COMPANIES

Top-tier law firm Clifford Chance has joined the bonus bandwagon by announcing bonuses that matches the levels of Cravath Swaine & Moore even as some law firms like Cahill Gordon & Reindel and Susman Godfrey have announced fatter payouts.

A federal grand jury has indicted five people in connection with an identity theft and tax fraud conspiracy in the Middle District of Alabama, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has announced.

Mergers & acquisitions (M&A) activity has surpassed $2.2 trillion for the first year since 2007 and it could be still busier in the coming year, according to Thomson Reuters data.

A Texas lawyer and her estranged husband were found dead on a property they own near Canyon Lake in an apparent murder-suicide incident, investigators claim.

Santa Google has extended its free US and Canada VoIP calls service through Gmail to 2011.

Apple's censorship sword falls on Wikileaks app as it is purged from iTunes App Store.

Apple has moved a step forward towards launching its Mac App Store as it announced that its Mac OS X Download site will stop delivering apps from Jan. 6.

Toyota Motors Co has agreed to pay an additional $32.425 million in civil penalties as the result of two separate investigations into the Japanese auto-maker's handling of auto recalls.

Nissan Motor Co on Monday unveiled the all-new Global sedan model 'Sunny' at the 8th China (Guangzhou) International Automobile Exhibition. The model will be launched in China in January 2011 followed by India in the second-half of the next year and progressively across 170 countries.

The lifeblood of retail expansion is same store sales. If same store sales do not increase, any store count expansion becomes a death march. But the big retailers keep expanding out of touch with reality.

Stifel Nicolaus analyst Chris Brendler downgraded American Express because their credit card businses will lose market share to debit cards.

It's tough times for crooks as well, according to the FBI, which released its Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report today, showing declines in all the major violent crime and property crime categories for the first six months of 2010 compared to the first six months of 2009.

New York-traded shares of China Eastern Airlines plunged 4.42 percent and those of China Southern Airlines plunged 2.47 percent in morning trading on tensions between North and South Korea.

Japan's Sharp Corp. plans to expand its smartphone LCD panel production capacity spurred by Apple's plan to buy a major chunk of the LCD screens for its iPhone.

After being crowned Time Person of the Year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is in China and is reported to have visited China's top search engine, Baidu's office.

Online spending in the United States rose 12 percent to $27.5 billion till date this holiday shopping season. Free Shipping Day punctuated an exceptional week in which consumers spent more than $5.5 billion online, representing a 14 percent increase from last year, research firm comScore said.

After a San Francisco Bay Area resident became the first in the United States to receive the delivery of all electric Leaf, Nissan Motors on Saturday carried out its first Leaf delivery in the Seattle region.

India's Tata Group owned Jaguar Land Rover global sales were 79,959 nos. in November 2010, a growth of 6 percent over November 2009.

Honda Japan today said that it will start lease sales of the EV-neo electric scooter on December 24, 2010. Designed as urban delivery vehicles, the scooters are seen by Japan's Ministry of Environment as technology development projects for global warming countermeasures.

General Motors is recalling 111,136 Chevrolet Equinox, GMC Terrain and Cadillac SRX crossover utility vehicles from the 2011 model year due to seat belt buckle anchors that could fail to perform as designed in a crash.

A Detroit-area medical clinic owner has been sentenced to 151 months in prison for his role in a $23 million Medicare fraud scheme, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Health and Human Services (HHS) have announced.

Nigeria has withdrawn charges against former US Vice-President Dick Cheney over a bribery scandal dating from the 1990s when Cheney was chief executive officer of Halliburton Co. (NYSE: HAL).

Howrey's litigation practice co-chair Gary Bendinger has defected with two other partners to Sidley Austin.

A federal jury has found two former engineers of Wyko Tire Technology Inc., guilty of stealing trade secrets from the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Sony has announced that it is bringing its PlayStation platform experience on iPhone and Android via apps.

The explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling platform in Macondo early this year was no less than a cut on the oil industry's artery, out of which gushed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico - a tragedy that devastated the Gulf Coast ecosystem, paralyzed an oil behemoth and thwarted the Big Oil's prospects by attracting a moratorium on deepwater drilling and a crippling regulatory environment.

A real-time translating app that magically turns billboard signs and menus, otherwise incomprehensible in a foreign land, into text that you can understand is now available for iPhones.

Auriga USA upgraded Spreadtrum Communications, saying that the company’s gross margin concerns will be offset market share gains.

Global automobile sales are expected to top 80 million units in 2012 and 118 million units in 2020, according to industry tracking firm JD Power & Associates.