The insurer Aflac has become the first U.S. company to give shareholders a say on pay - a vote on top management's compensation. And in their first advisory vote Monday, they signaled that the compensation committee was doing a fine job.

Slightly more than 93 percent of shareholders approved of the $11.96 million compensation package that Daniel Amos, Aflac's chief executive for the last 18 years, received last year. Only 2.5 percent voted against.

"As he makes more money, I make more money," said George Nader, a shareholder in West Point, Georgia, who has been accumulating Aflac shares for more than 30 years. "The dividend keeps increasing and the shares have done well. The man at the top is thinking of the shareholders, and he deserves to be compensated for that."

Read the full article here on the International Herald Tribune website.

Federal prosecutors in New York have formed a task force together with other government agencies to examine the collapse of the market for risky home loans, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn said Monday.

The group is being run out of the federal prosecutors' office in Brooklyn, said Robert Nardoza, a spokesman for the office, formally known as the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

The task force is working with representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Nardoza said.

He was tied this year to one of the largest securities scandals in history and faces charges ranging from forgery to unauthorized computer use, yet the former trader at French bank Societe Generale is gainfully employed, again.

Jerome Kerviel, who shook global financial markets when the bank revealed $7.14 billion in losses tied what it says were unauthorized trades, landed a new job as a computer consultant less than a month after his conditional release from prison.

An article by Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at CNN Money.Com, states that the expected arrival of China as the world’s dominant economic superpower is a bit ahead of schedule. As a matter of fact, they are expected to reach that pinnacle not in 2050 as originally predicted, but in 2015. That means you have 7 years to learn Mandarin.

Read the full article detailing the implications of this shifting trend here at the CNNMoney.Com website.

Warren Buffett, the world's richest person, said on Monday the U.S. economy is in a recession that will be more severe than most people expect.   "This is not a field of specialty for me, but my general feeling is that the recession will be longer and deeper than most people think," Buffett said. "This will not be short and shallow.”

In an article by Bloomberg reporter Dan Levy, More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5% from February.

"We're not near the bottom of this at all," said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. "The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year."

Read the full article here on the Financial Post website.

No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a  Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the "team-building exercise," that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it's widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales."

What's at issue in the lawsuit Hudgens filed against his former employers -- just as in the ongoing global debate over the CIA’s waterboarding of terrorism suspects -- is the question of intent.

Prosper Inc. maintains that what the supervisor did, while unauthorized, overzealous and misguided, falls far short of torture, and in fact was not nearly as bad as Hudgens makes out in his quest for damages.

Some 15 times a year, Warren Buffett invites a group of business students for an intensive day of learning. Fortune Magazine was there.

A class-action lawsuit against Deutsche Telekom opened Monday with thousands of disgruntled shareholders seeking up to $126 million from Europe's biggest telecom operator. Some 16,000 investors are seeking compensation in the case for what they claim were falsehoods regarding the company's third initial public offering tranche in June, 2000.

One of the complaints is that at the time of the offering, Bonn-based Deutsche Telekom had already started negotiations with U.S. mobile phone company Voicestream, now T-Mobile USA. German giant Telekom bought Voicestream in 2001 for about 34 billion euros ($53.4 billion) in a move highly criticized at the time. The unit has since become a key driver of growth. Another complaint is that the value of some of Telekom's real estate assets had been inflated in pamphlets sent to shareholders before the offering.

Read the full story here on CNN.Com’s World Business Site.

For quite some time, the largest retailer of Music in the United States has been Wal-Mart.   That is no longer the case.  The leader in this category is now…Apple.  That’s correct.  On-line retailing of music has just become the number one way to buy songs in the United States.

It puts an interesting spin on what comes next for the record industry.  Read about that spin here on The Motley Fool website.

A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy. Not for the untold amounts of information that can be dug up using the Google search logarithms, but instead for the “Street View” feature of the Google Maps.

(Street View is a tool used when looking on maps of various neighborhoods that show actual pictures of locations when you use Google Maps. Want to see the PLUS Office? Type in 5353 Wayzata Boulevard, 55416 in the search box here on Google Mapsand then click “Street View”)

Aaron and Christine Boring have accused Google of an intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of seclusion and privacy. The larger question is what technology will be the first to cross the line and give insurers fits? You can read the full article (and see copies of the pleading) here on the Smoking Gun website.

American International Group Inc (NYSE:AIG - News), the world's largest insurer, has filed a complaint in New York Supreme Court against former Chief Executive Maurice "Hank" Greenberg and six other former directors and officers, accusing them of breaching their fiduciary duty.

In the complaint, filed on Wednesday, AIG alleges Greenberg, former Chief Financial Officer Howard Smith and five others breached their fiduciary duty through "misappropriation of a special block of AIG shares worth approximately $20 billion in 2005."

Read the full story here on the Yahoo! Finance website.

