New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer warned radio stations that they would not escape scrutiny as his investigation into pay-for-play schemes in which music companies pay for airplay of songs released on their labels.

The warning came as Mr. Spitzer announced the first settlement by a music company in the year-long investigation.

Sony BMG Music has agreed to pay $10 million to a music-related charity and alter its promotion practices, as well as to make a public statement acknowledging that it had pursued improper pay-for-play deals in order to get music by its artists played on certain radio stations and that such practices are still prevalent in the music industry.

Specifically, Spitzer said that Sony had bribed programmers and disc jockeys with luxury trips, gifts such as digital cameras, as well as payments through independent promoters.

Some members of the music industry disputed the impropriety of pay-for-play practices by using the example of product placement in supermarkets, where companies routinely pay the supermarket chains for optimum placement of their products in the stores.

Others claimed that the practices were not illegal, as well as that radio was not even that important a platform for the launch of music in the internet age, where websites have replaced radio as the media of choice for promoting music.

Microsoft is suing Google to stop one of its top engineers from going to work for Google.

Kai-Fu Lee was in charge of Microsoft’s research and development center in Beijing before going to work at the company’s head office in Redmond, Washington, in the United States.

However, on Tuesday Google named Mr. Lee president of its operation in China as well as the head of its planned research and development center in China.

In reaction, Microsoft announced that it had filed suit against both Mr. Lee and Google in order to force him to keep non-competition and confidentiality contracts he had signed with Microsoft.

The agreement, like those signed by all Microsoft employees, would prevent Mr. Lee from going to work for a direct competitor for a year after leaving Microsoft, from hiring anyone away from Microsoft, and from disclosing Microsoft’s trade secrets.

One of Microsoft’s lawyers said that it sometimes negotiated agreements with departing employees to allow them to go to other companies in positions not overlapping what they had done with Microsoft, but that Mr. Lee had not applied for such an agreement before accepting the position with Google.

Further, Microsoft claimed that Mr. Lee had accepted the position with Google in “egregious violation” of his contract with Microsoft. Google said that they had reviewed all of Microsoft’s claims and that they were without merit and that they support Dr. Lee and will fight Microsoft’s claims.

A decision handed down by the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals late Thursday afternoon that immediately ended the ban on importation of Canadian cattle into to the US due to fears of mad cow disease sent shares of Tyson Foods Inc. soaring on Friday morning.

The stock gained 7.5 percent, or $1.39 to trade at $19.91 on the New York Stock Exchange early in the day. Under the decision, Canadian cattle might begin to enter the US as early as the end of the summer, according to analysts.

Tyson said on Friday that it is waiting for information from the US Department of Agriculture for details of how and when the border will be reopened to cattle.

The company plans to resume importation of cattle as soon as practically possible. The ban, according to one analyst, had severely cut Tyson’s capacity because there just were not enough cattle to process. Tyson, the worlds largest chicken producer, began processing beef in 2001 and beef is now the largest proportion of its business.

Before the ban, the US had imported about 2 million head of cattle per year from Canada, approximately 8 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the US annually. The ban on importation came in May 2003 after traces of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, were discovered in a cow born in Alberta.

The founder of WorldCom, Bernard J. Ebbers, was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison for his participation in accounting fraud which misstated the company’s profits by $11 billion and caused the collapse of the telecommunications giant in 2002.

Federal prosecutors had asked for a sentence of life in prison. The sentence is one of the stiffest ever given to an executive charged with large-scale corporate corruption. In handing down the sentence, Federal judge Barbara S. Jones said that Mr. Ebbers deserved the sentence because his statements “deprived investors of their money” and that he was a leader of the criminal activity that led to his company’s downfall.

Legal analysts said that the long sentence given to Mr. Ebbers would encourage settlements in similar cases as well as serve as a deterrent to others thinking of engaging in such misconduct.

Mr. Ebbers remains free on bail for the time being, but he must report to a probation officer within 72 hours and he was ordered to report to prison on October 12. His attorney said that he would appeal Mr. Ebbers’s sentence and asked that his client be allowed to remain free on bail through the appeals process, but it was unclear whether the judge will allow that.

Legislation to open up the credit rating industry to more competition has been proposed in a bill introduced by Representative Michael Fitzpatrick.

