Beverly Hills Hotel

Mark Whitacre is, according to one biographer, the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower ever. The former Archer Daniels Midland divisional president helped expose his company's involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy that, as actor Matt Damon puts it, "robbed everyone in America and around the world, jacking up the price of everything in their kitchen cupboard." So when Damon and director Steven Soderbergh finally got to make "The Informant!" -- based on Kurt Eichenwald's chronicle of the case -- they naturally went for, well, laughs.

Before the Persian Gulf War exploded in the early 1990s, Cherien Dabis and her family were popular, well-respected members of their adopted Ohio town. Her father, a physician, and mother were Palestinian immigrants from the West Bank and Jordan who'd moved to the United States shortly before Dabis' birth. Dabis says she grew up wanting "so badly" to be an all-American girl. But when the war began, her family went from being treated as friends and neighbors to being turned into pariahs and outcasts.

Reigning European monarchs don't come along every day, not even to Beverly Hills. So it was no surprise that event patrons and other guests at the Rodeo Drive Walk of Style Awards felt privileged to attend a private party at Cartier with Prince Albert II, who arrived from Monaco to represent his mother, the late Princess Grace of Monaco. This year, the city of Beverly Hills and the Rodeo Drive Committee honored both Cartier and Princess Grace with plaques on the famed luxury street.