The death of bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who masterminded the Sept. 11 terror attacks, received 128 first-place votes out of 247 ballots cast for the top 10 stories. The Japan disaster was next, with 60 first-place votes. Placing third were the Arab Spring uprisings that rocked North Africa and the Middle East, while the European Union’s financial turmoil was No. 4.

The international flavor of these top stories contrasted with last year’s voting — when the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was the top story, President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul was No. 2, and the U.S. midterm elections were No. 3.

Here are 2011′s top 10 stories, in order:

—OSAMA BIN LADEN’S DEATH: He’d been the world’s most-wanted terrorist for nearly a decade, ever since a team of his al-Qaida followers carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In May, the long and often-frustrating manhunt ended with a nighttime assault by a helicopter-borne special operations squad on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden was shot dead by one of the raiders, and within hours his body was buried at sea.

—JAPAN’S TRIPLE DISASTER: A 9.0-magnitude earthquake off Japan’s northeast coast in March unleashed a tsunami that devastated scores of communities, leaving nearly 20,000 people dead or missing and wreaking an estimated $218 billion in damage. The tsunami triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl after waves knocked out the cooling system at a nuclear power plant, causing it to spew radiation that turned up in local produce. About 100,000 people evacuated from the area have not returned to their homes.

—ARAB SPRING: It began with demonstrations in Tunisia that rapidly toppled the longtime strongman. Spreading like a wildfire, the Arab Spring protests sparked a revolution in Egypt that ousted Hosni Mubarak, fueled a civil war in Libya that climaxed with Moammar Gadhafi’s death, and fomented a bloody uprising in Syria against the Assad regime. Bahrain and Yemen also experienced major protests and unrest.

—EU FISCAL CRISIS: The European Union was wracked by relentless fiscal turmoil. In Greece, austerity measures triggered strikes, protests and riots, while Italy’s economic woes toppled Premier Silvio Berlusconi. France and Germany led urgent efforts to ease the debt crisis; Britain balked at proposed changes.

—US ECONOMY: By some measures, the U.S. economy gained strength as the year progressed. Hiring picked up a bit, consumers were spending more, and the unemployment rate finally dipped below 9 percent. But millions of Americans remained buffeted by foreclosures, joblessness and benefit cutbacks, and investors were on edge monitoring the chain of fiscal crises in Europe.

—PENN STATE SEX ABUSE SCANDAL: One of America’s most storied college football programs was tarnished in a scandal that prompted the firing of Hall of Fame football coach Joe Paterno. One of his former assistants, Jerry Sandusky, was accused of sexually molesting 10 boys; two senior Penn State officials were charged with perjury; and the longtime president was ousted. Paterno wasn’t charged, but expressed regret he didn’t do more after being told there was a problem.

—GADHAFI TOPPLED IN LIBYA: After nearly 42 years of mercurial and often brutal rule, Moammar Gadhafi was toppled by his own people. Anti-government protests escalated into an eight-month rebellion, backed by NATO bombing, that shattered his regime, and Gadhafi finally was tracked down and killed in the fishing village where he was born.

—FISCAL SHOWDOWNS IN CONGRESS: Partisan divisions in Congress led to several showdowns on fiscal issues. A fight over the debt ceiling prompted Standard & Poor’s to strip the U.S. of its AAA credit rating. Later, the so-called “supercommittee” failed to agree on a deficit-reduction package of at least $1.2 trillion — potentially triggering automatic spending cuts of that amount starting in 2013.

—OCCUPY WALL STREET PROTESTS: It began Sept. 17 with a protest at a New York City park near Wall Street, and within weeks spread to scores of communities across the U.S. and abroad. The movement depicted itself as leaderless and shied away from specific demands, but succeeded in airing its complaint that the richest 1 percent of Americans benefit at the expense of the rest. As winter approached, local police dismantled several of the protest encampments.

—GABRIELLE GIFFORDS SHOT: The popular third-term congresswoman from Arizona suffered a severe brain injury when she and 18 other people were shot by a gunman as she met with constituents outside a Tucson supermarket in January. Six people died, and Giffords’ painstaking recovery is still in progress.

Among the news events falling just short of the Top 10 were the death of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, Hurricane Irene, the devastating series of tornados across Midwest and Southeastern U.S., and the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that barred gays from serving openly in U.S. military.

