Lawyers

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

WASHINGTON — Already grappling with regulatory reviews of its troubled initial public offering, Facebook Inc. and the Wall Street banks that shepherded the deal are now under fire from lawmakers and lawyers. Two congressional committees said Wednesday that they would conduct preliminary inquiries into the IPO. And attorneys filed two separate lawsuits alleging that average investors were misled in the days before Facebook shares began trading Friday. "Shareholders suffered billions of dollars in losses," said Darren Robbins, a partner in the San Diego law firm of Robbins Geller Rudman & Dow, which filed one of the suits.

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

The heads of Apple Inc.and Samsung Electronics Co. will sit opposite each other in settlement talks this week, even as the rival smartphone makers continue to blast each other with patent infringement claims. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook was scheduled to participate in a mediation conference with Samsung Chief Executive Gee-Sung Choi in front of a San Francisco judge Monday and Tuesday to discuss how to speed the resolution of a high-profile U.S. patent case. The 13-month-old case in the U.S. District Court in Northern California is one of many around the world that are amounting to a bruising patent war. The two companies have repeatedly accused one another of copying the look and function of their rival's tablets and smartphones.

First of three parts Tiffany Lee wanted a car. She was weary of the two-hour bus ride to her job at a UCLA Health System clinic. She hated having to ask friends to drive her 7-year-old son to his asthma treatments. But as a single mother with three children, bad credit and a $27,000-a-year salary, she couldn't find a bank or dealership willing to give her a loan. Then a friend steered her to Repossess Auto Sales in Hawthorne. Another buyer might have balked at the deal she was offered.

The defense in ex-Sen. John Edwards' campaign finance trial rested its case Wednesday without the former presidential candidate or his former mistress taking the stand. Edwards' attorneys ended their defense after just three days - in contrast to the nearly three weeks that federal prosecutors spent, often through salacious testimony, attempting to show Edwards accepted more than $900,000 in illegal campaign contributions during his 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination to hide his extramarital affair.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

Bob Brickman spent months fighting a ticket he got last fall from a red-light traffic camera at Wilshire and Sepulveda boulevards in West Los Angeles. The 61-year-old from Playa Vista eventually decided to give up the fight and fork over the $476 fine. Now he's regretting paying every penny. City officials this week spotlighted a surprising revelation involving red-light camera tickets: Authorities cannot force violators who simply don't respond to pay them. For a variety of reasons, including the way the law was written, Los Angeles officials say the fines for ticketed motorists are essentially "voluntary" and there are virtually no tangible consequences for those who refuse to pay. The disclosure comes as the city is considering whether to drop the controversial photo enforcement program, with the City Council scheduled to vote on the matter Wednesday.

'Life is short. Have an affair." That's the slogan of the Ashley Madison dating service, a website for people who want to cheat on their partners. That's right, unlike traditional Internet dating sites -- where you're expected to say you're unattached no matter what the truth is -- Ashley Madison is honest about its duplicity. Unlike match.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - His political career is wrecked, his reputation is destroyed. He poisoned his marriage, and his martyred wife died knowing he cheated on her and lied about it to the world. And yet Johnny Reid Edwards has behaved as if he owns the courtroom where the Justice Department has been prosecuting him the last three weeks. He strides into court, his face tanned, his hair perfectly in place, his suit crisp. He grabs his counsel's arm and orders him to object to a prosecutor's question.

NEW YORK Shortly after Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s board learned of famed investor Warren Buffett's $5-billion lifeline at the height of the financial crisis, then-director Rajat Gupta phoned hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam. Rajaratnam, a federal prosecutor said Monday, then used that information when he snapped up Goldman stock before the deal was announced in September 2008. Prosecutors said Gupta helped Rajaratnam make $1 million in just six minutes with the help of illegal inside information.

The gig: As a kid Jamon Hicks spent many afternoons in courtrooms where his mother was a clerk. He still spends a lot of his time in courtrooms, but now Hicks, 32, is a trial attorney with the Cochran Firm in Los Angeles. Also, last month Hicks became president of the California Assn. of Black Lawyers, an organization founded in 1977 that now has more than 6,000 members, including lawyers, judges, law professors and students. Growing up in court: Hicks was raised in Inglewood and Baldwin Hills, and after day care or school he was often whisked to courtrooms where his mother was finishing her workday.

Early in the novel, "Second Person Singular," a main character known throughout the book as "the lawyer" reads a note in his wife's handwriting. "I waited for you, but you didn't come," the note says. "I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow?" The sense of intimacy leaps off the page. But the note was not written for the lawyer. It fell out of a copy of Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" he had just bought from a used-book store.

WASHINGTON — Rusty Hardin, lead attorney for Roger Clemens, got the former pitcher's chief accuser to admit to a series of lies in a day of aggressive cross examination, but did not undermine his credibility with a single grand stroke. Clemens is on trial for perjury, accused of lying to Congress about his use of performance enhancing drugs. Brian McNamee, a former trainer who worked closely with Clemens, admitted that in 2007 he lied to federal agent Jeff Novitzky and the Mitchell Commission, which was investigating performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

WASHINGTON — Brian McNamee, the key prosecution witness in the Roger Clemens perjury trial, said he had never made up details about the pitcher's drug use, but that some of his memories of it had become clearer over time. During cross-examination Wednesday, McNamee, a former strength trainer, described a conversation with Clemens in early 2004 in which the pitcher asked whether McNamee still had a source to obtain steroids. According to McNamee, Clemens told him, "I want to get really huge, I want to get strong.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - His political career is wrecked, his reputation is destroyed. He poisoned his marriage, and his martyred wife died knowing he cheated on her and lied about it to the world. And yet Johnny Reid Edwards has behaved as if he owns the courtroom where the Justice Department has been prosecuting him the last three weeks. He strides into court, his face tanned, his hair perfectly in place, his suit crisp. He grabs his counsel's arm and orders him to object to a prosecutor's question.

WASHINGTON — Brian McNamee, the key prosecution witness in the Roger Clemens perjury trial, said he had never made up details about the pitcher's drug use, but that some of his memories of it had become clearer over time. During cross-examination Wednesday, McNamee, a former strength trainer, described a conversation with Clemens in early 2004 in which the pitcher asked whether McNamee still had a source to obtain steroids. According to McNamee, Clemens told him, "I want to get really huge, I want to get strong.

Mario Batali, the celebrity TV chef and owner of a string of restaurants, is often seen with actress Gwyneth Paltrow, taste-testing the culinary delights of Spain in their public television series "On the Road Again. " Batali took a detour, through his lawyers, to New York federal court in Manhattan, where he was sued and accused of cheating workers of part of their tips for serving wine. He and his associate Joseph Bastianich agreed to pay $5.25 million to settle the class-action lawsuit, according to court papers.

The defense in ex-Sen. John Edwards' campaign finance trial rested its case Wednesday without the former presidential candidate or his former mistress taking the stand. Edwards' attorneys ended their defense after just three days - in contrast to the nearly three weeks that federal prosecutors spent, often through salacious testimony, attempting to show Edwards accepted more than $900,000 in illegal campaign contributions during his 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination to hide his extramarital affair.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - Lawyers for John Edwards spent their second day of defense testimony Tuesday trying to discredit the chief witness against him while also seeking to prove that money paid to support Edwards' mistress constituted private gifts and not illegal campaign contributions. A former FBI agent hired by Edwards' lawyers to investigate money spent by the witness, former aide Andrew Young, testified that Young and his wife claimed they had spent money to support the mistress when in fact they spent much of it on themselves.