George Soros

National political activist George Soros has agreed to pay $8,000 in fines to California's ethics watchdog agency for failing to properly disclose $500,000 in contributions he made to support a state ballot measure that would have curtailed the use of three-strikes sentencing laws against criminals. Soros, a resident of New York, made the contributions to the nonprofit Drug Policy Action Network, which used the funds to support Proposition 66 on California's 2004 ballot. Voters defeated the ballot measure, which would have sharply restricted the three-strikes law. -- Patrick McGreevy

A private equity group headed by billionaire George Soros has entered into exclusive negotiations to acquire the 59-title movie library of DreamWorks SKG from Paramount Pictures, according to sources familiar with the talks. Paramount had been seeking as much as $1 billion for the library, which includes such titles as "Catch Me If You Can," "Gladiator" and "American Beauty." Paramount wants to defray some of the $1.6-billion price tag, which includes cash and assumed debt, to buy DreamWorks.

As expected, Viacom Inc. announced a deal Friday to sell the film library of the recently acquired DreamWorks SKG studio for $900 million to an investment group led by billionaire George Soros. Under the terms of the deal, Soros Strategic Partners and Dune Entertainment II, an affiliate of Dune Capital Management, will acquire 59 live-action titles released through Sept. 15, 2005, by the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

GEORGE SOROS, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor whose fortune is matched only by his philanthropy, pioneered a kind of self-styled approach to global reform that made him, in the words of the Carnegie Endowment's Morton Abramowitz, "the only private citizen who had his own foreign policy." With no sluggish bureaucracy to answer to, he rose to prominence with stunningly practical bequests delivered in a timely manner.

Billionaire investor George Soros failed to erase the only legal blemish on a long financial career when a French appeals court upheld his 3-year-old conviction for insider trading. The Paris Court of Appeal maintained the guilty verdict and the $2.9-million fine handed down by a lower court -- the same amount that Soros made buying and selling Societe Generale shares in 1988 after receiving information about a planned corporate raid on the bank.

More than any other philanthropist, the Hungarian-born emigre George Soros has operated on a global scale. Having survived both the Nazis and the Communists to flee to Britain, where he was educated at the London School of Economics, he came to the United States in 1956 as a young man, to make a fortune and become a paradigm of the American dream.

SPRING is a time of celebration for graduates of the nation's colleges. It is also a time for speeches. National security advisor Condoleezza Rice, former President Clinton, President Bush and financier George Soros were among those offering advice to this year's crop of graduates. What follows are excerpts from their remarks.

His democracy watchdog group had just been ordered out of neighboring Uzbekistan by an authoritarian president who seemed fearful the American billionaire might foment a revolt. But George Soros wasn't pulling any punches. "Unfortunately, the Uzbek government is very repressive," the controversial Hungarian-born philanthropist told reporters here in the Kyrgyz capital in April. "It has 7,000 people in prison for political offenses.

Calling it "the most important election of my lifetime," billionaire George Soros, a Democratic philanthropist and financial supporter of Sen. John F. Kerry, announced Tuesday that he would spend as much as $3 million on a monthlong, multi-state speaking tour criticizing President Bush and his conduct in the Iraq war. "President Bush is undermining the civilized discourse that is the foundation of our democracy," Soros said in a speech at the National Press Club.