Kate Upton and the ladies of Sport's Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue preview this year's highly anticipated spread for ET!
Clad in impossibly tiny bikinis, the gorgeous girls representing SI's 50th edition of the beach-themed edition travel across the globe to show some skin across all seven continents.
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SI's Swimsuit Issue hits stands February 12.
He tried to pull an “Argo” on the feds.
An Indian national arrived at JFK Airport in New York and told US Customs and Border Protection officers he was a production manager for a film company known as "Fire and Ice."
Nitinkumar Chandubhai Patel explained that his firm was gearing up to make a movie titled "I Love New York," and he had traveled from New Delhi to Gotham to scout locations for the shoot.
But officers noted oddities about his story: The film shoot would take six weeks, with a release date planned for July 2012 - but Patel would be paid only 65,000 Indian Rupees or just over $1,200 for his work.
The suspicious Customs officers soon discovered that Patel's visa was revoked, after the State Department determined that other visa applicants also had been posing as "Fire and Ice" reps.
Patel eventually admitted that he actually was a farmer and was supplied the film shoot cover story by a travel agent in India, officials said.
He's now in custody and awaiting trial on visa fraud charges.
mmaddux@nypost.com
If David Hart gets his way, South Beach’s 42-room Astor Hotel will be on a hiring spree this year as it adds concierge service, a roof-top pool, an all-night diner, spa and private-car service available 24 hours a day.
New hires will be crucial to Hart’s business plan, since foreign investors have agreed to pay about $50,000 for each job created by the Art Deco boutique.
The Miami immigration lawyer specializes in arranging visas for wealthy foreign citizens under a special program that trades green cards for investment dollars. Businesses get the money and must use it to boost payroll. The minimum investment is $500,000 to add at least 10 jobs to the economy. That puts the pressure on Hart and his partners at the Astor to beef up payroll dramatically, with plans to take a hotel with roughly 20 employees to one with as many as 100 workers.
“My primary responsibility is to make something happen here over the next two years that will create the jobs we need,’’ Hart said a few steps away from a nearly empty restaurant on a recent weekday morning. “It’s all going to be transformed.”
Though established in the 1990s, the “EB5” visas soared in popularity during the recession as developers sought foreign cash to replace dried-up credit markets in the United States.
Chinese investors dominate the transactions, accounting for about 65 percent of the nearly 9,000 EB5 visas granted since 2006. South Korea finishes a distant second at 12 percent and the United Kingdom holds the third-place slot at 3 percent. If Latin America and the Caribbean were one country, they would rank No. 4 on the list, with 231 EB5 visas granted, or about 3 percent of the total.
Competition has gotten stiffer for the deep-pocketed foreign investors willing to pay for green cards. The University of Miami’s bio-science research park near the Jackson hospital system raised $20 million from 40 foreign investors under the EB5 program, most of them from Asia. The money went into the park’s first building; visa brokers are waiting to see if the second building will proceed so they can offer a new pool of potential green-card sales.
In Hollywood, the stalled $131 million Margaritaville resort had hoped to raise about $75 million from EB5 investors before ditching that plan last year to pursue more traditional financing. A retail complex by developer Jeff Berkowitz in Coral Gables also launched a program to raise $50 million in EB5 money for the project, Gables Station. Hart worked with other EB5 investors to back pizza restaurants in Miami and South Beach. A limestone mine in Martin County also was backed by EB5 dollars.
This year, the city of Miami itself is expected to get into the business by setting up an EB5 program to raise foreign cash for a range of city businesses and developments. The first would be the tallest building in the city — developer Tibor Hollo’s planned 85-story apartment tower, the Panorama, in downtown Miami.
With a construction cost of about $700 million, Miami’s debut EB5 venture hopes to raise about $100 million from foreign investors, said Laura Reiff, the Greenberg Traurig lawyer in Virginia working with Miami on the EB5 effort. “This is a marquis project,’’ she said.
The arrangement is a novel one for Miami, with the city planning to help a private developer raise funds overseas for a new high-rise. And it would allow Hollo and future participants to tout the city of Miami’s endorsement when competing with other Miami-area projects for EB5 dollars. “We will have the benefit of the brand of the city of Miami,’’ said Mikki Canton, the $6,000-a-month city consultant heading Miami’s EB5 effort. “A lot of these others are privately owned and they won’t have that brand.”
TALLAHASSEE --
They headed for Marsh Harbour Airport in the Bahamas, most of them on private planes owned by billionaire Harry Sargeant III, then the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party.
The weekend trip began on Friday Jan. 11, 2008, for a select group of Floridians —maybe 20 or so — who helped raise money for a constitutional amendment that would increase homestead exemptions.
