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122004-51
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01
Microsoft
Loses Windows Media Monopoly in Europe. Must pay EU
Sanctions
December 23, 2000 / The software giant
is ordered to sell a version of Windows in Europe
without its media player A European judge Wednesday
ordered Microsoft Corp. to sell a version of its
flagship Windows operating system without a music
and video player.
-----The ruling by Court of First Instance
President Bo Vesterdorf marked the first time in a
decade of antitrust litigation that the software
giant would be forced to make significant changes
to a product.
-----Vesterdorf rejected Microsoft's request
to temporarily suspend the sanctions imposed in
March by the European Commission, and the company
promised to comply with his order next month.
Microsoft said it would charge the same amount for
the operating system with or without Windows Media
Player.
-----As a result, manufacturers may start
offering their European customers personal
computers equipped with a media player from
RealNetworks Inc. or Apple Computer Inc. instead of
Microsoft's player.
-----RealNetworks has paid PC makers in the
past to install its player, and it might be willing
to pay more if Microsoft's player is
excluded.
-----"We're going to do our best to make
good on the opportunity," said RealNetworks Deputy
General Counsel Dave Stewart. He declined to
predict how popular any PCs with only RealNetworks'
media player might
become.
Apple and the biggest PC
makers declined to
comment.
-----Unless
it fares better in the next step of its appeal of
the European Commission sanctions, Microsoft might
be forced to take other features out of future
editions of the Windows operating system, which
powers more than 90% of the world's
PCs.
-----The European Commission, the
administrative arm of the European Union, hopes the
upshot will be more competition in the software
market.
-----"We've been waiting for this day to
know whether Microsoft would be obliged by laws to
change its business practices in Europe, and now it
will have to," said antitrust lawyer David Wood of
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Brussels. "The
difficult question for Microsoft is to what
extent."
----- Wednesday's ruling, issued in
Luxembourg, could hamper Microsoft's efforts to woo
the entertainment industry as it figures out how to
deliver content in a digital
age.
-----Until now, the company could guarantee
movie studios, record labels and other content
providers that anything they produced in
Microsoft's format could be played on any Microsoft
PC.
-----Without such a guarantee for a third of
Microsoft's market, "there's at least a chance of
competition on the merits," said University of
Baltimore antitrust law professor Robert Lande.
----- The Court of First Instance president
also rejected Microsoft's plea that he suspend the
other penalty imposed by the European Commission,
requiring the company to disclose some programming
techniques to rivals. Microsoft now must reveal,
for a fee, details about how its PC software
communicates with its server software for
controlling networks and about how those server
computers talk to each
other.
-----The disclosures are designed to give
such rivals as Novell Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc.
and providers of the free operating system Linux a
better chance at catching up to Microsoft's 60%
share of the European server market. Sun filed the
complaint that triggered the European probe more
than six years ago.
-----On both issues, Vesterdorf held that
Microsoft failed to show that the harm it would
suffer outweighed the urgency to put the measures
in place. Microsoft could follow the terms of the
interim ruling while appealing, but Vesterdorf's
decision probably ends the debate about when the
remedies will kick in.
A
separate court panel will eventually weigh
Microsoft's full appeal.
-----Microsoft
executives Wednesday said the company wanted to
negotiate a final settlement with the European
Commission that would end the main appeal and
remove the uncertainty hanging over the
company.
-----Microsoft has already settled with the
U.S. Justice Department and resolved almost every
significant private lawsuit brought by rivals, with
the exception of
RealNetworks.
-----The company's dollars might not go as
far in Europe. Microsoft lawyers had said
previously that they would have the best chance of
cutting a deal if Vesterdorf issued a split
decision.
----- European Commission spokesman Jonathan
Todd said the body hadn't made a decision on
Microsoft's renewed offer to talk. It hadn't been
receptive beforehand, he said, and "there is
nothing in the wording of today's decision by the
Court of First Instance president to make
negotiations more
likely."
