggressive in fighting...
...criminal counts. But the largest insider-trading conviction came two decades later, in 2007, when former Qwest Communications head Joseph Nacchio was convicted of selling $52 million in company stock while knowing the company was headed for trouble. He was sentenced to six years in prison, though an appeals court later ordered his sentence reduced...
...insider-trading scandal - just ask Martha Stewart. The homemaking guru spent five months in prison in 2004 after a series of events triggered by her sale of $228,000 in shares of biomedical firm ImClone Systems, the day before its value plunged 15%. Thanks to a 1997 Supreme Court ruling, even those who lack a connection to a company cannot trade on inside information if they know it is meant to remain confidential. (ImClone was run by Stewart's friend, Sam Waksal.) Ultimately, Stewart was not convicted of insider trading, but of lying to authorities and obstructing justice during...
Burke's new assignment came with an impressive title: Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura - essentially chief justice of the Vatican's highest court. But the job, which involves hearing appeals of lower-canon-court rulings on issues like annulment requests, did not stop him from commenting on American politics. In January he charged that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops was responsible for Obama's victory because it overwhelmingly approved a document suggesting that Catholics could consider issues besides abortion when deciding how to vote. The conference's in-house news service, he added, failed...
There are other signs that the word has gone forth, at least for now. In years past, the annual Red Mass held the Sunday before the U.S. Supreme Court's term opens has been so heavily steeped in pro-life rhetoric that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg now declines to attend. This year's service, however, featured a homily by the new chair of the bishop's pro-life committee that included only the subtlest of references to abortion. More striking was the image of Biden taking Communion without incident...