Target Breach Affected Up to 110 Million Customers

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DealBook: Pearson to Sell Financial News Group for $623 Million

DealBook: JPMorgan Set to Pay More Than $900 Million in Fines

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DealBook: A $250 Million Pledge to a College Evaporates as a Deal Collapses

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Superior Ct. Throws Out $14.5 Million Asbestos Verdict

A divided state Superior Court has thrown out a $14.5 million asbestos verdict awarded to the widow of a mesothelioma victim, determining that her counsel?s suggestion of a specific sum for damages to the jury was improper and that the plaintiffs expert's testimony was inadmissible.

DealBook: Bank of America to Pay $39 Million in Gender Bias Case

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DealBook: China Brokerage Firm Fined $85 Million Over ‘Fat-Finger’ Trades

DealBook: After Tourre Decision, UBS Pays $50 Million to Settle

DealBook: Over a Million Are Denied Bank Accounts for Past Errors

After a Fee Dispute With Time Warner Cable, CBS Goes Dark for Three Million Viewers

CBS stations went black just after 5 p.m. Eastern time. Both sides then issued statements blaming the other for being unreasonable in the negotiations, which were extended from Monday.

The dispute centers on what are known as retransmission fees, which cable companies have increasingly been compelled to pay to broadcasters, despite vigorous protest. CBS’s president, Leslie Moonves, has been a leader in seeking retransmission fees for broadcasters.

The decision to black out the stations means that Time Warner Cable subscribers will not be able to watch CBS programming until a deal is reached. In the past, subscribers have reacted with anger at such suspensions, but generally because they have missed specific programs. In this case, the summer programming roster does not contain many highly popular shows that might drive a settlement. CBS’s biggest appeal this summer is from the show “Under the Dome,” which will not have a new episode until Monday.

But the network does have the P.G.A. golf championship coming in a week. CBS emphasized on Friday that this week’s P.G.A. event was being led by Tiger Woods, who always draws viewers. And CBS, which broadcasts two soap operas, is also likely to gain support from those viewers.

Further down the road is the N.F.L. season, which might be a driving factor in why Time Warner Cable acted now.

Richard Greenfield, a media analyst who follows the company for BTIG Research, said the cable company was in “a once-in-a-lifetime position” to fight this battle because at the moment it does not face the overwhelming leverage of N.F.L. games and the most popular prime-time shows.

In addition, two top series on the Showtime network, owned by CBS, “Dexter” (which is in its final season) and “Ray Donovan,” are now also off the air, even though customers pay a separate fee for them. Time Warner Cable said it would offer a rebate to Showtime subscribers, as well as access to other subscription channels like Starz.

Time Warner Cable has insisted that the fee increases that CBS is asking for are unreasonable; CBS has argued it provides far more value than many cable networks that require much higher fees. Some reports have said CBS is asking for an increase of about 100 percent, to $2 a subscriber, from $1.

A spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission said that the agency was disappointed that the companies had not reached an agreement. “We urge all parties involved to resolve this situation as soon as possible.”

Despite recriminations on Friday from both sides, the negotiations are expected to resume as soon as Monday. That does not mean a quick settlement is likely, however. Mr. Greenfield said he could foresee CBS’s being dark “six weeks, if not more.” An executive close to the CBS side of the talks predicted 10 to 14 days.

In the meantime, CBS is sending messages on the radio and through other outlets urging viewers to complain to Time Warner Cable. The cable company, for its part, was telling customers to buy an antenna or sign up for Aereo, the new service that offers broadcast signals, and was also urging its customers to watch the missing CBS shows through streaming Web sites.

But for customers with Time Warner Cable broadband on Friday, CBS.com was blocking the streaming of shows, instead posting messages.

In almost every previous showdown over retransmission fees, the cable company’s stand has crumbled in short order. Mr. Greenfield said this time could be different because Time Warner Cable could take steps like appealing to Congress and selling CBS’s channel position to another bidder.

CBS stressed that it had never been taken off the air in a retransmission dispute and that it had not stopped offering extensions to keep the talks going.

