[MUSIC.YAHOO] The estate of pop music legend Michael Jackson owes $702 million in federal taxes and penalties, the Internal Revenue Service charged in U.S. Tax Court, accusing the estate of undervaluing some of the star's assets by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The dollar amounts in dispute had not been previously disclosed in the court challenge that the Jackson estate filed in July to a bill from the IRS, the U.S. tax-collecting agency.
At issue is the wide difference between what the estate said Jackson's legacy was worth versus what the IRS determined was its taxable value.
An IRS front man and lawyers for the estate declined to comment.
Jackson died on June 25, 2009, the date of the estate tax return. His estate's beneficiaries are Jackson's mother, Katherine, his three children and charities.
The estate's 2009 tax filing said the total Jackson estate had a $7 million taxable value. In May, the IRS issued the estate a tax deficiency notice for $505.1 million in taxes and $196.9 million in penalties, according to Tax Court documents dated Tuesday.
Jackson's image and likeness were valued by the IRS at $434 million. The estate said its taxable value was $2,105.
The largest taxable item was the estate's stake in some of Jackson's recording assets, listed as MJ/ATV Publishing Trust interest in New Horizon Trust II, which was valued at $469 million by IRS. It was not valued in the 2009 estate filing.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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Semi-obvious lesson here - the rich always get audited. Contrary to Harry Reid, I not only guarantee Romney paid taxes but that he was on the end of numerous IRS, Mass. DOR (and other) audits.
[Al Ahram] The Administrative Court ruled on Saturday against the banning of pornography websites in Egypt.
A case was filed by lawyer Ibrahim El-Salamony against former President Mohamed Morsi's request to ban pornography websites in Egypt.
El-Salamony filed the case, arguing that marriage burdens and high unemployment in recent years have led many young men to turn to pornographic websites. Banning such sites, the lawyer said, would protect society.
Last November, former Prosecutor-General Abdel-Meguid Mahmoud submitted an official letter to the ministries of telecommunications, information and interior ordering that measures be adopted to ban pornographic websites in Egypt, based on a 2009 court order to this effect.
In May 2009, Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court declared a ban on pornographic websites. The move was based on a lawsuit filed by Islamist lawyer Nezar Ghourab.
Blocking pornographic websites would cost Egypt up to LE100 million ($16.5m) to implement and may place a significant strain on the country's internet services, according to telecom and IT experts.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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[Al Ahram] The trial of 33 accused of involvement in sectarian violence that took place in Qalioubiya's Khosous last April was adjourned on Saturday until 21 September. The case was postponed due to security forces' inability to transport the accused from prison to court within Egypt's current period of unrest, following the ouster of former president Mohamed Morsi.
The 33 on trial are facing accusations of involvement in sectarian festivities which left 6 dead and 22 injured.
The violence broke out last April after a group of children allegedly painted a swastika on the wall of a prominent Islamic religious institute.
Some Al-Khosous residents claimed the children were Christian, yet news sources maintain they were Mohammedan.
All witnesses agree, however, that the swastika -- a popular symbol to scribble on walls -- was likely mistaken for a Christian cross.
In the ensuing violence, which raged for hours, guns were fired and shops and buildings set ablaze, leading to the death of four Christians and one Mohammedan.
The total corpse count increased to six after another Mohammedan died in hospital days later.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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[FOXNEWS] Zim-bob-we's president has threatened to expel foreign-owned companies over what he says is the West's interference in the politics of the country he has owned since 1980. The citizenry has nothing left to steal, so steal whatever the hated foreigners have. Then blame them when things go south. Or in the case of Zim, start back north the other way.
In a speech before supporters gathered for the burial of a top military chief in Harare, President Bob Muggsy Mugabe Octogenarian President-for-Life of Zim-bob-we who turned the former Breadbasket of Africa into the African Basket Case... said Sunday he wanted no "ideas from London or Washington." "If they ain't my ideas, they ain't ideas."
He warned the countries that although his government hasn't "done anything to your companies, time will come when we will say tit for tat." "If we sell you no products, then where will you be?"
"Where will you be?"
"Deeper in the Chinese pocket. But that's beside the point..."
The West has pushed for democratic reform in Zim-bob-we. Horrors.
Mugabe, who was sworn in Thursday for another five-year term at the age of 89, said "there will come a time when we lose our patience." "We've already lost our coherence."
