Rain (the Korean pop star, not the weather) arrived in Hawaii on Sunday to defend himself in a lawsuit arising out of the cancellation of a concert there in 2007.
Without a trace of irony, the local press reports that at the airport Rain was greeted by dozens of fans (presumably the same 75 people who bought tickets for the 2007 concert), at least one of whom was in his 70s.
So this guy at work likes to play rap music, peppered with the N word and general nastiness. To make things worse, this same guy likes to sing along, including all the bad words. An African American co-worker complains to the rapper and to management, but nothing happens. The concerts continue every day for several months until management ultimately fires, you guessed it, the African American employee.
Time for a lawsuit!
What makes the case somewhat unusual is that the rapper was Vietnamese American. It’s funny — I almost feel like I know him.
Defendant Novellus Systems, Inc. of Silicon Valley, California, paid $168,000 in settlement of a lawsuit alleging that management’s more than 6 months of inaction contributed to a hostile work environment and that the subsequent firing of the employee was retaliatory.
Hmm. Maybe I should go see a lawyer about that temp job where the jerk in the next cubicle kept singing along to the original cast album of Miss Saigon…
Back in junior high school, when I first heard about publicly-held corporations, I wondered why any corporation going public would sell more than 49% of their voting stock.
The answer is pretty straightforward — it’s all about the Big Bet. Let’s say your share of your corporation is worth $10 million. Would you be willing to risk the possibility of losing control of your baby for the chance of your share being worth $100 million? How about $1 billion? What if I were to throw in a team of the sharpest corporate attorneys on Wall Street (or in Silicon Valley), who will slave away 80-100 hours a week, every week, to keep you in control?
They call it “selling out” for a reason. (And there’s a lesson in here somewhere for any of you Geeks toying with the idea of going to law school…)
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that a Guantanamo detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
To give you an idea of how bad things must have been for the former fruit peddler back in China, Mr. Parhat chose to flee from that country to *Afghanistan*. Things went from bad to worse when the US began rounding up Uighurs in Afghanistan in 2001 and detaining them on the ground that Uighurs were “affiliated” with a resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, that allegedly has ties to known terrorist groups. (Well, if it didn’t *before*…)
Even though it now appears that Mr. Parhat has been wrongfully imprisoned for 6+ years, during which time he conveyed a message to his wife urging her to remarry inasmuch as his confinement at Gitmo ”was like already being dead,” there are no immediate plans to release him.
American officials have said that they cannot return Mr. Parhat and 16 other Uighur detainees at Guantánamo to China for fear of mistreatment…
If you’ve got a few minutes, you might get a chuckle from the quiz at the attached link:
http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/
(I scored a 7 out of 10.)
The Monsters & Critics Asia-Pacific website reports from Phnom Penh that a 70-year-old Cambodian grandmother is seeking a record sexual harassment payout from her 55-year-old, one-legged neighbor:
If only, if only there were some overused, trite, hackneyed cliche to describe the weakness of her case.
