Brazilian companies Safra Group and Cutrale completed their acquisition of Chiquita Brands International Tuesday, taking the Charlotte-based banana producer private.
Chiquita agreed in October to be acquired by investment firm Safra Group and juice company Cutrale Group for about $681 million, or $14.50 per share. The agreement came after shareholders rejected a proposed merger with Irish produce company Fyffes first announced in March.

Trading of Ocwen Financial Group (NYSE:OCN) shares was temporarily halted after news that California may suspend the mortgage-payment collector's license, a move that would deprive the company of its largest market.

The state alleges that Ocwen has refused over the past two years to provide sufficient information to verify whether it was obeying laws intended to prevent foreclosure-related abuse, the Los Angeles Times reported late Monday.
Shares plunged 30% on the stock market today, hitting lows not seen since 2009.

If California and Ocwen, which is among the biggest U.S. mortgage servicers, can't settle, the company could lose its license in the state before the end of the year, which means that it could no longer collect payments and handle foreclosures.

State and federal investigators are also examining whether Ocwen delayed short sales of some homes so it could keep collecting fees, Bloomberg said last month, citing sources.

A former bartender at an Ohio country club frequented by House Speaker John Boehner allegedly thought the Republican was the devil and had threatened to kill him, according to a report Tuesday from WCOP in Cincinnati.

Michael Robert Hoyt, 47, who had worked for five years at the Wetherington Country Club, was indicted last Wednesday for threatening to murder a congressman. WCOP based its report on the charging documents in the case.

The case seems to have started on Oct. 29, when Hoyt called the authorities and blamed Boehner for him being fired from his country club job a week earlier. Federal agents followed up in person, and things took a strange turn.

“Hoyt told the officer he was Jesus Christ and he was going to kill Boehner because Boehner was mean to him at the country club and because Boehner is responsible for Ebola,” United States Capitol Police (USCP) Special Agent Christopher M. Desrosiers said. “Hoyt advised he had a loaded Beretta .380 automatic and he was going to shoot Boehner and take off.”

After announcing he was forming a presidential exploratory committee last month, former Republican Florida Governor Jeb Bush quickly began pulling together a political operation of strategists, consultants and donors. On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that DC insider Richard Hohlt, a Republican lobbyist, has become an informal member of the Jeb Bush campaign team. But the newspaper neglected to note that Hohlt is more than your average Washington influence-peddler.

Hohlt has been a key and somewhat infamous lobbyist for the financial industry, best known for assisting the corrupt savings-and-loan banking industry three decades ago in its battle with federal regulators—at a profound cost to US taxpayers. And in 2009, following the Wall Street-driven economic demise, Citigroup enlisted him to assist its efforts in Washington.

Hohlt has worked the halls of the nation's capital for various corporate giants, including Chevron and Altria. But he is best known for assisting the S&L gang three decades ago. He kept regulators at bay on behalf of these thrifts, which were overextended and speculating with federally insured deposits. The ensuing S&L collapse, which happened during the Reagan and (first) Bush years, helped drive the US economy into the tank, launched a series of investigations, and yielded criminal convictions. As the New York Times reported six years ago, "Critics say that as a top lobbyist for the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, Mr. Hohlt blocked regulation of these institutions and played a pivotal role helping to prolong dubious industry practices that cost taxpayers $150 billion to clean up." (Incidentally, an S&L run by Jeb Bush’s brother, Neil, went belly-up at a cost of $1 billion to taxpayers.)

Years later, Hohlt's S&L work didn't disqualify him from lobbying on financial matters. In 2009, he was hired by Citigroup to lobby the federal government regarding the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the big bank bailout that followed the 2008 economic implosion. The move stirred controversy. A former financial regulator called Hohlt "one of the most infamous lobbyists in the world" and said his involvement in TARP was "singularly obscene."

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) — Police say an Alaska corrections officer accidentally shot his 12-year-old daughter in the leg when they went for physical therapy appointments.

Initial police reports said the shooting occurred when the father removed his jacket and didn't want other patients to see his holstered .40-caliber pistol.