Those who attended have differing memories of how many were there or what occurred, and no one is very anxious to talk to a reporter about the gathering.
Perhaps it’s the accusation of a golf cart filled with prostitutes that scares them away.
The five-year-old gathering has gained a life of its own in the criminal case against former Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer, who has been charged with money laundering and grand theft for allegedly diverting about $200,000 in party funds to a corporation he created. The trip itself isn’t tied to Greer’s legal problems, but details of the weekend could surface in testimony at his trial, which begins with jury selection Monday in Orlando, or remain secret, depending on which lawyers win out.
The Bahamas trip included an impressive outdoor seafood dinner with then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Bahamian Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas Ned Siegel, Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer and a handful of Tallahassee lobbyists and big campaign donors.
It was organized by Greer and Sargeant for supporters of “Yes on 1-Save Our Homes Now,” a constitutional amendment campaign Crist was pushing to expand the state’s homestead exemption. Delmar Johnson, former executive director of the state Republican party and a key witness against Greer, describes it as a thank you trip for those who contributed some of the $4.4 million raised in support of the measure. Others, including Crist, say the gathering was a fundraiser. The amendment was approved by Florida voters on Jan. 29, 2008, a few weeks after the trip.
The trip was for men only. Even women who worked for the party and helped with fundraising were excluded.
Johnson told prosecutors last summer that he saw women who appeared to be prostitutes in a golf cart driven by one of Sargeant’s employees. The information surfaced late last year when a video of Johnson’s testimony was made public.
More specifics have been hard to come by.
Johnson’s testimony is included in a sealed Florida Department of Law Enforcement report prepared last summer by investigators looking at possible witness tampering in the Greer case. Prosecutors say the report — and details about the Bahamas trip — may be used as rebuttal evidence against some of those scheduled to testify on Greer’s behalf.
Lawyers for two unidentified witnesses have asked that the report remain sealed, saying it contains information that would embarrass them. Greer Circuit Judge Marc Lubet says the records must be made public if they are used in an attempt to impeach the testimony of witnesses who might be embarrassed by details of the Bahamas trip.
After reviewing the report in chambers last year, Lubet read the names of four men: Lobbyist Brian Ballard, Sargeant, Johnson and new state Rep. Dane Eagle, R-Cape Coral, asking if they would be witnesses at the trial. At the time of the trip Eagle was a travel aide for Crist. Prosecutors said all but Eagle, now a state legislator, are expected to be witnesses at the trial.
Three people were killed Sunday morning in a helicopter crash during a production shoot for a Discovery Channel reality show.
The crash occurred about 3:40 a.m. in an open field in the town of Acton outside Los Angeles, Deadline reports. The three victims were thrown from the helicopter and pronounced dead at the scene.
PICS: Star Sightings
In a statement to Deadline, the Discovery Channel confirmed the accident, which occurred during filming by the reality show's producer, Eyeworks USA. "We are all cooperating fully with authorities. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families," the statement said.
Shooting at the location began Saturday and a film permit listed the production as "Untitled Military Project."
The body of an elderly man who lived on a houseboat was found floating under a dock today in Brooklyn, authorities said.
The 74-year-old man’s boat was docked in the Plumb Beach Channel off of Ebony Court in Gerritsen Beach when he he was spotted in the water around 12:35 p.m., cops said.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. Police do not suspect any criminality at this time, cops said.
The city’s medical examiner will determine the cause of death.
BOSTON --
Are there guns in your investment portfolio? It’s an issue that some politicians and gun-control advocates are raising after recent mass shootings prompted calls for tougher laws.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote letters to six mutual fund companies asking them to sell their stock in gun manufacturers Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co. It’s a critical concern in Chicago, where more than 500 people were murdered last year.
Fund companies should “send a clear and unambiguous message to the entire gun industry that investors will no longer support companies that profit from gun violence,” Emanuel wrote in his letters last week.
Other city leaders, including those in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, are considering similar steps with their pension funds.
Gun control is the kind of issue that can wake investors up to the fact that money in a fund portfolio or 401(k) affects more than just their retirement security. The financial markets support all kinds of companies, including many that an investor may believe aren’t contributing to the greater good.
But whatever one thinks about gun control, removing such an investment from a portfolio on moral grounds isn’t always a simple matter. There are potential costs from putting your principles before profits.
Recognize that over the last 10 years Smith & Wesson has posted an average annualized return of 17 percent, compared with the 8 percent return of the broader market. Similarly, Sturm Ruger, the largest publicly traded gun company, has returned an annualized 23 percent over that time. The vast majority of gun manufacturers are privately held.
LEGAL HURDLES
There would be other potential costs if fund companies or 401(k) managers were to sell gun maker stocks in response to the recent controversy. These companies have obligations to serve the financial interests of vast numbers of individual fund shareholders and plan participants with varying opinions about guns.