-----Not everyone agreed because the judge
determined that Microsoft had an arguable case on
the merits on some
points.
-----"There should be just enough to put
some self-doubt in the minds of the commission,"
said Shearman & Sterling antitrust lawyer
Christopher Bright in London. Besides, he said, a
settlement would preserve the limited precedent
established in the case so
far.
-----"We all think of this case as being
Microsoft against the commission," Bright said.
"But it's to some extent about how the European
Commission is going to deal with monopolies over
the next decade or even two decades. If the
commission loses, its platform is really going to
fall away."
-----A complete Microsoft victory had been
seen as unlikely, and the company's stock dipped
just 10 cents Wednesday on Nasdaq to
$26.97.
-----The most significant long-term
questions are whether Microsoft will shy away from
bundling more products into Windows and, if it
doesn't, whether the European Commission will
intervene again.
-----Microsoft's Smith said the company
would have to keep the player out of some copies of
the next major version of Windows, expected in two
years, if the main appeal remained undecided.
Beyond that, he
said, Microsoft doesn't plan to alter its
ways.
-----"If the court had been dismissive of
all of our arguments on the merits, that would have
been one thing," Smith said. "But that's not what
the court did. It included a number of statements
that are encouraging."
///
020451Trump
Hotels Secures
$500-Million Loan - Shareholder's Wonder How and
Why?
December 24, 2004 / Ariel Holdings alleges
that the bankruptcy exit plan unfairly favors the
billionaire and fails to protect investors. Trump
Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. said in a
regulatory filing Thursday that it had arranged
$500 million in financing for when it emerges from
Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
-----The news comes one day after a
shareholder filed a lawsuit against billionaire
Donald Trump and four other directors over the
company's proposed plan to exit bankruptcy, saying
it unfairly favors him as majority
holder.
-----The casino operator, which filed for
bankruptcy protection last month, said Thursday
that Morgan Stanley Senior Funding Inc., UBS Loan
Financing and UBS Securities had committed to the
working capital loan.
----- Last week, a New Jersey bankruptcy
judge gave interim approval to a $100-million
credit line from Beal Bank under which the company
could continue operations.
----- Shareholders, however, have until
Monday to file requests with the U.S. Trustee to
form an official committee of equity holders to
object to the plan.
----- Under the restructuring -- negotiated
with bondholders before the casino operator filed
for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month --
bondholders will own about two-thirds of the
company and Donald Trump's stake would shrink to
about 27% from 56%. The real estate magnate would
remain chairman and chief
executive.
-----In the lawsuit filed Wednesday in
Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington, investor
Ariel Holdings said the bankruptcy plan served
Trump's "personal interests" and violated the
board's duties to shareholders. Ariel asked the
court for unspecified fees and damages and to order
Trump and other directors to act independently to
protect the interests of all
shareholders.
-----"Seizing upon the dire straits the
company was placed in by virtue of his own
mismanagement, under the subterfuge of a
prepackaged bankruptcy plan, Trump has trampled
upon the rights" of shareholders, "diluting their
interests to almost nothing, while shifting
additional assets, compensation and equity into his
own pocket," Ariel said in the suit. Ariel owns
more than 100,000 shares of Trump Hotels.
The suit says the
plan would dilute shareholders' current 44% stake
to 0.05%.
Trump Hotels President Scott Butera didn't respond
to messages seeking comments.
----- Ariel, which is seeking to represent
other shareholders, also asked the court to force
the directors to ensure that there are no conflicts
of interest between Trump and other
shareholders.
-----Trump Hotels would be able to exit
bankruptcy in March if creditors and the court
approve the plan. Shares of the company rose 13
cents to $1.89 in over-the-counter trading.
///
030451Star
of David Badges worn by Gaza Jewish Settlers -- as
a political protest
December 24, 2004 / The use of Holocaust
imagery to protest Sharon's withdrawal plan evoked
outrage JERUSALEM -- Every Israeli schoolchild
knows the significance of the yellow Star of David
badges that the persecuted Jews of Europe were
forced to wear in the dark days leading up to the
Holocaust.
