The lawyer behind the $10B haul for Madoff victims

NEW YORK (AP) -- Everyone's mad at Irving Picard.

To be fair, his job is thankless: He's the court-appointed bloodhound in charge of hunting down money for the victims of Bernard Madoff, a man who was so skilled at hiding money that he kept the biggest scam in the history of American finance going for at least two decades.

Wall Street hates him. Picard has sued more than a dozen banks, including several whose big link to the Ponzi scheme was one step removed - helping people bet on funds that bet on the fund run by Madoff.

Paraguay dividing over spending Brazilian millions

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) -- President Fernando Lugo is about to realize Paraguay's long-held dream of receiving millions of dollars more from Brazil for energy from their shared hydroelectric dam, money he promised would finance land reform and transform his impoverished, agrarian nation.

But now that the extra $240 million a year is about to arrive, that campaign promise seems as difficult to fulfill as ever. The ex-Roman Catholic bishop appears incapable of keeping the money from being directed elsewhere by the entrenched political party that controls congress and ran Paraguay as its fiefdom for 61 years before his election in 2008.

Super rich see federal taxes drop dramatically

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Still scrambling to file your taxes? You'll probably take little consolation in hearing that the super rich pay a lot less taxes than they did a couple of decades ago. And nearly half of U.S. households pay no income taxes at all.

The Internal Revenue Service tracks the tax returns with the 400 highest adjusted gross incomes each year. The average income on those returns in 2007, the latest year for IRS data, was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992.

Over the same period, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 9.9 percent.

Community Health makes all-cash bid for Tenet

NEW YORK (AP) -- Hospital operator Community Health Systems Inc. on Monday revised its $3 billion offer for rival Tenet Healthcare Corp. to an all-cash bid.

Community Health is now offering $6 per share in cash. In December, it had gone public with a bid of $5 per share in cash and $1 per share in stock. At the time, the offer was a premium of about 40 percent to the Dallas company's shares.

But Tenet's board rejected that offer, and adopted a "poison pill" measure to fend off the bid.