Jackson estate says it recovered $5.5 million from ex-advisers

The administrators of Michael Jackson’s estate have filed court papers disclosing they’ve recovered $5.5 million in cash from one of Jackson’s "former financial advisers." They expect to present contracts to the court “within the week” that should add “tens of millions of dollars” to Jackson’s estate, which they said is solvent and worth an estimated $500 million, the documents said.

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Do Monkeys Pay for Sex?

It turns out that one of humanity’s oldest professions may be even older than we thought: In a recent study of macaque monkeys in Indonesia, researchers found that male primates “paid” for sexual access to females — and that the going rate for such access dwindled as the number of available females went up. According to the paper, “Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market,” published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual

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Connecticut, 19 other states launch AIG investigations

Twenty state attorneys general announced investigations Friday into the $165 million bonuses paid by insurance giant AIG last week, with Connecticut’s top lawyer issuing subpoenas to CEO Edward Liddy and 11 other executives. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and the Democratic chairman of the General Assembly’s Banks Committee want Liddy and other executives to appear Thursday and bring with them “original or copies of documents regarding the AIG Financial Products Corp

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Summers defends White House response to AIG bonuses

With outrage mounting over AIG’s $165 million in bonuses to executives, the president’s chief economic adviser offered a new line of defense for the White House in an exclusive interview with CNN. Larry Summers suggested that if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had pushed the insurance giant too hard on the bonuses, AIG could have collapsed just like Lehman Brothers and sparked an even bigger crisis

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Man who froze had history of late utility payments

Marvin Schur may have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the World War II veteran was chronically late in paying his utility bills during the two years before he froze to death last month at age 93 in his home in Bay City, Michigan, after his power was cut off.

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