“Apparently I said somethings that offended little Kermit and Miss Piggy the past few days, and I apologize, I didn’t mean to say anything to offend you guys,” Bolling said. “Froggy, Miss Piggy, if you wanna debate this any time, I’m all for it.”

He’s even asked Donald Trump to moderate. In that case, expect Gonzo, Fozzie and Rowlf to drop out.

SINGAPORE (Kevin Plumberg) – Equities rose while gold and the yen dropped on Monday, with investors cutting safety trades after Washington reached a last minute deal to escape default, though the top U.S. credit rating could still be downgraded.

After a tense weekend in which rival plans to lift the U.S. borrowing limit were shot down in Congress, U.S. President Barack Obama said leaders from both parties reached a deal to cut the budget deficit by $1 trillion over 10 years, with additional saving possible.

U.S. S&P 500 stock futures bounced 1.4 percent and futures on U.S. Treasuries — which have maintained their haven status despite being at the eye of the debt ceiling impasse — slid .

Investors were still on guard though since the plan, which will come to a vote in Congress on Monday, may not necessarily satisfy Standard & Poor’s enough to keep the U.S. triple-A debt rating.

“There was concern that if you had this extreme tail event — if the U.S. did default — that positions would have to be cut and financial markets would be thrown into turmoil, so they sold off on that risk,” Steven Englander, head of G10 currency strategy, told Reuters Insider. “Now that the risk is down, the risky assets are rallying but the dollar still doesn’t look that attractive.”

Japan’s Nikkei share average rose in line with U.S. futures, up 1.7 percent as investors bought back technology-related shares.

The MSCI index of Asia Pacific stocks outside Japan was up 0.9 percent after falling for the past two sessions, led by commodity-related shares.

The U.S. dollar index , which measures its value against a basket of six other major currencies, was largely unchanged on the day. The euro weighs heavily in the basket, and so the index reflected deep-seated fears about the fiscal unsustainability for both the United States and the euro zone.

The dollar shot up against the yen, up 0.7 percent to 78.00 yen , which slid broadly as safe haven trades were closed out. Traders in Asia had been keeping a close eye on the yen, since the dollar dropped below 77 yen to a four-month low of 76.70 yen on Friday, raising fears of yen-selling intervention by Japanese authorities.

U.S. Treasury debt futures fell in electronic trading. The 10-year Treasury futures were down 10/32 to 125 12/32, and in the cash market, the benchmark 10-year yield rose five basis points to 2.84 percent .

Oil futures also rose. U.S. crude rose $1.29 to $96.99 a barrel, while Brent crude gained $1.18 cents to $117.92.

Gold prices tumbled 1 percent to $1,609.89 an ounce, down from a record high of $1,632.30 .

Many investors believe focus will shift to the likelihood of a rating downgrade now.

“I think it’s an almost foregone conclusion that there is going to be a downgrade at some point.” said Peter Kenny, managing director in institutional sales at Knight Capital Group in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

A recent interview with James Altucher on Yahoo’s Daily Ticker illustrates everything that is wrong with financial journalism. It’s not easy to do that in one interview.

Mr. Altucher’s biography is informative. He is president and founder of Stockpickr LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of TheStreet.com and a managing partner at Formula Capital Management, LLC, an “alternative asset management firm” that runs a fund of hedge funds. According to the SEC website, Formula Capital is no longer registered with the SEC and is not required to update its Form ADV.

This is an odd background for someone who makes financial predictions. There is no data indicating stock pickers are skillful rather than just lucky. Their percentage of “winners” is typically less than what you would expect from random chance. Hedge funds make no sense for anyone other than those who manage them. Hedge “fund of funds”, where the fund manager takes a cut of the fees for pretending to have the ability to pick outperforming hedge fund managers, are even more tenuous.

These thin credentials did not deter Mr. Altucher from confidently predicting that the Dow is going to 20,000. He may be right or wrong, but neither Mr. Altucher or anyone else can predict the direction of the markets. Legendary investor, Benjamin Graham, who was co-author of the investment classic, Security Analysis, summarized the views of those with legitimate credentials: “If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what’s going to happen to the stock market.”

Mr. Altucher proceeded to make matters worse. Even though his crystal ball tells him the markets will continue their remarkable bull run, he advises investors to avoid stocks. Why? Because it’s “too hard.” There is “too much competition…The very best investors in the world can only consistently produce 10% to 15% annual returns, so what hope is there for the rest of us?”

This is errant nonsense, which is easily contradicted by reams of data. But data can be dull and Mr. Altucher is a colorful character who does not want to get bogged down with boring details.

