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Ex-AT&T executive pleads guilty in NY insider case
Headline News |
2012/06/19 17:03
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A former executive at AT&T has pleaded guilty in New York to charges in an insider trading scheme that authorities say involved the passing of secrets disguised as expert guidance.
Alnoor Ebrahim pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Manhattan to charges of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. He was formerly an associate director of channel marketing at AT&T.
Prosecutors say the information that Ebrahim provided through his work for an expert networking firm involved information about product sales for the company's handset devices.
The government said Ebrahim was paid more than $180,000 to serve as a consultant for employees of Manhattan-based investment firms. |
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NY court limits disclosure in old communist probe
Headline News |
2012/06/09 07:17
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New York's top court on Tuesday ordered the release of more names and records to a writer whose parents were targeted by anti-communist investigators in the New York City school system 57 years ago.
The Court of Appeals, however, is still excluding informants who were promised confidentiality. The seven judges unanimously said history may at some point overtake those promises and more completely peel back the veil of secrecy from that chapter in America's Red Scare.
"The story of the Anti-Communist Investigations, like any other that is a significant part of our past, should be told as fully and as accurately as possible, and historians are better equipped to do so when they can work from uncensored records," Judge Robert Smith wrote. "Perhaps there will be a time when the promise made ... is so ancient that its enforcement would be pointless, but that time is not yet."
Lisa Harbatkin's parents were among more than 1,100 teachers investigated from the 1930s to the 1960s. She has seen interview transcripts with names and personal information blacked out and is seeking complete documents under New York's Freedom of Information Law.
City officials opposed complete disclosure for privacy reasons, offering redacted documents unless those in question or their legal heirs agreed to disclosure. As an alternative, they offered Harbatkin complete accounts if she agreed not to publish the names, a condition she rejected. |
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Court rules NY town's prayer violated Constitution
Headline News |
2012/05/17 05:25
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An upstate New York town violated the constitutional ban against favoring one religion over another by opening nearly every meeting over an 11-year span with prayers that stressed Christianity, a federal court of appeals ruled Thursday.
In what it said was its first case testing the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled the town of Greece, a suburb of Rochester, should have made a greater effort to invite people from other faiths to open monthly meetings. The town's lawyer says it will appeal.
From 1999 through 2007, and again from January 2009 through June 2010, every meeting was opened with a Christian-oriented invocation. In 2008, after residents Susan Galloway and Linda Stephens complained, four of 12 meetings were opened by non-Christians, including a Jewish layman, a Wiccan priestess and the chairman of the local Baha'i congregation.
Galloway and Stephens sued and, in 2010, a lower court ruled there was no evidence the town had intentionally excluded other faiths.
A town employee each month selected clerics or lay people by using a local published guide of churches. The guide did not include non-Christian denominations, however. The court found that religious institutions in the town of just under 100,000 people are primarily Christian, and even Galloway and Stephens testified they knew of no non-Christian places of worship there. |
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High court weighs overtime pay for drug sales reps
Headline News |
2012/04/17 17:07
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A seemingly divided Supreme Court on Monday weighed a potentially costly challenge to the pharmaceutical industry's practice of not paying overtime to its sales representatives.
The justices questioned whether the federal law governing overtime pay should apply to the roughly 90,000 people who try to persuade doctors to prescribe certain drugs to their patients.
Many sales jobs are exempt from overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But unlike typical salespeople who often work on commission, pharmaceutical sales representatives cannot seal a deal with doctors. Federal law, in fact, forbids any binding agreement by a doctor to prescribe a specific drug.
Two salesmen who once worked for drug maker GlaxoSmithKline filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that they were not paid for the 10 to 20 hours they worked each week on average outside the normal business day. Their jobs required them to meet with doctors in their offices, but also to attend conventions, dinners, even golf outings.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was among several justices who wondered about limits on overtime opportunities if the court were to rule for the sales reps. A court filing by the industry said drug companies could be on the hook for billions of dollars in past overtime. |
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Bernstein Liebhard LLP Announces Class Action
Headline News |
2012/01/10 17:55
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Bernstein Liebhard LLP today announced that a class action has been commenced in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on behalf of purchasers of Camelot Information Systems Inc. American Depositary Shares between July 21, 2010 and August 17, 2011, including those who acquired Camelot ADSs pursuant or traceable to the Company’s false and misleading Registration Statements and Prospectuses issued in connection with its July 21, 2010 initial public offering and December 10, 2010 Secondary Offering.