Mugabe has vowed to press ahead with black ownership of foreign-owned companies. "Foreign-owned" = "not indigenously owned." If it's owned by Frenchies or Brits or Luxembourgeouis, whaddya do? Fire the board of directors?
Oh. Wait.
Just shoot them. Of course.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 11:42 ||
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Bob's reading the ANC hate playbook. Reject even the liberal, progressive whites. They are not us !
Viewpoint by Magasela Mzobe: To reduce the miasmatic white supremacist enterprise that was codified in colonial apartheid only to the routine savagery and dispossession of black indigenous people, is to fundamentally miss the indispensable role performed by 'messianic' white liberalism, to the legitimization of colonial-apartheid infrastructure. Insolent racist bigots and colonial-apartheid white liberals were (are) the proverbial two sides of the same bloody coin. They are both constitutive elements of Western hegemonic logic and construct.......
#2
I can't say I have any sympathy for any foreign-owned company that's still in Zim-bob-we. They should have seen the handwriting on the wall (the rest of us did) and gotten out completely 10 years ago. At least. >:-(
Posted by: Barbara ||
08/25/2013 14:56 Comments ||
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Gotta agree w/ Muggsie on one thing, I'm not too fond of any ideas from Washington, either.
[Al Ahram] Congolese soldiers fought rebels in the country's volatile east for hours Saturday, officials said, while a rocket landed inside the town of Goma and killed three people as border tensions escalated between Rwanda and Congo.
Scores of angry residents erupted into the streets of Goma in protest following several days of violence that has left at least seven dead and dozens maimed in this city of nearly a million near the Congo-Rwanda border.
Congo immediately blamed the rocket attack on neighbouring Rwanda, which has long been accused of supporting the eastern Congolese rebel movement known as M23.
"We wonder, for how long will the international community continue to tolerate these offenses?" Lambert Mende, a front man for the Congolese government, told The News Agency that Dare Not be Named.
Rwanda, which has vigorously denied allegations by the United Nations ...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships... and others that it has provided support to the M23 rebels fighting the Congolese government, also accused Congolese forces of attacking Rwanda. The Rwandan army said mortar fire landed in several villages along the border Friday.
Brigadier Joseph Nzabamwita, a front man for Rwanda's military, said "acts of provocation that endanger the lives of Rwandan citizens will not remain unanswered indefinitely."
The M23 rebel group briefly took Goma last November and subsequent peace talks in neighbouring Uganda have repeatedly stalled. M23's leaders previously headed other rebel groups in the region that were backed by Rwanda. The rebel group is made up of hundreds of Congolese soldiers mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group who deserted the national army last year after accusing the government of failing to honour the terms of a deal signed in March 2009.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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[REUTERS] Hundreds of teachers in Philadelphia voiced their outrage on Thursday at proposed pay and benefit cuts as public school officials demanded $133 million in concessions from employees because of a financial crisis.
With the teachers' labor contract due to expire on Aug. 31 and school set to start about a week after that, the district and union leaders are still far apart on terms, according to George Jackson, front man for the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers.
Teachers are being asked to take salary cuts of between 5 and 13 percent next year and to pay more for health coverage.
More than 200 teachers held a march and then rallied outside the school board offices on Thursday to protest the demands.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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Teachers are being asked to take salary cuts of between 5 and 13 percent next year and to pay more for health coverage.
Sound like an NEA and Champ voter remorse problem to me. Snicker, snicker, snicker
[Dawn] A second man was incarcerated Book 'im, Mahmoud! by the Mumbai police on Saturday on accusations of gang-raping a female photographer in the Indian financial hub.
The attack has renewed anger over the country's treatment of women.
Echoing a similar assault in New Delhi in December last year that sparked nationwide protests, five men raped the woman in her early twenties in central Mumbai when she was on a magazine assignment with a male colleague early Thursday evening.
Officers arrested the first suspect, in his early twenties, on Friday and a second arrest was made overnight, police front man Satyanarayan Choudhary told AFP.
The attack, which shocked a city seen as far safer for women than the country's capital, sparked outrage on social media sites, uproar in the Indian parliament and protests in Mumbai led by journalists.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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[BBC's Masters of the obvious division] Taking cocaine can change the structure of the brain within hours in what could be the first steps of drug addiction, according to US researchers. So thaaaat's what happens.