While he makes a passing reference to buying index funds for those “really determined” to own stocks, here’s what he leaves out. Intelligent investing is really easy. Capturing the returns of the global marketplace can be done by anyone. All you need to do is purchase a globally diversified portfolio of low management fee index funds in an asset allocation suitable for you. I told investors precisely how to do this in 2006 when I wrote The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read. I recommended the purchase of only three index funds from Vanguard, Fidelity or T. Rowe Price. How difficult is this?

Using this “no-brainer portfolio” and assuming you invested 100% in stocks (which is far too aggressive for most investors), your returns would have been approximately 7% annualized over the past 10 years and almost 10% over the past 20 years.

Mr. Altucher’s concern about “competition” is hopelessly wide of the mark. You do not have to compete with any other investors to obtain the returns of the global marketplace. Over the past 50 years, if you bought a globally diversified portfolio of stocks and held for a ten year period, your average annualized return was over 12%, which is what Mr. Altucher wrongly states was attainable by only “the very best investors in the world.”

Mr. Altucher fails to note the consequences of not investing in stocks. You will suffer the ravages of inflation and taxes, which practically insures your portfolio will lose money. Does this seem like an intelligent investment strategy?

There is a logical inconsistency in Mr. Altucher’s advice. Since he is so confident of his ability to predict the Dow reaching 20,000, wouldn’t it make sense for his clients to be fully invested during this bull run? Presumably, he could tell them (and others) when to exit the markets before the next crash. The reality is neither he, nor anyone else, has this predictive ability.

Mr. Altucher’s views, and those of other financial pundits, is long on musings and short on data. You may find him and his colleagues entertaining to watch, but relying on their psychic predictions and wrong-headed conclusions is harmful to your financial health.

The views set forth in this blog are the opinions of the author alone and may not represent the views of any firm or entity with whom he is affiliated. The data, information, and content on this blog are for information, education, and non-commercial purposes only. Returns from index funds do not represent the performance of any investment advisory firm. The information on this blog does not involve the rendering of personalized investment advice and is limited to the dissemination of opinions on investing. No reader should construe these opinions as an offer of advisory services. Readers who require investment advice should retain the services of a competent investment professional. The information on this blog is not an offer to buy or sell, or a solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities or class of securities mentioned herein. Furthermore, the information on this blog should not be construed as an offer of advisory services. Please note that the author does not recommend specific securities nor is he responsible for comments made by persons posting on this blog.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – News Corp has kicked off the process to explore the sale or spin-off of its troubled social entertainment site, Myspace, a person familiar with the talks said on Thursday.

The media conglomerate has received early interest from around 20 parties so far and expects to receive more inquiries as the process develops in coming weeks.

Reuters reported earlier this month that News Corp had tapped boutique investment bank Allen & Co to aid with the process.

News Corp executives and bankers from Allen & Co will start talking to interested parties in the second week of March the person said.

Most of the buyout or spin-off interest is expected to come from financial parties such as private equity and venture capital. But possible strategic interest could come from parties such as mobile social networking site MocoSpace and gaming site Zynga. The person said Zynga is currently not in talks with News Corp about Myspace. MocoSpace said earlier this month it was interested in buying Myspace.

News Corp acquired Myspace in 2005 for $580 million after News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch famously swooped in to beat rivals such as MTV owner Viacom Inc in the bidding. But since then, the loss-making website has become increasingly irrelevant as a social network for many users who have migrated to Facebook.

(Reporting by Yinka Adegoke; editing by Andre Grenon)

Copyright 2010 Thomson Reuters. Click for Restrictions.

Depending upon your ideological predisposition, the crisis owes to the greedy bankers who turned home loans into casino chips, or to the federal regulators who abdicated authority, allowing Wall Street to turn itself into a gambling parlor. It was homeowners who treated their mortgages like winning lottery tickets, cashing in through repeated rounds of refinancing. It was politicians who championed expanded home ownership with reckless tax incentives and mandates forcing banks to lend even to borrowers with sketchy credit. It was the Federal Reserve which kept interest rates too low for too long.

But one segment of American society has largely evaded scrutiny in the search for the source of the disaster: the financial press. This is a dangerous oversight, argues journalist Anya Schiffrin in an intriguing and thoughtful new book, “Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century.”

