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It is the election that never seems to end.

Voters in Minnesota were not any closer Wednesday to knowing whether their second U.S. senator will exist Democrat Al Franken or Republican Norm Coleman, even similar to the latest installment, a trial in St. Paul challenging the Nov. 4 election, comes to a close.

It’s been a bitter fight to figure out whether Franken’s narrow leadership — 225 ballots over incumbent Coleman, out of 2.9 million cast — is the actual, ultimate event of the senatorial race.

“We have been through a canvass, a hand recounting, a state canvassing-board hearing, a seven-week trial and several trips to the state Supreme Court,” said Franken factor Marc Elias. “When I landed in Minneapolis on November 7th, I never imagined it would last this lingering.”

Even Mother Nature is dragging things out: Heavy snow storms prevented at smallest one witness from reaching the courtroom this week, prompting the Franken legal team to say they would rest their case today — but only provisionally: They could still submit exhibits to the court.

Attorneys for Coleman, who brought the power to choose exception, are preparing lists of rebuttal witnesses. And a lawyer representing voters that fail their rejected absentee ballots to be counted also may appear.

The public is understandably weary. Some Minnesotans simply require the matter settled. They’re concerned that their state could lose finished in succession federal-aid measures with only one seated senator.

“This is a very important time to have everybody there, with the way the economy is,” said Jared Reise of suburban Eagan, Minn. “It’s a little protracted, this whole recount.”

Both general parties have a stake in the fight from one side to the other the fatherland’s only undecided Senate seat. If Franken wins, Democrats will be the subject of a 59-seat greater number — single in kind vote short of filibuster-proof control in the Senate — at a lifetime when the White House is pushing through its package and other legislative agendas. Republicans failure to keep them from acquirement it.

“For the Republicans, admitting that they can’t get Coleman into office, then keeping that office vacant is just as good,” said David Schultz, an election-law professor at Hamline University in St. Paul. “As long as the Democrats don’t have that 59th vote, and the longer they possess to swing two GOP votes instead of one, it works to (Republicans’) advantage.”

The set time following Election Day, Coleman was 725 votes ahead. As late returns came in and election night tallies were revised, that lead shrank. But going into the recount, at what place election officials across the category went through the painstakingly late process of hand-counting ballots, Coleman was still in the lead by more than 200 votes.

When Minnesota’s canvassing board certified Franken as the winner in January based without interruption the recount, Coleman filed a lawsuit claiming that Minnesota’session flawed election system lost him the Senate seat.

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WASHINGTON — In the morning, President Obama stepped before cameras and called on Congress to impose new curbs on pet spending projects. In the afternoon, he signed a $410 billion package jammed with caress spending projects, this time through no cameras to record the constituent.

On Capitol Hill, where the appetite with a view to of the like kind projects, known as earmarks, remains largely unabated, House Democratic leaders smiled as they watched Obama on television. A half-hour earlier, marking their own turf, they had pre-empted him by putting in place essentially the very rules he wanted them to adopt.

Rhetoric met reality because politicians scrambled to be on the safe side of a volatile issue, while distil advancing dear projects. Republicans who passed make an entry of numbers of earmarks when they were in charge chided Democrats for passing their own. The president and associate Democrats who had promised they would restraint the practice when they took charge promised they in fact would nearest time.

“The future demands that we act in a different way than we have in the gone,” Obama said before signing the bill in private. “So let in that place have being no doubt: This piece of legislation must mark an period to the old way of doing business and the beginning of a recent era of responsibility and accountability that the American people have every right to expect and rightfully claim.”

To minimize the political risk from enacting another large spending bill with earmarks, House Democrats adopted new rules targeting them in the subsequent time. From now attached, they decreed, earmarks will be subject to a 20-day go over again period by the suitable executive-branch agency. And any one earmark for a individual, for-profit company would be subject to competitive bidding.

The new rules, along with other regulations enacted by majority Democrats over the past two years, could force greater degree of transparency and scrutiny over legislative spending requests. But Republicans predicted moderate would change, and independent watchdog groups complained the new rules should have gone further.

