COMPANIES

Pop star Britney Spears has recently purchased a nearly 20,000 square foot Tudor-style mansion in hidden Hills area of Los Angeles. The house is situated on a 3.39-acre village-like estate and comes with an entertainment complex with arcade, wood-paneled ballroom, fitness center, poker playing room, and even staff apartments.

Mortgage foreclosures “have clearly turned the corner,” said the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) chief economist Jay Brinkmann.

IBM announced an agreement with Nuance Communications, a speech recognition provider, to develop and commercialize Watson's advanced analytics capabilities in the health-care industry.

A former U.S. Customs inspector was arrested on Tuesday after he disguised himself as a postman and attempted to smuggle a Mexican woman into Texas on false documents, U.S. Customs and Border Protection authorities said.

A Beverly Hills attorney has been sentenced to four months in county jail after he pleaded no contest to a single charge of attempting to smuggle black tar heroin into the downtown Los Angeles courthouse.

Borders Group, owner of the second largest U.S. bookstore chain, said in its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing that it will close down around 200 stores nationwide, sending store landlords into a tizzy.

The fate of Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., a former Pennsylvania judge who has been charged with racketeering, fraud, money laundering, extortion, bribery and federal tax violations, lies in the hands of the 12-member jury, who began their deliberations Wednesday.

Dell's roadmap for 2011 with details and probable launch dates of Android and WP7 devices, wound its way into Android Central and wpcentral's lap.

Bank of China Ltd, the country's fourth-biggest lender, plans to set up a second headquarters in Shanghai, giving a boost to the city's global ambitions, local media reported on Thursday.

In the end Watson tripled the score of his competitors and proved machine is better than man on Jeopardy!

Health care company Allergan said the FDA has approved the wider use of its Lap-Band weight-loss system.

Google has announced its Google One Pass service, a flexible business model platform for publishers to take on Apple's recently launched subscription service for publishers.

Lexus, the luxury car division of Toyota Motor Corporation, is working hard to create a trendy new image and appeal to the younger generation by performing a new publicity stunt with Dutch supermodel Rianne Ten Haken.

Manu Sporny, founder and CEO of Virginia-based Digital Bazaar, became the first person in the world to release his own genetic data as an open source project.

Japanese major Honda's Indian subsidiary Honda Siel Cars India (HSCI) announced on Thursday that it was recalling 57,853 units of its mid-sized sedan City in the country for replacing a faulty engine part.

Japanese auto major Honda said on Thursday that it will recall more than 693,497 units of the Freed, Fit and City company models globally due to defective parts that could stall the engine and cause problems restarting.

JPMorgan has slashed its target price on mobile operator Reliance Communications by 49 percent to 82 rupees, citing lower estimates for wireless and broadband segments and issues related to spectrum regulations.

Indian refiner Essar Oil is set to buy Royal Dutch Shell's Stanlow refinery in the United Kingdom for about $350 million to $400 million, two sources with direct knowledge of the development told Reuters.

Visa and banks will press lawmakers on Thursday for relief from a proposed slashing of debit card processing fees, an issue that has attracted bipartisan support for softening the impact of part of the Dodd-Frank financial law.

New York City's bank tax collections ran 48 percent above a year-ago, one of several taxes whose encouraging performance might give Mayor Michael Bloomberg some extra cash to spend in next year's budget.

One of Watson's collaborators, Eric Nyberg from Carnegie Mellon University, shares the robot's strengths, weaknesses and its future.

Clay Aiken, the American singer, songwriter, actor, producer, and author who began his rise to fame on the second season of a television program American Idol in 2003, has listed his mansion outside Raleigh, NC on the market for $2,700,000.

The Kids for Cash trial resumed this week with former Pennsylvania Judge mark Ciavarella's attorneys trying to undermine the credibility of the prosecution witnesses and the accused vehemently claiming that though he has committed tax fraud, he never extorted money from others or took bribe in return for sending juveniles to a private detention center.

U.S. oil giant Chevron Corp. said it will challenge the ruling of an Ecuadorean judge who has ordered it to pay a record $9.5 billion fine after holding it responsible for polluting a wide swath of Amazon rainforest in Ecuador from 1972 to 1992 while it operated in a consortium with state-run Petroecuador.

A Connecticut ambulance company has settled with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB ) a lawsuit involving the firing of an employee who had published negative remarks about her boss on her Facebook page.

Wragge & Co has played a leading role in advising the UK's largest branded food producer Premier Foods Plc on the £182m sale of its canned groceries business to rival Princes.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has sued a former CEO and two former CFOs of failed mortgage lender IndyMac Bankcorp, accusing them of securities fraud.

Metzler, Timm, Treleven, Pahl, Beck, S.C., a Green Bay-based law firm has offered to donate money towards the cost of renaming a street in honor of Packers coach Mike McCarthy after his team emerged victorious in the Super Bowl.

Joerg Kretschmer, who was last week found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and handed down a 21-month suspended sentence for enabling his 17-year old son to go on a shooting rampage in 2009, has appealed the verdict.