Eideard

An ATM receipt showing a $100 million account balance was left behind at a Hamptons, Long Island Capital One bank. The receipt, uncovered by Dealbreaker.com, reportedly belongs to billionaire hedge fund manager and Hamptons resident, David Tepper. The ATM slip shows a savings balance of a whopping $99,864,731.94.

What’s in your wallet?

A lesbian couple who say they were asked to leave a North Carolina shopping center after sharing a kiss and a hug met with the center’s property manager on Saturday.

Caitlin Breedlove

“We welcomed the opportunity to sit down with the women and offer our sincere regrets over last week’s incident,” said George York, president of York Properties, which manages the Cameron Village shopping center in Raleigh, North Carolina. The incident took place Wednesday at Cameron Village.

Caitlin Breedlove told CNN Raleigh affiliate WRAL that she and her partner were being affectionate, but appropriate with one another, when a security officer asked them to leave the shopping center.

The officer told the couple that they were being inappropriate and that “nobody wants to see that here at Cameron Village,” Breedlove said…

On Saturday, York said his company is planning additional sensitivity training for its security personnel.

“We apologized that the women were offended, and we affirmed that Cameron Village and York Properties have no tolerance for discrimination of any kind and believe all people deserve the right to be treated fairly in their work, homes and daily lives,” York said in a statement.

His additional statement of “Phew!” was unrecorded.

It’s difficult enough finding a mall cop who’s truly useful. Having one who is a pantywaist bigot strutting around offending customers – should be sent to work for the competition.

Dozens of Valley moms converged Saturday on a McDonald’s in Phoenix to breastfeed their infants in protest of a woman who was asked to leave the establishment for doing the same.

An assistant manager of the McDonald’s at 51st Avenue and Cactus Road asked Clarissa Bradford and her children to leave when Bradford began nursing her 6-month-old child on Aug. 11.

Although the restaurant this week issued an apology saying it would never happen again, demonstrators were upset at public reaction to the story and wanted to respond to critics who say mothers shouldn’t breastfeed in public…

A restaurant employee stood outside the entrance, shooing members of the media away. Starchman and another woman, Alisa Ilardo, came out to speak with reporters. They estimated there were about 100 people in the restaurant at the time, mostly mothers with infant children.

There was no sign of resistance from restaurant employees, Starchman said, characterizing the atmosphere as relaxed with most of the women using the time to have casual conversation. Once inside, a few of them even bought food, she said.

Alisa Ilardo said the group was not upset with McDonald’s, but they wanted to make a statement.

“It was just someone’s bad judgment, but we need to keep people from treating moms like this,” she said.

Right on!

China executed the former chairman of a huge state-owned airport holding company on Friday, six months after he was convicted on bribery and embezzlement charges involving more than $14.6 million.

The executive, Li Peiying, had been the chairman and general manager of Capital Airports Holding Company, a conglomerate that runs 30 airports in 9 Chinese provinces, including Beijing’s much-acclaimed new international airport.

China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, said that Mr. Li, 60, was executed in Jinan, a Yellow River city in Shandong Province. The province’s Higher People’s Court rejected an appeal in July.

The execution underscored the gravity of the national government’s campaign against official corruption, which President Hu Jintao has labeled a serious threat to stability. The Communist Party announced this week that it was investigating a member of its ruling authority, the party’s Central Committee, apparently for corruption in the nation’s nuclear industry. News reports stated that that official, Kang Rixin, was suspected of embezzlement and bidding irregularities related to the construction of nuclear power plants…

At his peak, Mr. Li, the airport executive, supervised a 38,000-employee behemoth that not only served 30 percent of the nation’s air passenger traffic, but also began forays into insurance, hotels, real estate and tourism.

Will someone please forward this to Bernie Madoff and his other Wall Street buddies! It sounds like a policy we might consider adopting.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

A key architect of Republican Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign has urged conservatives to drop their opposition to same-sex marriage.

In a speech Friday to Log Cabin Republicans, a conservative gay rights group, Steve Schmidt said allowing same-sex marriage is in line with the conservative credo of keeping government out of people’s private lives.

“There is a sound conservative argument to be made for same-sex marriage,” Schmidt, who was McCain’s campaign manager, told the group. “I believe conservatives, more than liberals, insist that rights come with responsibilities. No other exercise of one’s liberty comes with greater responsibilities than marriage. In a marriage, two people are completely responsible to and for each other.”

He added: “If you are not willing to accept and faithfully discharge those responsibilities, you shouldn’t enter the state of matrimony, and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if you’re straight or gay. It is a responsibility like no other, which can and should make marriage an association between two human beings more fulfilling than any other…”

Read the rest of this entry »

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Federal regulators on Wednesday charged a missing hedge fund manager with fraud, saying he misled investors and overstated the value of investments in the six funds by about $300 million.

The Securities and Exchange Commission won a court order freezing the assets of Arthur G. Nadel, of Sarasota, Fla., and other defendants in the case.

Nadel owed investors a $50 million payout, told his wife in a note he felt guilty and threatened to kill himself, according to the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office. The authorities believe that Nadel, 76, planned his Jan. 14 disappearance.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Tampa, the SEC said Nadel recently transferred at least $1.25 million from two of the funds to secret bank accounts that he controlled…

The SEC said Nadel’s funds currently appear to have assets totaling less than $1 million — while he claimed in sales materials for three of the funds that they had about $342 million in assets as of Nov. 30. The materials also boasted of monthly returns of 11 to 12 percent for several of the funds last year, when they actually had negative results.

The SEC has been doing it’s usual “praiseworthy” job of investigation and oversight.

This is supposed to be a quasi-judicial agency regulating and examining the actions of brokers and corporations selling securities. Looks like their prime activity was drawing their salaries.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Paul Ince has been sacked as manager of Blackburn Rovers after six months of his three-year contract and 21 games in all competitions in charge at Ewood Park. The former England captain leaves with the Lancashire club without a win in their past 11 league games, a run which has seen them fall to second bottom of the Premier League.

The Blackburn board met yesterday to discuss the future of the former Macclesfield and MK Dons manager, who guided Rovers to only three wins and 13 points from 17 league games since his appointment in June.

“It is with great sadness the board announce that Paul Ince is to leave the club, blah, blah, blah…”

As another sect within the Guardian Church put it…

While he may have lost over half his 21 matches in charge, the sales of David Bentley and Brad Friedel and the injuries to Steven Reid and David Dunn meant Ince also lost almost all his top players. The Guv’nor was presumably looking forward to filling the holes in his squad in January. Indeed, he had perhaps already supplied the board with the names of his transfer targets.

And it’s not as if those names probably included a lower league journeyman, an England has-been and a portly property developer who looks like he’d struggle to finish a paper round let alone a Premier League match. Isn’t that right Keith Andrews, Paul Robinson and Robbie Fowler?

Thanks to The Fiver for providing much-needed perspective.