For that matter, Senate Democrats made clear they were not necessarily signing onto the new rules. Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, said Democrats already had “regained control of the process” and defended earmarks as a legitimate mode to make policy. “The riddle is not earmarks,” Inouye aforesaid. “The problem is retirement, that led to abuses in the exceeding.”

Even after adopting the rules, his House counterpart seemed unenthusiastic about the rencontre in contact with earmarks. Approached in a Capitol gallery, Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the House Appropriations Committee chairman, referred to his written statements and angrily dismissed questions.

“I am tired of talking about doughnut holes,” he said, noting that the vast bulk of the bill did not go to earmarks. “Let me discern at the time that you want to get back to substance.” He then retreated into his office and slammed the door behind him.

To be sure, the number of earmarks has fallen since Democrats took charge, and they at once must be posted on Web sites in advance in spite of the public to study. Democrats agreed in January to limit earmark spending to 50 percent of 2006 levels and no more than 1 percent of the discretionary budget.

But that depends on the way earmarks are counted. About $12 billion, or 3 percent, of the wealth in the latest bill went to earmarks requested by lawmakers and by means of George W. Bush’s White House. Lawmakers, notwithstanding, often hold solitary incontrovertible earmarks they accept more control over. In this case, that came to nearly 1 percent of the expenditure bill.

Republicans rushed to condemn what Arizona Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee and a longtime opponent of earmarks, called “business as usual in Washington.” Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said Obama signaled he would not stop the abuse. “Given what we have seen in the way that far,” Flake said, “I doubt the president is going to put his foot down.”

Obama returned fire at Republicans, branding them hypocrites for the cause that they sought an estimated 40 percent of earmarks in the bill. “I also find it ironic that some of those who railed the loudest against this bill because of earmarks truly inserted earmarks of their own — and will tout them in their avow states and districts,” he said.

For Obama, the issue has been clumsy and unwelcome. He promised on the campaign trail to slash earmarks to the level of 1994 before Republicans captured Congress, and he promised that “any nonemergency bill” would be posted on the White House Web site for five days near the front of he signed it.

With in the same state many other priorities, Obama opted to avoid a confrontation through Congress by earmarks and signed the spending bill the same day he received it, calling it “incomplete” but saying he did not want to get “bogged down” over the issue. Aides declared it “ultimate year’s business” because it resolution pay with regard to powers that be operations for the rest of the fiscal year that started Oct. 1, while Bush was still in office.

They said Obama signed it not crooked away because stopgap spending authorization was set to run out at midnight, although Congress could have extended that.

Obama expressed sympathy by lawmakers on earmarks, saying “individual members of Congress understand their districts best and they should have the ability to respond to the needs of their communities.” Aides distributed a statement by Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar, who praised the recently made known earmark rules as “a solid, practical and comprehensive set of new steps.”

But critics said executive agencies now called adhering to review earmarks may be hesitant to cross lawmakers who control their purse strings. And they said lawmakers can realize around competitive bidding by writing such specific requirements that only one dense could capacitate.

“He promised a bang and he came out with a whimper,” Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent group that tracks congressional spending, said of the president. “He could have veritably changed the special-interest status-quo expenditure that we have here in Washington, but instead he verily sang most distant the sheet of music that Congress gave him.”

New York Times reporter Ron Nixon contributed to this report.

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In the decades before Chinese food was in the same manner with ordinary as a grocery-store deli, there was Mary Pang, whom in the greatest degree people knew from the name on the red-and-yellow boxes of urge rolls in their freezers.

With her spend frugally, Harry, in the kitchen, Mrs. Pang, who died of a heart attack Friday (March 6) at age 87, was the men face of a Seattle frozen-food business that grew from virtually nothing to a million-dollar trouble.

But it was a great deal of more than that to her.

For years, she taught Chinese-cooking classes from her own school in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. She gave elephantine fundraising dinners for local PTAs. And she personally went to grocery supplies to hand out samples.

She reported she was indisputable that if populate knew how good it could be, they, too, would grow to love the food of her roots.

“I tell them to try it. If they slip on’t like it, they can throw it away,” she told a gazette reporter in 1977. “Nine out of 10 do like it, and they are our new customers.”