-----This week, Jewish settlers from the
Gaza Strip sought to make this hauntingly evocative
emblem -- colored orange instead of yellow -- a
symbol of their struggle against Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's plan to uproot their communities
next year and hand over the area to the
Palestinians.
----- Settlers and their
supporters walked the halls of parliament with the
badges pinned to their lapels. The nationally
circulated Maariv newspaper carried a front-page
picture of four settler children, the youngest a
toddler with a pacifier, staring plaintively from
behind a wire fence with the orange Star of David
emblems affixed to their
chests.
-----On Thursday, faced with an outpouring
of revulsion and anger from across the Israeli
political spectrum, Gaza settler leaders
acknowledged that it might have been a mistake to
try to appropriate an image of such iconic power in
service of their cause.
-----"We had decided to wear an orange Star
of David in protest of the prime minister's plans
to expel us from our homes," Motti Sander, a
leading activist from the main Gaza settlement
block of Gush Katif, told Israel Radio. "But we are
attentive to the feelings of the people of Israel
… and have therefore decided to stop this
campaign."
-----The Gaza activists' capitulation came
after leaders of the main Jewish settler group, the
Yesha Council, moved late Wednesday to disassociate
itself from the orange badge
movement.
-----One prominent settler leader, Yehoshua
Mor-Yosef, who until now has enthusiastically
supported all protest measures employed by the Gaza
activists, branded it an act of
"craziness."
Anger over the
orange badges had been building since they were
unveiled this
week.
-----Former Justice Minister Tommy Lapid, a
Holocaust survivor, condemned the badges as an
ill-advised publicity
stunt.
-----"To force a person to move his house is
not putting him in a concentration camp, nor in a
gas chamber, nor in the crematorium at Auschwitz,"
Lapid said.
Even
among the Gaza settlers' supporters, the campaign
stirred deep
unease.
-----"My father lost his parents and his 11
brothers and sisters, so for me, the Holocaust is
hallowed," said Gila Finkelstein, a lawmaker from
the pro-settler National Religious Party. "I say to
my friends the settlers: I am with you in your
struggle, but without Holocaust
symbols."
-----In some respects, the controversy was
nothing new. The Gaza settlers and their supporters
have for months invoked Holocaust imagery in
pressing their cause, though usually less baldly
than in this instance.
-----Nadia Matar, a settler activist, caused
a stir this year when she wrote an open letter to
Yonatan Bassi, the head of a new government agency
created to oversee the evacuation of Gaza
settlements. She likened Bassi, a religiously
observant Jew, to a member of the Judenrat. Those
Jewish councils were ordered by the Nazis to make
lists that expedited the herding of Jews into
ghettos, and eventually into death
camps.
-----Settlers and their supporters commonly
use language associated with Nazi-era decrees to
characterize the planned evacuation of the 21
settlements in Gaza and four smaller ones in the
West Bank, describing the relocations as the
"forced transfer of Jews from their
homes."
-----The debate found its way into Israeli
schools after some children turned up wearing the
Star of David emblem. On Wednesday, the Education
Ministry announced that the badges were banned in
the classroom.
-----The Anti-Defamation League, a
U.S.-based group that campaigns against
anti-Semitism worldwide, called the campaign a
misguided one.
-----Some of those who spearheaded the
campaign said they had no
regrets.
-----"I am 100% comfortable with what I
did," said Ron Bakshi, the Gaza settler who came up
with the idea. "We received many supportive calls,
including from Holocaust survivors."
///
Center
Page /
TIMELINE:
Top Stories To Start The Week With:
122004-51
Unocal to
Settle Human Rights Lawsuits
-----Unocal
Corp. said it would settle landmark human rights
lawsuits brought by 15 villagers from Myanmar who
claimed it was responsible for forced labor, rapes
and a murder allegedly committed by soldiers along
the route of a natural gas pipeline in the
Southeast Asian
nation.