As the crisis begins to fade from memory, and as acute fear is predictably replaced by complacency, a rigorous accounting of what actually transpired is imperative. Schiffrin aims to impose that accounting on those of us who make our living writing about finance. Her findings are not comforting, suggesting that coziness with sources and a lack of financial acumen made many reporters vulnerable to bogus assurances that nothing was wrong.

Schiffrin is herself a member of the tribe, having worked as a correspondent for Dow Jones news service in Vietnam during the Asian financial crisis (an experience that gave her an taste of the risks inherent in an economy shy of reliable information). She brings her experience and contacts to bear on this project, probing how shrinking budgets in a time of traditional media decline deprived many newsrooms of the resources needed to unravel a complex story, just as financial journalism confronted its ultimate test: a historic real estate bubble enhanced by the steroids known as derivatives.

A necessary disclosure: I wrote a chapter of this book, examining my experience covering the crisis as the national economic correspondent for the New York Times. And I don’t fully buy into its overarching thesis that the reporting in the run-up to the crisis amounts to a systemic failure. As several chapters in Bad News make clear, a good deal of excellent work in the years before the crisis could have limited the pain had warnings been heeded–not least, work by my former Times colleagues Gretchen Morgenson and David Leonhardt, who sounded the alarm early on that home prices were getting well of whack with American incomes, setting up a fall.

The trouble was that a louder chorus repeatedly drowned out this probing reporting about the magnitude of the real estate bubble–a steady celebration of permanently rising home price, the fantasy that propelled a construction binge, a mortgage bonanza and no end of wealth that got created along the way. That chorus abetted and enabled the capture of the regulators who are supposed to be able to tune out such noise while dispassionately scrutinizing the numbers.

This is not to exonerate the press or chastise the lazy reader, the reflexive posture for many a scribe whose words have failed to produce happy results. Though the press rarely has the power to dominate events and does not make policy, we are collectively responsible for the understanding that our audience takes away from our words. And it is a fair hit to assert that we are prone to being manipulated and getting swept up in the excitement of the times, rather then stopping to ask the critical, typically difficult-to-answer questions that public service journalism demands.

This is not so much because we consciously decide to become cheerleaders, urging on bubbles that take shape on our watch, but rather because cheerleading is the product of the easiest options that present themselves on any given day. Rising prices, soaring stock markets and the wealth accruing to executives overseeing the festivities are verifiable facts, whereas warnings and worrying entail the indulgence of conjecture and speculation, and they might turn out to be wrong.

It takes a special breed of reporter to do the digging and put faith in their convictions as they take on the dominant narrative of the moment–particularly when that narrative is championed by prize-winning economists celebrated as wise men, such as the former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben Bernanke, who played leading roles in convincing the public that everything was fine.

I first saw this dynamic up close during the technology bubble of the late-1990s. I never heard one of my colleagues profess a desire to help the Nasdaq continue to multiply. I never was privy to a directive to tout the impregnability of every new dot-com that came along. But many writers effectively opted to play these roles by default in selecting the stories that were most readily available–profiles of start-ups arranged by ubiquitous public relations consultants; astounding tales of technological discovery; stories of the wealth being harvested from the market like the proverbial gold at the end of the rainbow.

You could sit at your desk in any newsroom in America in 1999 and simply wait for a press release to arrive in your inbox or a wire story to be flagged by your assignment editor and soon find yourself writing about something that no one had ever written before–the largest merger in history! The fastest this! The slickest that! The path of least resistance turned journalists into boosters, while critical stories entailed a path into the wilderness, with no eager sources and only piles of inscrutable documents.

Fundamentally, there is much to Schiffrin’s point that most reporters took the easy route in the years leading up to the financial crisis, which meant buying into the fantasy that justified ridiculously inflated housing prices. The real estate bubble so dominated the era that it caused even serious reporters to miss the underlying story: Tens of millions of Americans needed to use their houses as ATMs because their pay checks no longer delivered enough money to finance even middle class aspirations–health care when someone got sick, college for children, a functioning car to get to work. That is the broadest context in which to critique the financial press. We mostly missed the breakdown in the American middle class bargain, and so we did not appreciate how predatory lending effectively went mainstream.

The more immediate coverage of the crisis and its aftermath has occasioned conspiratorial talk that the press oversold the fears of a systemic meltdown to help enable the Bush and Obama administrations to deliver the taxpayer-financed bailouts for Wall Street. Some have suggested that the financial press played a role much like the Washington press corps in the lead-up to the Iraq War, frightening the public with apocalyptic visions that required intervention. (Schiffrin cites the pre-Iraq War coverage as a potent example of coziness with sources yielding tainted journalism, though her critique is more systemic than conspiratorial.)