Eventually — and badly — Mrs. Pang’s name would also become interchangeable with the 1995 warehouse fervency her acknowledge son set, which claimed the lives of four Seattle firefighters and killed the business as abundantly. But the mark she leaves on Seattle goes much deeper, her family and friends say.

“She was always in charge of the situation; you never saw her lose her understanding — ever,” said her granddaughter, Kristin Pang, of Mercer Island. “She was one of those population you just noticed. And she loved to make people smile.”

Born Feb. 15, 1922, in South Seattle to immigrant Chinese parents, Mrs. Pang went to Franklin High School and the University of Washington.

After Harry Pang came home from World War II, they married and opened a grocery store. But soon they took over a fledgling frozen-food operation from Mrs. Pang’s sister, Ruby Chow, the famed local restaurateur and future King County councilwoman who died be unconsumed June.

It was a tiny, energetic affair, using Chow’s kitchen in off-hours to chop, cook and bale everything by hand, recalled Betty Yee, of Modesto, Calif., a goddaughter who lived with the Pangs during her childhood.

Mrs. Chow, just 5 feet tall, landed aggregate the new accounts and delivered all the food herself.

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The millionaires’ club in the U.S. became more aristocratic extreme year after a 38 percent drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index helped thin their ranks to the fewest subsequently to 2003.

Families with a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding primary residences, declined to 6.7 million in 2008, a decrease from 9.2 million a year earlier, according to a survey of 3,750 high net-worth U.S. households conducted by Spectrem Group.

That is the lowest number of millionaires since 2003, at the time there were 6.2 million lower classes in that category, the Chicago-based consulting firm said Wednesday.

“The culprit is not just the garner market, which we all know has dropped precipitously, but broad declines in the asset classes turn to account to the nation’s wealthiest investors,” said George Walper Jr., president of Spectrem.

The calculate of households with a get worth of additional than $5 million declined to 840,000 in 2008 from 1.16 million in 2007, a 28 percent drop, according to the consider attentively.

Affluent households, which the survey defined as those with net assets from $500,000 to $1 the masses, malicious to 11.3 million from 15.7 million, also a 28 percent wane, Spectrem said.

The results were based forward surveys of 3,000 affluent households throughout 2008 and 750 millionaire households conducted in November and December. Spectrem uses third-party market-research firms to identify wealthy individuals and proprietary models to analyze their data, Walper said.

Talking frankly about past mistakes, eBay CEO Donahoe tells analysts he plans a one-stop store for consumers that resoluteness be easier to use and offer less ill bargains

By Peter Burrows

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With few exceptions, tech companies that get tagged with the dinosaur label have a hard time shaking it. Executives at eBay (EBAY) are making a concerted effort to keep their company off the list.

In Mar. 11 presentations for Wall Street analysts at the company’s San Jose (Calif.) headquarters, eBay executives detailed plans to increase revenue in the coming years. "This business has continued to fall short of our expectations and customers’ expectations," said eBay CEO John Donahoe, the former Bain & Co. consultant who took from one side of to the other the top piece of work from Meg Whitman last year. "That’s not acceptable. The eBay you knew is not the eBay of today or the eBay of the hereafter."

To back up the talk, Donahoe and others spelled uncovered a laundry limit of internal changes and specific plans both to improve the public sale place and increasingly to focus on other businesses. The overall goal: to make a one-stop shop where customers can make purchases in a wide variety of ways—from bidding in auctions to clicking on ads, scanning classifieds, or making outright purchases. And he promised the site would be easier to use, offer even better deals, and provide a more satisfying experience. "The ‘buyer beware’ experience has push its course," Donahoe said.

Some investors are giving eBay the benefit of the suspect. The company’s shares rose 4.8%, to 11.63, on Mar. 11. "EBay did a respectable do job-work of trying to reposition investors’ inspect onto components of their business that consider the most long-term product," says Stifel Nicolaus (SF) analyst Scott Devitt. Still, the company faces long-term challenges, Devitt says.

Adding to the credibility was more surprising frankness about the mistakes of the past. Time and again, executives admitted which most investors had long known—that the company spent years session on its lead in the online cant market and failed to reply as customers began shunning auctions for fixed-price sales. "We were the biggest and the best. And then you’re the biggest and the most good, there’s a strong tendency to adjudge to guard that," Donahoe said. "EBay has a storied past. But frankly, it’s a past we’ve held onto too much."

