Rajaratnam, BofA, AIG, BofA, SAC Capital in Court News

After about 18 months preparing to defend Galleon Group LLC’s Raj Rajaratnam at his federal insider-trading trial in Manhattan , attorney John Dowd said he could use a vacation.

Dowd, who spent a fourth day yesterday waiting for jurors to deliver a verdict in the case, said he hasn’t gotten much sleep lately and plans to take a trip to Cape Cod in Massachusetts when the trial’s over.

“You don’t sleep,” said Dowd, chatting with a group of reporters in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Richard Holwell. “It will take me six months to recover from this.”

Dowd spoke after approaching a group of reporters talking with Assistant U.S. Attorney Reed Brodsky , one of the prosecutors in the case. Reporters, lawyers and trial observers spent yesterday along with Rajaratnam waiting for a verdict, which could come at any time.

Dowd told reporters he has been working non-stop on the Rajaratnam case for the past 10 months. The defense team has about 10 people in the courthouse with another 14 outside, he said.

“Raj was a huge resource” in preparing the defense, Dowd said, providing details of the transactions in the government’s charges against him. “He knew it.”

Dowd said he didn’t have his client testify during the trial because he didn’t want to give prosecutors the opportunity to try to reinforce their points on cross-examination.

“There’s no sense giving these guys any oxygen to retry their case,” he said.

Dowd declined to discuss other aspects of the case or to speculate on what jurors were thinking. He said the Rajaratnam legal team is set up at a hotel in lower Manhattan, where three other teams of lawyers trying cases are also located.

The case is U.S. v. Rajaratnam, 1:09-cr-01184, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).

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Bank of America, Citibank, UBS Manipulated Libor, Suit Says

A West Virginia pension sued Bank of America Corp., a Citigroup Inc. (C) unit and UBS AG (UBSN) claiming they manipulated the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, in violation of U.S. antitrust law.

The Carpenters Pension Fund of West Virginia filed a complaint in federal court in Manhattan April 27 claiming the banks and a group of unnamed co-conspirators deliberately understated their borrowing costs to depress Libor, lowering their interest costs on products tied to the rate.

The pension fund seeks to represent a class of all clients of the banks that invested in Libor-based products between 2006 and 2009. The suit seeks unspecified damages, which may be tripled under antitrust law.

Botox on an 8-year-old: Child abuse? - The Week

Last week that she gave the girl injections so she wouldn't have wrinkles on her face when she competed in child beauty pageants. The broadcast provoked a flood of complaints to San Francisco's child abuse hotline, and Britney was placed in the care of other relatives for her safety. Did the social services agency overreact, or is injecting a child with Botox child abuse? But revoking custody is not the answer: "I totally agree with the need to remove the child from the home," says Jonathan Turley at his blog , but that doesn't mean the loss of custody should be permanent. "The whole beauty contest culture for children is a bit repellent for some of us, and seems to lend itself to this type of excessiveness." But splitting up a family over such a single lapse in judgment isn't necessarily an appropriate penalty.

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