The legislation would let any rating agency that meets certain standards register with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It would also allow the SEC to inspect rating agencies and regulate how they handle conflict of interest situations and non-public information.

Passage of the bill through Congress would not only open up the industry for competition, but it would also greatly reduce the power of such agencies as S&P and Moody’s.

Those two agencies currently hold 80 percent of the market between them. In introducing the legislation, Mr. Fitzpatrick criticized these two agencies for failing to give adequate warning of the disasters at Enron and WorldCom.

Under the current system, the SEC designates select agencies as “nationally recognized statistical rating organizations,” and only credit ratings generated by those agencies are legally valid in the US.

If Abbot Laboratories will not cut the price of one of its AIDS drugs, Brazil has said that it will break the company’s patent on the drug and begin manufacturing the drug itself.

Brazil is in talks with Abbot to try to convince the drug maker to cut the price of Kaltera, an anti-retroviral drug, by 42 percent. Abbot’s current price for the drug is $1.17 per pill. Brazil says that a state-owned lab could sell the drug for 68 cents per pill.

Humberto Costa, Brazil’s health minister, said that if his country does break Abbot’s patent on Kaltera, it will do so only because it is in the best interest of the public.

The World Trade Organization permits nations to break patents in this way if certain circumstances of national emergency exist, but critics of Brazil’s intentions say that such conditions do not exist in this case because Brazil is spending less to treat AIDS now than was the case five years ago.

Abbot Laboratories said that if Brazil makes good on its threat, it could have a negative impact on research into and development of new drugs for all diseases. An official of a US drug industry lobby, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, called Brazil’s threat “troubling.”

The Brazilian government is also currently in discussions with Merck and Gilead Sciences, two other US drug manufacturers, concerning the prices of their AIDS drugs, and Mr. Costa said that Brazil is ready to break their patents as well if they will not lower their prices.

When it comes to selling houses, there are all sorts of unwelcome delays that can leave a sale dragging on for months after the property has first been put on the market.

However, there are now a number of property investment companies and house purchasers who will offer up cash for house and homes, in order to move the property selling process on much faster.

The result is the ability to sell house fast, or any other home or property, allowing the seller to reinvest their home equity into a new house purchase, whether at home or abroad, or else use the assets to pay off debts and move towards a position of stronger financial stability.

Some U.S. shareholders in major corporations are attempting to gain more power than they have ever had in the election of members to companies’ boards of directors.

These activists claim that this power is necessary in order to hold boards responsible for their actions in order to avoid scandals like the one that led to the downfall of Enron.

Business leaders were able to stop shareholders from effecting reform at the federal level, retaining most of the power for appointing board members to themselves, as present rules allow board members to be appointed after receiving even just one vote from a shareholder.

Holding out little hope that the Securities and Exchange Commission will act on the issue, shareholders are now attempting to change corporate rules at the state level.

Delaware, the state where over half of the large companies in the U.S. are incorporated, however, will wait for the American Bar Association to study the matter and make recommendations before they act.

Because the ABA will take at least a year to study the issue, action in Delaware is more than a year a way. Things will likely not progress any faster in the other states, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, joining business executives in opposing the proposed changes.

However, some entities, such as US state pensions funds are being asked to support the initiative and companies like Caterpillar and Rayethon are either planning on putting resolutions on the issue to a vote at their annual meetings or are pursuing compromise resolutions with the activist shareholders.

South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) are probing US Equity firm, Warburg Pincus, over suspicions of insider trading over shares in LG Card.

Warburg Pincus had originally held a 20% share in LG Card until October 2003, when it sold most of it's main shareholding. Shortly afterwards, LG Card was pushed close to banruptcy after a consumer spending bubble burst.

At the time of sale, Hwang Sung-jin was leading Warburg Pincus's Korean investments and also an outside director of LG Card.

Although Warburg Pincus deny wrongdoing, the FSS is investigating suggestions of insider trading.

This case follows a series of high-profile deals that have seen Western-backed investment groups making massive profits off the back of sales of Korean interests.

However, since private equity funds from foreign investors became a mainstay of the Korean corporate scene after economic crisis in 1997, some investors have suggested the current FSS investigation may be as much for political posturing, rather than any real evidence of manipulation of stock markets.