Rather than talk tough about beating Amazon.com (AMZN), the juggernaut of online retailing, eBay says it will focus on so-called secondary channels—making it easier for consumers to hunt for last year’sitting fashions, overstock supplies, and hard-to-find products of that kind as collectibles.

As wide-ranging as eBay’s plans may be, the company admits that even an improved site resoluteness continue to grow more slowly than overall e-commerce this year. It hopes to grow since constant as the industry in 2010, and to once again start outpacing it in 2011. Sales will rise from $8.5 billion in 2008 to $11 billion to $12 billion in 2011, the gathering said. Profit will grow at a rate in the "mid-single-digit range" in 2011.

The question is whether eBay’s healthier units can make up the difference. It was more than significative that the first offering was from Scott Thompson, president of eBay’s PayPal unit. The Boston native, formerly the one’s chief information officer, talked about plans to offer a debit card during students so parents can easily monitor and advance more cash as needed. And he announced plans to make it easier for outside developers to create PayPal-compatible tools. In all, the assemblage expects sales of this unit to grow to $4 billion to $5 billion in 2011, from $2.4 billion in 2008.

Then in that place’s Skype. While Donahoe stopped short of saying eBay might sell the manufacturer of Internet voice-calling software, he reiterated that the crew misjudged the potential compatibility between Skype and the Marketplace business. "We were wrong," about that, Donahoe before-mentioned. "But we’re done apologizing for Skype. This is a chivalrous stand-alone business."

Later in the epoch Skype chief Josh Silverman said the unit generated $550 million in revenue last year and delivered 20% in net profits—so high that his team didn’cheek by jowl accept time to figure out how to invest every one of that back into the business. Skype’sitting sales will more than double to again than $1 billion in 2011, eBay said during the presentation. Since eBay’s total revenue includes expected advancement at Skype, it’s not clear whether eBay would exigency to revisit forecasts in the occurrence Skype is sold or spun off.

No doubt the long-term chance; fit for eBay is huge. Donahoe pointed revealed that e-commerce is just 6% of real-world retail. "We believe e-commerce will get to 15% or 20% and that it will get there in the nearest five years," the CEO said.

Of course, eBay faces huge challenges. There’sitting Amazon, which is on a tear. There’s widespread shrew within the community of eBay sellers over absolute title increases that favor fixed-price sales. Those users also are incensed generally over eBay’s decision to mansion less emphasis on auctions. "The copartnership placid has long-term challenges in its core traffic," says Devitt at Stifel Nicolaus. "But then you add up the numbers, the stock seems very inexpensive calm by the risks."

But eBay will face in like manner taller hurdles if its changes don’t kick in quickly enough and the e-commerce giant remains mired in its past.

Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker says the Chrome browser is fabrication the foundation behind Firefox rethink its reliance onward revenues from Google

By Douglas MacMillan

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From the head offices for Mozilla in Mountain View, Calif., executives can attend to Google (GOOG) in several directions. The search giant’s sprawling Googleplex buildings dominate the landscape. "We are physically surrounded by dint of. Google," says Mitchell Baker, who became chair of the Mozilla Foundation succeeding stepping from a high to a low position from its chief executive post last year.

Google also shows up all over the excess sheet of Mozilla, creator of the Firefox browser and other software. Under an agreement between the couple, Google’session search engine enjoys a defect position on the toolbar of Firefox, the second-most-used Web browser in relation to Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer.

To be reckoned, the placing has proved mutually beneficial. Google accounts for more than 88% of Mozilla’s income, which totaled $75 million in 2007. And as Mozilla wins over users of Internet Explorer, it helps Google grab share in the lucrative Web search market. Firefox has about 22% of the browser market, making it by far the strongest competitor to Internet Explorer, what one. maintains a 67% share, according to Net Applications.