Maureen Huff, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable, said, “We’ve accepted numerous extensions at this point, but it’s become clear that no matter how much time we give them, they’re not willing to come to reasonable terms.”

Brian Stelter contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 2, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated at one point which company suspended the service. It was Time Warner Cable, not CBS.

Your Money: An $18 Million Lesson in Handling Credit Report Errors

That indifference should surprise no one who has ever tried to deal with any of the three big credit reporting agencies, Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. “You feel trapped, like you are in a box,” said Ms. Miller, a 57-year-old nurse who works in a dermatologist’s office. “You have no control over this, and you can’t call them up and say, ‘You’re fired.’ ”

So she tried suing. That worked.

A jury in Federal District Court in Portland, Ore., last week awarded her a whopping $18.4 million in punitive damages, which, according to consumer lawyers, is the largest individual case on record.

If you think this has taught Equifax and the other credit reporting companies a lesson, you are a lot more optimistic than close observers of the industry. They say that despite the huge judgment, little is going to change for the millions of Americans who discover errors in their credit reports.

The credit bureaus are willing to tolerate these errors — and settle with consumers out of court — as a cost of doing business, according to credit experts and lawyers who work on these cases.

“Their business model is to keep doing the same thing over and over again,” said Justin Baxter, the lead lawyer on Ms. Miller’s case. “They can buy off a number of consumers with small dollar amounts and get rid of the vast majority of cases. To Equifax, that’s the cost of doing business.”

Ms. Miller made every effort to fix her report, exactly as consumers are advised to do. She initiated the company’s dispute process about seven times, and in most instances, Equifax would spit back a form letter saying it needed more proof of her identity. So she sent her pay stub and her phone bill. When that didn’t work, she sent her pay stub and her driver’s license. And when that failed, she sent her W-2 form and an insurance bill — at least three times.

But nothing ever changed: Ms. Miller, a model financial citizen who once had the credit score to prove it, had become mixed up with another, much less creditworthy Julie Miller. After she was denied a line of credit from KeyBank, she discovered 38 collection accounts on her credit report, none of which belonged to her, along with an inaccurate Social Security number and birth date. Her financial life was no longer her own.

Mixed files, as they are known in the credit industry, most frequently involve people who share common names with individuals who have similar Social Security numbers, birth dates or addresses. These errors are notorious for being among the most difficult to fix, credit experts said, and require human intervention to untangle the mess. But given the huge number of disputes, the process to address them is largely automated. And that is the excuse the industry advances to consumers who get stuck in its web.

The bureaus often outsource thousands of disputes daily to workers overseas. Those workers, often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases, are largely told to translate the problem into a two- or three-digit code that defines the gist of the problem (account not his/hers, for instance) and feed it into a computer.

But that process won’t untangle a mixed credit report. The reason files become mixed to begin with can be traced back to the computer formula the bureaus use to match credit data to a specific person’s credit report. It allows credit data, say a late payment on a credit card, to be inserted into a person’s file even if the identifying information isn’t an exact match. In other words, the system might add a late payment to the credit report of someone like Julie Miller even if the Social Security number is off by two digits or a birth date is off by two years, but enough of the other identifying information matches. That’s roughly what happened to Ms. Miller.

Partial matches aren’t always wrong, of course. Solid estimates on the number of mixed files are hard to find, though a 2004 study from the Federal Trade Commission said that partial matches occurred in about 1 to 2 percent of credit files, citing data from the bureaus. That might not sound like much, but when you consider that there are 200 million individuals with credit files at each of the big three bureaus, that translates to two million to four million consumers.

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

Business Briefing | Legal News: Glaxo to Pay $45 Million to State Over Drug Marketing

With the city going through the bankruptcy process, some extremely valuable and world-class artwork is being eyed by creditors.

Wesley Stace asks: How can two versions of the same song be so different?

App Puts the Bible in 100 Million Palms

For millions of readers around the world, a wildly successful free Bible app, YouVersion, is changing how, where and when they read the Bible.