This is a great article from BusinessWeek Online that talks about Rick Frenkel, the patent attorney working for Cisco Systems who in his spare time kept an anonymous blog titled “Patent Troll* Tracker”.

He was posting anonymously, making examples of those “Trolls” who were abusing the system and even calling into question the ethical practices of some attorneys. Finally, a bounty of $15,000 was offered to anyone who could identify the mystery blogger, and he was forced to reveal his identity after he was discovered by an internet sleuth.

The interesting part of this story is how it illustrates the questions and risks related to blogging (whether anonymous or not) and not just to the blogger, but the company that employs them.

*“Patent Trolls” is a derogatory term used to describe businesses that make money purchasing patents and then suing big companies for infringement.

Lawsuits can proceed on behalf of thousands of workers who say they were not properly protected as they cleaned up the World Trade Center site after the 2001 terrorist attacks, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

Lawyers for New York City and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site, had argued that they are immune from nearly 8,000 workers' claims.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals however said it is too early to decide whether the defendants are protected from these sorts of lawsuits.

A federal judge has signed off on Walgreen Co.'s plan to pay $24 million to settle a federal lawsuit alleging racial bias at the nation's largest drugstore chain.

Roughly 10,000 past and present black Walgreen workers will split $20 million under the consent decree given final approval Monday by U.S. District Judge G. Patrick Murphy.

Wall Street banks, brokerages and hedge funds may report $460 billion in credit losses from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, or almost four times the amount already disclosed, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Profits will continue to wane, other analysts said.

 Read the full story behind this headline here on the Bloomberg website.

Prominent attorney Melvyn Weiss has agreed to plead guilty to racketeering in a lucrative kickback scheme involving payments to plaintiffs in class-action lawsuits targeting some of the largest U.S. corporations, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

Weiss, 72, also will acknowledge that he and others concealed secret payment arrangements that his firm, Milberg Weiss, had with named plaintiffs in the lawsuits, prosecutors said in a statement.

Read the entire story here from the International Herald Tribune.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the events leading up to the collapse of Bear Stearns, specifically a surge in options contracts betting that the investment bank's share price would fall sharply, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In an article from BusinessWeek Online, the question is raised of how many other banking institutions on the verge of collapse. Here is an excerpt:

The Federal Reserve most likely did the right thing when it backed JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) purchase of Bear Stearns (BSC) on Mar. 16. But the sudden collapse of a well-known Wall Street firm and the penny stock, $2-per-share price that JPMorgan is paying—less than 10% of Bear's already battered market cap on Mar. 14—rattled European and Asian markets on Mar. 17.

If Bear is close to worthless, the thinking goes, what does that mean for other troubled institutions in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere? Can other failures be far behind? A wide range of European banking shares, including UBS (UBS), which has been hit hard by subprime writedowns, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), whose capital base has been stretched by the ABN Amro takeover, and smaller British banks such as Alliance & Leicester (ALLL.L), took a pounding on Mar. 17.

Read the full article here on the BusinessWeek Online Website.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Sunday that it would acquire troubled Wall Street firm Bear Stearns for a mere fraction of what it was once worth amid deepening fears about further erosion of the world's financial markets.

The rock-bottom price left investors feeling queasy. Asian markets tumbled, with Japan's benchmark Nikkei index finishing Monday's session nearly 4% lower. U.S. stock futures plunged, indicating a miserable start for Wall Street.

The all-stock deal values Bear Stearns at $236 million, or just $2 a share. The company's stock had closed at $30 on Friday, down a staggering 47% for the day.

Read the full article here on CNNMoney.com.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has resigned.

"I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been," Spitzer said.  "There is much more to be done, and I cannot allow my private failings to disrupt the people's work."

You can read the full article here on MSNBC.Com.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the crusading politician who built his career on rooting out corruption, apologized Monday after he was accused of involvement in a prostitution ring. He did not elaborate on the scandal, which drew calls for his resignation. His stoic wife at his side, Spitzer told reporters at a hastily called news conference: "I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family."

Spitzer's involvement in the ring was caught on a federal wiretap as part of an investigation opened in recent months, according to a law enforcement official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry.

WCBS News Channel 2 in New York is citing anonymous sources in the New York State Legislature that say Governor Spitzer will not continue in office.  He didn't say anything about his future in his press conference.

The FBI is in the early stages of an inquiry into whether company officials misrepresented its financial position and the quality of its mortgage loans, The Wall Street Journal first reported Saturday, citing law enforcement officials and finance executives with knowledge of the development.

The Justice Department is also involved in the investigation into the nation's largest mortgage lender, said the New York Times, which also cited anonymous sources who said they were not authorized to discuss ongoing criminal matters.

"We are not aware of any such investigation," Countrywide spokeswoman Susan Martin told the Times.

Read the full story here on Yahoo! Finance.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Thursday he issued new subpoenas to Aetna Inc., Cigna Corp., UnitedH