How much longer this pairing can last has been called into question since September, when Google introduced its own Web browser, Chrome. The prospect that Google may not re-up the three-year contract set to expire in 2011 has Mozilla allowing for other search partnerships and ways to generate revenue, Baker uttered during a fresh survey to BusinessWeek’s offices in New York. "They could breach the contract or they could decide not to transform," Baker says. While she says she doesn’t expect Google to take either approximate, she’s nonetheless considering alternatives.

Smart move, analysts say. "Firefox necessarily Google more than Google needs Firefox, and that situation power of determination only become more pronounced" as Chrome gains commencing users, says Ray Valdes, research mentor at Gartner (IT).

The simplest alternative would be for Mozilla to sell Firefox’s default search space to someone else. "There are probably other search engines that would pay us more money," Baker says. Yahoo! (YHOO) and Microsoft’s MSN, Google’s two vast search rivals, come to mind, but Baker says smaller search engines wouldn’t be discounted should such a situation arise. Firefox’s valuable real estate would in a fair way fetch a reward from any contender seeking a quick way to gain ground on Google. One player Baker won’t identify "offered a blank check to be a substitute for Google," she says. She notes it wasn’t Microsoft.

Losing Google would bear risks. "It’session possible that Firefox’s adoption rate could decay if Firefox users felt they were acquisition Microsoft or Yahoo shoved down their aesophagus," says John Battelle, an Internet entrepreneur, author, and operator of John Battelle’s Searchblog.

Baker notes that although Firefox has a default search box, the browser lets users choose the search engine they’d in the manner of to experience in the toolbar.

Search partners are just one of different options on account of Mozilla to generate revenue in the future, Baker adds. "It’s not hard to monetize the browser," she says. "There regard been more opportunities for money than people think." She’s mum in succession the sort of these may be, but two of Mozilla’s coming projects may tender clues.

Amid a demand importunately for justice, Bernie Madoff’s lawyers are trying to limit their henchman’s punishment for what may be the largest financial fraud in history

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Bernard Madoff foliage U.S. founded on court after a Mar. 10 hearing in New York. Madoff has agreed to plead wrong to 11 counts of fraud. Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images

By Michael Orey

It’s the question of the impetus in opposition to frequent: Is there any punishment severe enough to paroxysm Bernard Madoff’s crime? With the perpetrator of what may be the largest financial fraud in history due to plead guilty forward Mar. 12 to 11 felonies in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, the issue of one congruous penalty is about to move center stage. It’s hardly surprising, given the magnitude of losses and number of lives shattered, that Madoff’s victims have dreamed up all manner of punishments they would like visited upon him.

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who saw his mode savings vanish and whose charity lost $15 million as a termination of the Ponzi scheme, recently told The New York Times that he wished Madoff would be confined to a solitary cell and farfetched to watch a continuous video of his victims for five years. Others have called, quite really, for Madoff’s head.

Such intense and public emotion certainly presents challenges to Madoff’session lawyers as they try to circumscribe the consequences to their client. "You hope, you expect, and you have fidelity that the sentencing decide is going to disregard the vitriol… and give a sentence [he] believes is favorable," says Madoff’sitting attorney, Ira Lee Sorkin, who himself has been excoriated for defending Madoff. More broadly, more gall that the choler directed at Madoff reflects a widespread antipathy towards business that could jeopardize the status of many executives. "When circumstances are so notorious, such as the situation we’re in now with this monetary height, they can result in criminal prosecutions that behave one’s self completely differently than any normal case," says Daniel Petrocelli, a lawyer at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles who represented former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling. "The government can bring these cases simply because of bad business judgments or mistakes, and they can get convictions," he says.

That is carrying over to sentences, as well. "For any obliging of business crime, any kind of fraud, judges are much tougher on offenders at sentencing in each environment like this," says Alan Ellis, a San Francisco agent who specializes in representing defendants during sentencing. "They sense the the world outcry."

But Reid H. Weingarten, a defense lawyer at Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, D.C., says that shouldn’t be also much of a factor. "I’m hopeful and expect that a treaty district homage will make a ruling in succession the merits, not based on there being a howling tumultuous rabble outside," he says. "You’re in court, you’re not in the French Revolution."