But Welborn said Thursday the father also had a therapy appointment, and the shooting occurred when he removed the pistol from his hip holster as he prepared to get on a therapy table.

The bullet went through his forearm before striking his daughter.

Burlington Officer Jesse Hill was bitten by a dog during the incident in which he shot and killed 34-year-old Autumn Mae Steele, according to a statement on Wednesday from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigations (DCI).

Steele had been arrested the previous night and charged with a domestic abuse misdemeanor. She was released Tuesday morning, and Hill was escorting her to her residence to collect some belongings. According to a neighbor who witnessed the event, the couple's German shepherd approached the officer.

"The dog startled the officer," a witness told the Burlington Hawk Eye. "The officer began shooting at the dog. The officer was still shooting when he fell down in the snow."

Preliminary findings suggest that Hill fired his gun twice, with one of the rounds striking Steele's torso. Another witness told the Hawk Eye that "the woman was shot accidentally."

Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panthers in 1966, partially in response to perceived police brutality. At the inception, the Black Panthers were as much about community service as political protest, and ran a free breakfast program serving thousands of Oakland's disadvantaged children. The Panthers expanded rapidly to sixty eight cities and thousands of members, and achieved success in obtaining a number of concessions from local governments. However, the Panthers devolved in the 1970s due to infighting and reports of criminal activity such as drug dealing and extortion:

"[Huey] Newton graduated from Berkeley High a functional illiterate but then doggedly taught himself to read by struggling through Plato's Republic, plowing all the way through it no fewer than five times until he understood it. The book, and his accomplishment in learning to read it, fueled his aspirations to become a political leader.

"By the time he and Bobby Seale formed the Black Panther Party in October of 1966, Huey Newton had completed two years of law school and was well known on campus for his spirited discussions on the finer points of constitutional law. Bobby Seale was an engineering design major who had spent three years in the air force doing structural repair on high-performance aircraft and had worked on the Gemini missile program. Yet the press and political forces portrayed the Panthers as armed hoodlums and drug thugs who roamed the streets looking to gun down white people. J. Edgar Hoover's counterintelligence unit regarded even the Panthers' free breakfast program a threat to national security. The free breakfast program, which by 1969 served more than ten thousand Oakland children every morning before they went to school, was but one of the party's 'survival programs', along with clothing and food giveaways, escort services for the elderly, and health care services that included testing for sickle-cell anemia.

"Still, the only thing that mattered to the media and to a majority of Americans -- the only thing they knew about the Panthers, apparently -- was that they had guns. At that time, white America could scarcely imagine anything scarier than 'armed Negroes.'

"The scariest thing they couldn't have imagined would be Negroes with unconcealed weapons operating out in the open and entirely within the law -- angry young militants brazenly availing themselves of their legal and constitutional rights the same as everyone else. 'They were registered guns,' Newton pointed out. 'Just like the NRA's guns. Just like Charlton Heston's guns.'
"This wasn't what the Establishment had in mind when they advised minorities to work for change within the system. They meant casting ballots -- with proper ID and no outstanding warrants -- every couple of years for either candidate R or candidate D. That didn't mean exercise your rights to peaceably assemble, to engage in free speech, or bear arms and, when challenged, demand the courts to either uphold those rights or announce to the whole world, point-blank, that those rights didn't apply to people like you. But that's what they did. ...

"Exercising their constitutional right to bear arms was but one weapon in the Panthers' arsenal. Along with their guns, they carried tape recorders, cameras, and law books as they patrolled the streets on their mission to 'police the police,' to observe and document law enforcement's volatile interactions with Oakland's black citizenry. ...

"Congress went so far as to pass a law against the party's minister of justice Hubert 'H. Rap' Brown -- the 'Rap Brown' Federal Anti-Riot Act, tacked onto a fair housing law at the last minute by Senator Strom Thurmond, making it illegal to travel from one state to another, write a letter, make a telephone call, or speak on radio or television with the intent of encouraging any person to participate in a riot."