-----Terms of the deal are
being negotiated, and neither Unocal nor lawyers
representing plaintiffs would disclose details. In
a statement, the two sides said the El
Segundo-based energy company would pay plaintiffs
an unspecified amount of money and fund programs to
improve living conditions for people from the
region surrounding the $1.2-billion pipeline and
"who may have suffered
hardships."
-----The U.S. 9th Circuit
Court of Appeals had been scheduled to hear
arguments Monday on whether the case should go to
trial. The suits were filed in 1996.
----- Unocal had said it
shouldn't be held liable for alleged abuses by
soldiers assigned to guard the pipeline.
Celebrex
Is Said to Raise Risk of Heart
Attack
The Food and Drug Administration
warned physicians to begin looking for alternatives
to the popular arthritis drug Celebrex because of
new evidence that it doubles the chances of heart
attacks and strokes. The same problem led to the
removal of Vioxx, a similar drug, from the market
in October.
-----The federal agency also
said it might soon take other actions on Celebrex,
including requiring stronger warnings and even
withdrawing it from the
market.
-----The FDA warning came
hours after drug maker Pfizer Inc. announced that a
study of Celebrex's efficacy as a cancer treatment
found evidence of increased cardiovascular
risk.
-----But Pfizer said the
cancer study was out of step with other evidence
that Celebrex is safe.
Oracle Wins
Battle in Bid for
PeopleSoft
-----The board of PeopleSoft
Inc. agreed to sell the company to Oracle Corp. for
$10.3 billion, capping a bitter 18-month
fight.
-----The agreement was
reached during the first direct negotiations
between Oracle and PeopleSoft. The talks convened
after PeopleSoft asked Oracle to raise its previous
"best and final offer" by $2.50 a share to
$26.50.
-----PeopleSoft's concession
heads off a court fight over its anti-takeover
provisions.
-----After the purchase
closes next month, database maker Oracle will
become one of the largest producers of the software
that powers back-office functions for large
corporations, allowing it to compete against market
leader SAP.
-----Oracle executives said
they might cut $150 million or more of PeopleSoft's
annual research and development budget. Marketing
and administration also would take substantial
hits.
Global
Crossing Founder Will Avoid Charges
Global Crossing Ltd. founder
Gary Winnick will be absolved by federal regulators
for his role at the company that made him one of
the richest men in Los Angeles -- and one of the
most vilified executives in corporate
America.
-----An attorney for the
Beverly Hills financier said the Securities and
Exchange Commission would not file charges against
Winnick after a three-year investigation into the
telecommunications provider's accounting practices.
Winnick was chairman of the company when it made
controversial deals with other telecom providers in
an effort to boost sales
figures.
-----Winnick, who is running
a private investment firm, declined to
comment.
-----SEC Chairman William H.
Donaldson joined two fellow commissioners in
overruling the agency's staff and deciding not to
charge Winnick, according to people familiar with
the matter. The SEC declined to comment.
Federal
Reserve Raises Key Rate to
2.25%
-----The Federal Reserve
raised its benchmark short-term interest rate to
2.25% from 2%, the fifth quarter-point increase
since June.
-----Policymakers'
post-meeting statement indicated that they were
likely to keep tightening credit in 2005 at this
year's pace.
-----Wall Street had been
all but certain of another rate increase after
recent data that have mostly pointed to a growing
economy. Stocks rallied modestly Tuesday after the
increase, and long-term bond yields
eased.
-----Although job growth was
disappointing last month, analysts have been
impressed by retail sales gains, industrial
activity and business confidence. Also, a steep
drop in oil prices since late October has bolstered
optimism about consumer
spending.
-----In its statement, the
Fed repeated wording it used in November, saying,
"Inflation and longer-term inflation expectations
remain well contained."
Time Warner
Settles AOL Fraud
Charges
-----Time Warner Inc. agreed
to pay $510 million to settle government charges of
accounting fraud at its America Online unit,
accused by regulators of inflating advertising
revenue.