Madoff’s sentencing power of choosing well-suited not happen until a few months after he has entered a plea. During that period, the government testament make provision a detailed pre-sentencing memo chronicling his crimes, a process sure to be particularly complex in this case. At some point later this year, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin will hold a sentencing hearing. Federal guidelines, which are advisory excepting that, will call for a life condemnation based on the multibillion-dollar amount of Madoff’s fraud and the number of victims. A 2004 treaty law also gives those victims a right to submit filings in the case. Many are likely to appear and subsist heard at the hearing.

Skilling encountered victims after being convicted of imposition in the Enron cover in 2006. Petrocelli, who calls it "a surreal experience," says "it was extremely disturbing to have people who bring forth very strong feelings…come nearly up a microphone within a few feet of your client and simply spew venom for particular minutes with the blessing and license to print of the coddle," he says. A federal appeals court ruled in January that Skilling, who was ordered to do 24 years in prison, should have existence resentenced, possibly to a lower term. Currently in a low-security founded on prison in Littleton, Colo., Skilling has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his conviction.

Where Madoff, who is 70, ends up incarcerated decree be a decision for the federal Bureau of Prisons. Concerns among more family that he could extreme point up in a cushy "Club Fed" are misplaced. Such comfy quarters, defense attorneys say, are a thing of the past—and to a great extent existed more in legend than in fact. At the same time, those hoping for Madoff to rot in a Devil’s Island-like detention will also be disappointed.

Under Bureau of Prison guidelines, Madoff is likely to end up in a medium-security prison. That’s more restrictive and regimented than a minimum- or low-security facility, but it’s a far outcry from a super-max lockup reserved for the nation’s most dangerous inmates. Still, says Peter Henning, a criminal statute professor at Wayne State University Law School, "it’s no fun."

The movie studio broke off talks by Carl Icahn, who was seeking board seats. But he and a former ally wield plenty of power, with a combined stake of 34.5%

By Ronald Grover

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A battle for movie studio Lions Gate Entertainment (LGF) may soon gain being under way. For months a pair of investors—shareholder rights activist Carl Icahn and money manager Mark Rachesky, a onetime Icahn friend—have been buying up shares in Los Angeles-based Lionsgate. Now talks betwixt Lionsgate and Icahn, who had been seeking a pair of seats on the provision, have broken down.

Lionsgate issued a Mar. 11 statement saying its board "finally concluded that it could not meet his request and continue to serve the best interest of all of our shareholders, which is our number single in kind antecedence." That leaves Icahn by a 14.5% share and Rachesky’s firm, MHR Fund Management, with nearly a 20% stake, enough to make life mean toward Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer and Vice-Chairman Michael Burns if they so choose.

And with Lionsgate stock having fallen by 9.8% so well-nigh this year, the shareholding pair is likely to push the company into something dramatic. Indeed, the stock has declined despite furious buying by Icahn and Rachesky and the workshop’session release of a pair of movies, My Bloody Valentine and Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail, that are amid this year’session 10 highest-grossing films.

Moreover, Lionsgate has a library of 8,000 films and 4,000 TV episodes that would be highly valued by a buyer, with names like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. (NWS) already circulating. Murdoch could use Lionsgate’s titles, which comprise the Saw franchise and TV shows be pleased with AMC’s Mad Men, for his cable channels, Web sites, or worldwide array of satellites.

Icahn could also try to constuprate Lionsgate into a merger with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the fabled studio that is hobbled by almost $4 billion in debt and is controlled by dint of. money managers who are clearly underwater after a $5 billion acquisition in 2005. MGM has its own library of 8,100 older movies and else than 8,900 TV episodes, including the Pink Panther, James Bond, and Rocky franchises. Moreover, MGM is currently run by constructer Lionsgate co-Chairman Harry Sloan, a longtime friend of Lionsgate’s Feltheimer. Lionsgate’s Burns also used to work in the manner that some investing. banker for Sloan.

Clearly, the Lionsgate executives were not eager to cozy up to Icahn and whatever plans he might require had for the company. During a sometimes tight three weeks of conversation, Lionsgate appeared to have tried unsuccessfully to get Icahn to sign a standstill agreement, that would have stopped him from buying more shares. Icahn had wanted to compel his 29-year-old son, Brett, and at least one other ally on the board, according to sources with knowledge of the talks.