For employers sponsoring 401(k) plans, their hands can be tied unless the plan established a mandate to avoid investing in gun makers, says Kathleen McBride, founder of consulting firm FiduciaryPath.
She advises financial professionals who are fiduciaries, a legal designation requiring them to act in the best financial interests of their clients. That obligation is a chief concern cited by Vanguard, among the six fund companies that Emanuel is pressuring. A Vanguard spokeswoman said mutual funds “are not optimal agents to address social change.”
A spokesman for American Funds, which also received a letter from Emanuel, said: “If social issues may have an effect on the investment potential of a company, we take those issues into account as part of the investment process.”
For example, a stock fund manager might expect that gun laws are likely to become more restrictive. That would cut into industry sales, leading the manager to conclude that stocks of gun makers are bad long-term investments. Such a fund manager could justify selling such stocks as beneficial for shareholders. But the manager wouldn’t be justified in selling simply because of moral objections.
INDEX FUNDS
Making changes only gets more complicated with low-cost index funds, which own all the stocks in a given market index.
If such a fund doesn’t track the index closely, then it ceases to be an index fund — no matter whether some of the stocks may be viewed as morally objectionable by some investors.
TALLAHASSEE --
Even for Tallahassee standards, the scene was notable: lobbyist Brian Ballard dining with a nursing home executive, Gov. Rick Scott and a top aide at a pricey restaurant just blocks from the Capitol.
That Ballard’s clout could command a private dinner with the governor for a client speaks to the influential lobbyist’s fundraising finesse. But equally important, and less celebrated, is Ballard’s talent for helping his clients land lucrative state contracts: $938 million this year alone, according to a Herald/Times analysis of contracts in the $70 billion state budget.
“Is that all?’’ joked Ballard, who said he had never added it up. “A big part of my business is protecting contracts, and outsourcing. Outsourcing saves [the state] money.”
Ballard is not alone. The lobbying offices that line the moss-covered streets of Tallahassee have grown exponentially larger in the last two decades as governors and legislators have steered a greater share of the state’s budget to outside vendors.
No one is keeping track of the total, but Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater last year estimated the total contract spend for Florida’s 2011-12 budget cycle at $50.4 billon — 72 percent of the budget. The bulk of it, nearly $42 billion, was for health care contracts and service sector grants that often are never competitively bid.
“We probably privatize, or outsource, more than some of the Northeastern states — and we have a lot more volume,’’ said David Wilkins, a retired business executive who was tapped by the governor to review the state’s byzantine contracting process. He also is secretary of the Department of Children and Families.
Vendors — from giant computer firms and health care HMOs, to purveyors of office supplies, parking spaces and even prison services — each compete for a piece of one of the biggest spending pies in the Southeast: the state of Florida. The infusion of state cash into private and non-profit industries has spawned a cottage industry of lobbyists who help vendors manage the labyrinth of rules and build relationships with executive agency officers and staff so they can steer contracts to their clients.
There are now more people registered to lobby the governor, the Cabinet and their agencies — 4,925 — than there are registered to lobby the 160-member Legislature — 3,235.
Dozens of former legislators and their staff populate that industry, as well as former utility regulators, agency secretaries, division heads and other employees.
The most high-profile newcomer to the executive branch lobbying corps is Dean Cannon, the former speaker of the House from Orlando. Even before he retired from office in November, he had set up a lobbying shop just a block from the Capitol and started signing up clients to lobby the executive branch.
Cannon’s swift lawmaker-to-lobbyist turnaround has spawned a backlash from former colleagues. Senators are proposing that lawmakers leaving office wait two years before they can lobby the executive branch — similar to the aw that applies to former lawmakers who lobby the legislature.
“One minute you can be overseeing a budget and the next you’re lobbying a state agency,’’ said Sen. Jack Latvala, R-St. Petersburg, who is shepherding the Senate ethics bill. “That’s a revolving door and that’s wrong.”
Stacy Keibler and Heidi Klum
ETonline has found the lookalikes to the stars and, it turns out, it's
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HEMPSTEAD — Police say an apartment fire that spread to several buildings has forced 250 people from their homes, killed one and sent 11 to hospitals on Long Island.
Nassau County police say one victim is in critical condition after fire Saturday morning in Hempstead. The rest have injuries that aren't seen as life-threatening.
Police haven't released the identity of the person who died. Newsday says that victim is an 8-year-old boy, and another is a pregnant woman who suffered a heart attack.
Detectives are trying to determine what caused the fire. They don't believe it was set deliberately. It started in a third-floor apartment on Paul Road North around 6:20 a.m.
Some 300 firefighters were called in from 13 departments. It took several hours to extinguish the fire.
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