As someone who sat inside one of the biggest newsrooms during the crisis, however, I reject the notion that has taken root in some quarters that we were essentially active participant in a government-directed con. Yes, there were good reasons to doubt the veracity of Bush’s Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, who had previously headed Goldman, as he warned in the fall of 2008 that the public either had to hand over $700 billion to Wall Street or invite a meltdown. Those doubts (which were duly reported at the time) have only intensified as the terms of the bailout have emerged, with Goldman managing to secure a “backdoor bailout,” through funds dispensed to the insurance firm American International Group.

Continued investigation into the terms of the bailouts and how they came about is required. But the idea that the press was effectively complicit in an Iraq-style ruse, trumping up the mushroom clouds to justify the intervention, is misleading and unfair. The Bush administration doctored the intelligence to create a false perception of threat in Iraq. But economists and business people were genuinely and legitimately terrified of a potential repeat of the 1930s banking runs as major financial institutions teetered toward collapse in the fall of 2008. Money was freezing up, laying waste to companies, sending the unemployment rate soaring.

There turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, despite the bad journalism that insisted otherwise–journalism that contributed to the stampede into the war. But you simply cannot say the same about the financial consequences at risk as the Bush administration crafted the bailouts. Did the trillions of dollars of interrelated and suddenly un-payable credit obligations constitute weapons of mass destruction pointed at the global economy? Maybe, maybe not. There was simply no way to be sure, and whatever the government did–wade in with a rescue, or stand back and watch–was bound to affect the outcome.

Once the markets became ruled by fear, an expensive bailout was the price of preventing the worst. That bad news simply had to be reported, whatever the consequences, even as we knew that the stories themselves were adding to the fear.

Bad News provides little reason to imagine that the press will heroically prevent the next crisis, figuring out where danger lies before everyone else does. Financial crises build over many years through the fabric of the culture itself, warping expectations, altering the risks people and institutions are willing to bear in pursuit of return on their money, while tilting the balance away from the intrusions of government regulation. Journalists operate within our culture, and we absorb collective understandings.

Still, the basic critique of the book is instructive and worth contemplating. It boils down to most of us not cultivating a wide enough circle of sources. For anyone who writes about finance, it is worth pausing to consider where we regularly draw our information and then actively expanding that zone. It is worth looking at how many of our sources are people whose job descriptions include having to talk to reporters for a living. Because in this crisis, as in all such events, the warnings were never going to be obtained from people paid to talk to the press, a group dominated by the special interests that benefit from the status quo.

The real insights were waiting in harder to reach places, among people who typically have good reason to avoid journalists–the ranks of mid-level managers inside predatory lending operations; those doing due diligence inside banks that were buying a selling radioactive securities; the growing ranks of regular families that could no longer pay the bills.

In my own view, and from my own experience, blaming the press for the financial crisis is like blaming January for giving you a cold: You may have a point, but you better be prepared to dress warm again next winter. In both the technology bubble and the run-up to the Iraq War, a much stronger case can be made that shoddy reporting helped nurture disaster. Even by the everyday standards of journalism, bad information was presented as fact. But in the case of the financial crisis, the system did not fail so much as function according to the ordinary rules of engagement.

This is Schiffrin’s fundamental point, and it amounts to bad news indeed. It would be so much more convenient if we could blame it on a Judy Miller, pin it on one guy who got it wrong, then lance that boil and feel better. But the problem goes right to heart of a press that simply reflects too few voices, often missing out on the ones that have something important to tell us.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says Fox News Channel reporter Catherine Herridge filed an internal complaint about allegedly discriminatory practices in 2007.

Fox found no evidence of bias, but the EEOC says the network later included language in Herridge’s employment contract intended to stop her from making any more complaints.

Herridge refused to sign the contract. The network agreed to remove the language after she complained to the EEOC.

The EEOC seeks unspecified monetary damages and a court order enjoining Fox from retaliating against other employees.

It was the second $1 million contribution the company has made this election cycle to a GOP-aligned group. In late June it gave that amount to the Republican Governors Association.

The parent companies of other media companies such as Disney (which owns ABC) and General Electric (which owns NBC) have also made political contributions, but typically in far smaller chunks, and split between Democrats and Republicans.