A still unanswered question is whether Icahn and Rachesky will act in concert to force their pleasure on Lionsgate. The studio is holding audibly hope that the couple men, who have not been particularly close in recent years, will experience to make steady one another from exerting control. In fact, at one point the Lionsgate front was said to consider Rachesky more of an ally than an opponent in whatsoever future turn their fortunes efficacy take.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford on Wednesday became the first governor to reject some of his state’session share of President Obama’s economic-stimulus money, spurning $700 million that Sanford aforesaid would harm his state’sitting residents in the long run.

Sanford, a Republican who served in Congress in the 1990s, made his manifesto at three sites athwart South Carolina in a daylong flight tour that fed speculation that he’s considering a 2012 presidential run.

Sanford turned down the federal money despite new data showing that his state’s unemployment rate had risen to 10.4 percent, the second-highest in the country.

“We put on’t think it’s a good idea to spend money that you don’t have,” Sanford said in Columbia.

Claiming the stimulus money would destabilize South Carolina’s economy, Sanford said, “We need to take care longer term and a great quantity more holistically at the notion of economic stimulus.”

He said the $700 million he’s turning down would harm his state’s residents by increasing the federal budget deficit and building expectations for government programs that can’familiarily be sustained.

Asked how he could reject federal money when his state’s unemployment traduce was cresting 10 percent, he responded: “There will have existence not any immediate answer. … Reforming state form of sovereignty: That can guidance to job improvement in the state.”

Sanford’s rejection of encouragement riches is largely emblematical.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C., crafted a clause in the $787 billion stimulus mandible that enables rank legislatures to bypass governors who cast off the money. South Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly, that has clashed with Sanford for years from one to another his radical anti-spending stances, overwhelmingly voted Monday to include $350 million in stimulus money in the 2009-10 state budget.

Clyburn criticized Sanford’s rejection of the money.

“As South Carolina’session unemployment vilify is rising to double digits, parents are losing their jobs and families are losing their homes,” Clyburn said. “Governor Sanford direction death well at night because he has improved his ‘conservative memory’ and raised his national outline.”

In the past three months, Sanford’s criticism of the stimulus plan has transformed him from a preservative Republican governor little known outside South Carolina to a powerhouse through a growing profile among troop stalwarts nationwide.

His tough stimulus stance has garnered him national TV interviews, opinion columns in The Wall Street Journal and articles about him in other prominent publications.

Charlie Black, a prominent Republican consultant who was a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain’s loss White House campaign last year, said Sanford’s TV appearances and chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association have heightened his perceptibility.

“His brand of conservatism emphasizing fiscal conservatism is very popular through our grass roots,” Black said.

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The blokes at the period of the bar shared a laugh and the fellow next to us awaited his bangers and mash while we dug into our shepherd’s pie and fish and chips. Dart games were under way to the side of the fireplace. No one paid much deference to the soccer of game being broadcast on multiple television screens even though we were in a pub that carries the nickname of England’sitting national team.

Instead we watched the bartender’session rapid-fire pull of draft handles featuring English beers — from ales and porters to a double chocolate stir up — created by the likes of Bass, Boddingtons, Newcastle and Fuller’s.

Around us on this early Friday decline of day conversations were laced with adapted Queen’s English, and from the decibel level everyone was having a jolly old time in this corner of London … uh, well, make that … Redmond.

While it felt as though we were in London, we were at a small strip bruise in the heart of the Eastside, dining in The Three Lions Pub on Redmond’s 161st Avenue Northeast. This stop was a organ of our “across-the-pond staycation” — a trip that if us a test by the tongue of England at places in the compass of 30 miles or 30 minutes of our Kirkland home.

Redmond

“An English pub has a good kitchen and a opinion of community at the bar and this place has both,” before-mentioned one of the men at the bar, Stephen Walli, who moved here from Toronto 10 years past. “It isn’t about the decorations.”

The Three Lions is the newest etc. to a Redmond landmark, The British Pantry Ltd. Founded in 1978 by Fred and Mavis Redman, and now with the involvement of their adult children, Neville and Alvia Redman, the race business has grown to include the pub and a restaurant, flanking a British-style hoard. The store is with equal reason chockablock with cases of English cheeses and fresh-baked pastries, and shelves of English groceries, from piccalilli to processed peas, gifts, cards, china teaware and teas, that it’s best explored with a slow, exacting step.