The complaint charges Camelot, certain of its officers and directors and the underwriters of the Offerings with violations of the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Camelot is a holding company that conducts business through its operating subsidiaries in China. The Company is a provider of enterprise application services and financial industry information technology services in China.
The complaint alleges that during the Class Period, defendants issued materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company’s business practices and financial results. Specifically, defendants failed to disclose negative trends in Camelot’s business, including with Camelot’s most important customers. As a result of defendants’ false statements, Camelot ADSs traded at artificially inflated prices during the Class Period, reaching a high of $26.73 per share on January 11, 2011.
On July 21, 2010, Camelot announced the pricing of its IPO of 13.3 million ADSs at $11.00 per ADS. Subsequently, on December 9, 2010, Camelot announced the pricing of its Secondary Offering of 7,160,206 ADSs by selling shareholders at $19.50 per ADS. The complaint alleges that the Registration Statements issued in connection with the Offerings were inaccurate and misleading and omitted to state material facts required to be stated therein.
On August 15, 2011, Seeking Alpha published an article questioning several key components of Camelot’s business. This caused Camelot’s ADSs to drop to below $9 per share. Then on August 18, 2011, Camelot issued a press release announcing its second quarter 2011 unaudited financial results, including lower-than-expected guidance for fiscal 2011. On this news, Camelot’s ADSs dropped $2.24 per share to close at $6.32 per share on August 18, 2011, a one-day decline of 26%.
According to the complaint, the true facts, which were known by the defendants but concealed from the investing public during the Class Period, were as follows: (a) the Company’s IT professionals were not a competitive advantage to the Company and many were dissatisfied with Camelot, which would adversely affect Camelot’s ability to retain its customers; (b) the Company was suffering from undisclosed attrition of employees, which was having a negative impact on the Company’s ability to attract new customers; (c) Camelot did not have the large numbers of highly trained professionals at its disposal that it had represented; and (d) Camelot’s contract with its most important customer, IBM, was not as solid as represented, and would not be renewed on the same terms.
www.bernlieb.com |
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Supreme court won't let man appeal murder conviction
Headline News |
2012/01/10 17:55
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The Supreme Court won't let a man sentenced to prison for murder appeal his conviction despite his complaints that his window for further consideration was unfairly closed.
The high court on Tuesday upheld the ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Rafael Arriaza Gonzalez.
Gonzalez appealed his conviction for murder and his 30-year sentence in 2006 but missed one of the state lower court appeals deadlines. The federal courts since then have refused to hear his appeal, saying he filed in federal court one month after the required one-year deadline.
The courts started counting from the day Gonzalez missed the state court deadline, but the inmate said they should have started counting after the Texas courts officially declared his case over.
The high court said that the lower courts had correctly calculated the deadline for Gonzalez to file. Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote that Gonzalez's one-year deadline to appeal to the federal court began when he missed the state court filing date. Since Gonzalez filed one month after that one-year cutoff, the judgment against him became final, she said. |
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High Court Rejects Prisoner Lawsuit
Headline News |
2012/01/08 17:56
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The Supreme Court won't allow employees at a privately run federal prison to be sued by an inmate in federal court despite his complaint that their neglect left him with two permanently damaged arms.
The high court ruled 8-1 to throw out the federal lawsuit by inmate Richard Lee Pollard against employees of GEO Group Inc., formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. Mr. Pollard wanted to sue for his treatment after he fell and fractured both of his elbows at the privately run Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, Calif.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court that Mr. Pollard should have sued in state court, where there would be "significant deterrence and compensation" if he could prove GEO officials mistreated him. |
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