-----The agreement would be
with the Justice Department and the Securities and
Exchange Commission. It must be approved by SEC
commissioners.
-----Under the settlement
with the Justice Department, Time Warner agreed to
pay $210 million and accept responsibility for the
conduct of AOL executives who allegedly aided in
securities fraud with some online
partners.
-----The Justice Department
said it would file a criminal complaint against the
Internet unit, although it would defer prosecution
while it continued an
investigation.
-----On the SEC front, Time
Warner would pay $300 million to settle a probe
into AOL's accounting of a $400-million payment
received from Germany's Bertelsmann.
Sprint to Buy
Nextel in $33.8-Billion
Deal
-----Furthering the
consolidation of the wireless industry, Sprint
Corp. unveiled plans to acquire rival Nextel
Communications Inc. in a cash-and-stock deal valued
at $33.8 billion.
-----The new company -- to
be called Sprint Nextel -- would have 38.5 million
customers, compared with Cingular Wireless' 47.6
million subscribers and Verizon Wireless' 42.1
million.
-----For Nextel, the deal
would save the company from having to spend as much
as $3 billion on network upgrades so that customers
could use their phones to send e-mail and other
data at high speeds. Sprint and Nextel executives
portrayed the deal as a merger of equals that would
result in $12 billion in savings over three
years.
-----If the transaction is
approved by regulators and shareholders, the
company will spin off Sprint's local telephone
business while retaining its long-distance
customers.
Governor
Picks Two to Replace PUC
Members
-----Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger made his first appointments to the
California Public Utilities Commission as the panel
-- over the objections of its two departing members
-- rejected a regulatory judge's finding that
Southern California Gas Co. contributed to
natural-gas price spikes during the energy
crisis.
-----Schwarzenegger
nominated Silicon Valley businessman and fellow
Republican Steve Poizner and San Francisco attorney
Dian Grueneich, a Democrat, to the five-member
PUC.
-----The nominees must be
confirmed by the state Senate by the end of 2005.
In the meantime, the two will take their seats in
January, replacing Loretta M. Lynch and Carl Wood,
who are seen as the commission's chief advocates
for consumer and environmental
causes.
-----With the departure of
Wood and Lynch, Schwarzenegger can expect a more
friendly reception from the commission. The three
other commissioners, though appointed by former
Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, have generally backed
Schwarzenegger's energy initiatives.
Symantec
Agrees to Buy Veritas
Software
-----Top Internet security
firm Symantec Corp. said it would buy data storage
company Veritas Software Corp. for $13.5 billion in
stock, the second-highest price ever paid for a
software maker. The deal would create the world's
fifth-largest software
company.
-----Companies in the
fragmented industry are consolidating as sales
growth remains
sluggish.
-----Symantec Chief
Executive John Thompson said protecting corporate
information from viruses and hackers -- his
company's forte -- was closely related to making
complete backup copies of information, which is
Veritas' main
business.
-----Veritas shareholders
would get 1.12 shares of Symantec stock for each
share of Veritas, leaving them with 40% of the
combined company.
-----If shareholders of both
companies approve the Symantec-Veritas deal, it
could be completed by June.
///
ByLines:
Editors Note
Donald
Trump
Bylines
TVI
Magazine ONLINE / IS YOUR INDUSTRY WEB SITE Ready
for the future?
-----
TVI
Magazine introduces here a new marketing forum for
the international television industry: a dynamic
online service on its web site. TVI Magazine will
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listing TVI Magazine Online on more than 250 of the
world's most popular search engines and electronic
directories.
-----
Online
ad space can be purchased in monthly increments
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-----It
just goes to show you, says Troy about the TV and
Film industry -- "NOTHING IN THIS WORLD IS
PERMANENT" . . . so follow the
money -
- and
take some advice from a dinner-time chat with
"Stonehead" --
Disappointments Are Great! Follow
the Money . . . the Internet and the Smart- Daaf
Boys.
///
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