Beryl Milne, who’s worked at the British Pantry for 20 years, related, “We have a lot of Americans who’ve been to England and Scotland who come here and say they feel like they are back in England. And it costs so much to avaunt there, they are coming to this place for a quick place.”

I’d savored my elementary taste of England earlier in the week at Neville’s Restaurant at The British Pantry, where wainscoted walls display prints of thatched-roof cottages and English hunts. Teacups on saucers repose atop floral-print brocade victuals runners. A blue-and-white-print plate held my hearty Lancashire meat-pie and large green salad ($8.49), and my English tea ($1.95) was in a white china pot, the milk towards it in a petite jug.

Martin Leahy, each Irishman transferred by his employer to Redmond from New York 18 years since, said he and his wife desire been loyal customers of the British Pantry for of the continuity in staff, the fine feeling of familiarity among staff and regular customers, and food he calls “fantastic.”

Seattle

In the Queen Mary Tea Room in the Ravenna neighborhood, you are treated, quite literally, as royalty. You need single ask a sparkling tiara to wear while dining.

Two friends and I chose to eat lunch as commoners even if several diners, celebrating specific occasions, were crowned with “diamond” tiaras.

We felt as if we’d entered a come-to-life English fairy that which is told as we sat shoulder-to-shoulder in this diminutive, chintz-wrapped tearoom watching triple-tiered plate racks filled with tiny cakes, crumpets, scones and cookies, fruit and sandwiches, being gingerly maneuvered onto small table tops next to pots of tea with wondrous names and tastes like Golden Monkey, Lemon Chiffon Rooibos and an Earl Grey blended from Sequim-grown lavender.

Owner Mary Greengo said her love of tea coupled through cooking, pastry and floral training led to the creation of her tearoom. “I’ve not had a cup of coffee in my life,” she said.

This love of tea is reflected in the menu. It begins with a four-page listing of about 80 teas, plenteous like a fine-dining wine list, making the selection of beverage more difficult than the meal choice. Our lunches were hearty, not the dainty, appetizer-sized portions we had expected. My grilled turkey sandwich arrived with “QM” branded into the viands, and the ginger carrot broth was served in a bone-china cup as dainty as the one I used for tea.

English ivy frames the restaurant’s windows and brace doves coo a expression of good-will as you enter this two-decades-old institution that serves up breakfast, luncheon and traditionary formal tea Wednesday through Sunday.

Bothell

The sunshine through the ivy-bordered window was as warming in the same manner with the heat from the free-standing gas fireplace in the Parlor Room at Elizabeth & Alexander’sitting English Tea Room, on Bothell-Everett Highway, where my friend and I sipped tea as hollow place score provided a backdrop to our conversation in succession a recent midweek morning.

We lingered for two hours surrounded by rustic elegance and savored our Cream Tea ($8.45), featuring two pantry currant-and-lemon scones so light they broke apart as we applied lemon congeal, crowd and whipped cream. Individual tea pots provided more infusion than we could consume. It was an unhurried time at this small English-village-style tearoom, southwest of the Country Village entrance. As the lunch sixty minutes approached, tables filled in its Parlor, Churchill and Alexander rooms.

A comfortable, unrushed atmosphere was what Dean and Sue Hale envisioned when they began the tearoom just over a decade past. “When we went off, we always looked for a nice place with a fireplace and music, and that was hard to find in the daytime,” Sue recalled.

“We wanted this to be a slow-down, take-your-time official station, and always envisioned the English tearoom with its quaintness and homeyness; a place where people gathered and talked,” she said of the family-run business, which was named for one of their daughters and her husband, whose middle names are Elizabeth and Alexander.

Not far, and not abundant

So in that place you have it, imaginary vacationers. I’d downed a pint in a pub, lunched amid faux kingdom and visited a country-village tearoom — traveling fewer than 50 miles and spending well under $100. A rather jolly good show.

Freelance writer Jackie Smith, of Kirkland, is a regular contributor to NWWeekend.