Animal tests, reported in the journal Nature Neuroscience, showed new structures linked to learning and memory began to grow soon after the drug was taken. Mice with the most brain changes showed a greater preference for cocaine. Proving once again there is scant difference between mice and men.
Experts described it as the brain "learning addiction". Er huh, Cocaine 'experts' ?
The team at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Francisco looked for tiny protrusions from brain cells called dendritic spines. They are heavily implicated in memory formation. A group analysis emanating from a smoke filled room no doubt.
#12
Scopolamine, historically used for motion sickness and other forms of nausea, and now prescribed for depression, causes growth of the dendritic spines as well. It is thought that other anti-depressant drugs may also have a similar effect, although over a period of weeks and months rather than hours and days.
#1
Yes, that has worked so well all over the country. Where do we get these idiotic politicians?
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
08/25/2013 11:07 Comments ||
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Where do we get these idiotic politicians?
They come to the public limelight spreading truth and light, hope and change and fragrant unicorn farts and the encroachers/entitleists, grabbers vote them in. Other than PugetSoundostan, most of WA is actually to the right of center. but not enough voters to overcome the libtards.
#3
Here is a link to some local coverage. And yes people actually said these quotes:
June Son works at Lost Lake Cafe and Bar, another business participating in the program.
"A lot of us work late at night and at the end of your shift when you're walking home, it's just a much better feeling overall to know that folks aren't out there with guns," Son said.
Yes she really thinks the signs will keep her from being raped or robbed while she is outside the business.
"This is the most significant health issue of our time I would argue," said Ralph Fascitelli with Washington CeaseFire, "yet the most neglected."
You can guess what sort of organization Washington CeaseFire is...
The good news:
Washington is a free carry state and more than 350,000 people here are permitted to carry a concealed weapon.
The forced cuts of the sequester are hitting everywhere, apparently even at agencies with black budgets.
The budget ax has fallen on a CIA office that focused on declassifying historical materials, a move scholars say will mean fewer public disclosures about long-buried intelligence secrets and scandals. The Historical Collections Division, which has declassified documents on top Soviet spies, a secret CIA airline in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis and other major operations, has been disbanded. The office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.
The agency's spokesman says this move will "create efficiencies." Dumping this onto the FOIA department adds more work to a part of the agency that already uses every excuse it can to avoid complying with requests.
"This move is a true loss to the public," said Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who frequently litigates against the CIA. He said the CIA office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests "is the most obstructionist and unfriendly of those I have dealt with during the last two decades."
#1
A discreet luncheon will be held at the Capital Grill next Tuesday for both employees of HCD. Contact Sharon in the Director's office for reservations and details.
[CHRON] The Homeland Security Department says an employee who runs a racist website predicting and advocating a race war has been put on paid administrative leave.
He'll be back in a few months. This time in charge of Obamacare.
An acquisitions officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement who deals with small businesses, Ayo Kimathi, operates the website War on the Horizon. It includes descriptions of an "unavoidable, inevitable clash with the white race." Kimathi is black.
Kimathi has been with the department since 2009. He was told Friday that he is being put on paid administrative leave.
His website criticizes whites, gays, those of mixed race, and blacks who integrate with whites. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, earlier this week reported on Kimathi's role in running the site.
Kimathi hasn't responded to email and phone calls requesting comment.
Posted by: Fred ||
08/25/2013 00:00 ||
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Paid administrative leave - how exactly is that different from a vacation?
#4
...they'd better. Kill all the whities who's going to pay the Danegeld anymore? No workers out in the plantation field, no income up in the plantation house.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[MUSIC.YAHOO] The estate of pop music legend Michael Jackson owes $702 million in federal taxes and penalties, the Internal Revenue Service charged in U.S. Tax Court, accusing the estate of undervaluing some of the star's assets by hundreds of millions of dollars.
[Al Ahram] The Administrative Court ruled on Saturday against the banning of pornography websites in Egypt.
[FOXNEWS] Zim-bob-we's president has threatened to expel foreign-owned companies over what he says is the West's interference in the politics of the country he has 
[Al Ahram] Congolese soldiers fought rebels in the country's volatile east for hours Saturday, officials said, while a rocket landed inside the town of Goma and killed three people as border tensions escalated between Rwanda and Congo.
[REUTERS] Hundreds of teachers in Philadelphia voiced their outrage on Thursday at proposed pay and benefit cuts as public school officials demanded $133 million in concessions from employees because of a financial crisis.
