Word: million
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Street excess, witnessing some of the most notorious insider-trading prosecutions in history. Corporate raider Ivan Boesky - said to be an inspiration for the fictional Gordon ("Greed ... is good") Gekko, villain of the Oliver Stone film Wall Street - was sentenced to 3½ years in prison and fined $100 million in 1986 for insider trading. Financier Michael Milken, the "junk-bond king" who famously earned $550 million in 1987, avoided prosecution on similar charges by pleading guilty to other criminal counts. But the largest insider-trading conviction came two decades later, in 2007, when former Qwest Communications head Joseph Nacchio...
Meanwhile, a mastermind of one of the most elaborate insider-trading schemes in recent history remains on the lam. David Pajcin, a former Goldman Sachs analyst, pleaded guilty in 2006 of running a $6.7 million scam that authorities first detected when a retired underwear seamstress in Croatia earned $2 million in profit from a suspicious, two-day investment in Reebok. The 63-year-old, who did not own a computer, was Pajcin's aunt; he traded stocks in her name and in the name of an exotic dancer he was dating to escape scrutiny. In one ploy to glean inside...
When they are rolling through the streets in strollers, toddlers are usually the ones throwing temper tantrums. Now it's their parents who are having the biggest fits. On Monday the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) announced a stunning recall of some 1 million Maclaren strollers that were released nationwide from 1999 through November of this year. Maclaren, the 42-year-old British brand, is wildly popular among the young-urban-professional set. The strollers are light, compatible and upscale but not terribly expensive (the recalled models cost from $100 to $360). (See the top 10 product recalls...
Indians "love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic," Jan Morris wrote, affectionately, more than 30 years ago. And foreigners who go to India often love to project upon its 350 million or so gods their own rainbow-colored visions of Eternity. But far from the Technicolor gurus who excite so much attention in the West, and behind the beeping trucks and fast-rising malls that are so exhilarating to Indians today, everyday souls are sustaining centuries-old ways of bringing gods into their difficult days and homes. In their devotion and humble attentions, Hindu and Muslim and Jain...
...used to stand on bluffs to watch for schools of tuna passing the shore. Today, fishing fleets stalk the fish across thousands of miles of ocean with helicopters, GPS and sonar. In 1950, about 600,000 tons of tuna were caught worldwide. Last year, that figure hit nearly 6 million tons, the prize of a chase that plays out from the Philippines to Canada's Prince Edward Island...