Built by LifeChurch.tv, one of the nation’s largest and most technologically advanced evangelical churches, YouVersion is part of what the church calls its “digital missions.” They include a platform for online church services and prepackaged worship videos that the church distributes free. A digital tithing system and an interactive children’s Bible are in the works.

It’s all part of the church’s aspiration to be a kind of I.T. department for churches everywhere. YouVersion, with over 600 Bible translations in more than 400 languages, is by far the church’s biggest success. The app is nondenominational, including versions embraced by Catholics, Russian Orthodox and Messianic Jews. This month, the app reached 100 million downloads, placing it in the company of technology start-ups like Instagram and Dropbox.

“They have defined what it means to access God’s word on a mobile device,” said Geoff Dennis, an executive vice president of Crossway, one of many Bible publishers — from small presses to global Bible societies to News Corporation’s Thomas Nelson imprint — that have licensed their translations, free, to the church.

When Jen Sears, 37, a human resources manager in Oklahoma City, wants to pray these days, she leaves her Bible behind and grabs her phone instead.

“I have my print Bible sitting on my dresser at home, but it hasn’t moved” in the four years since she downloaded YouVersion, Mrs. Sears said.

The app, marketed simply as “The Bible,” has brought new donors to LifeChurch.tv. About $3 million was given by a handful of large donors to support development of the app last year; the church raised nearly $60 million over all, according to its financial statements. The church says it will have spent almost $20 million over all on YouVersion by the end of this year.

The church was founded in 1996 by a team consisting mostly of former business executives. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, a wider association of 850 congregations, which gives its members wide latitude in their operations. It has 50,000 weekly attendees in 16 locations.

The Gutenberg behind YouVersion is the church’s 36-year-old “innovation pastor,” Bobby Gruenewald, whose training was in business, not religion.

Mr. Gruenewald grew up in Decatur, Ill., in an evangelical church, where as a teenager he started a Christian rap ministry. Later, he moved to Oklahoma to join his sixth-grade crush, now his wife, who left Illinois to study at Southern Nazarene University.

Here at the church’s headquarters, Mr. Gruenewald wears the same tennis shoes, slouchy jeans and T-shirts that suited him as a Christian rapper and small-time entrepreneur who bluffed his way into building Web sites, then ran a Web hosting company out of his dorm room and later sold a pro-wrestling fan Web site for $7 million.

He joined LifeChurch.tv in 2001 after playing keyboard in its house band. Since then, the church has allowed him to experiment without an eye to profit.

Mr. Gruenewald’s early efforts for LifeChurch.tv included a virtual church for the online Second Life community and a Google ad campaign to lure pornography consumers to the church instead. But then he had a critical insight: if the church wanted to attract younger people, it needed both to be technically advanced and to offer its resources free.

“We have a generation of people that can’t fathom paying 99 cents for a song that they love,” Mr. Gruenewald said, “and we were asking them to pay $20 for a book that they don’t understand.”

He made YouVersion available in 2008, as the first Bible in Apple’s App Store. That early release contained only a few translations, like the King James Version, mostly in the public domain. When he began trying to persuade traditional Bible publishers to enter licensing arrangements with him, he encountered suspicion.

“People would say: ‘If people read it on YouVersion and they’re not paying anything for it, what’s going to happen to my pew Bibles?’ ” said Mr. Dennis of Crossway. “‘What’s going to happen to the thinline Bible that people carry to church?’”

Adam Graber of Tyndale House, another publisher that provides translations for the app, expressed some reservations about YouVersion’s strong position in the market for Bible apps.

Bits Blog: Coursera, an Online Education Company, Raises Another $43 Million

Ramin Rahimian for The New York Times Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera, at the company’s offices in Mountain View, Calif. Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100.

Coursera, a year-old company offering free online courses, has raised another $43 million in venture capital from investors active in both domestic and international education.

The new investors include the International Finance Corporation, the investment arm of the World Bank, and Laureate Education, an international higher education company with dozens of profit-making universities around the world, as well as GSV Capital, Learn Capital and Yuri Milner, an individual entrepreneur.

“We hope it’s enough money to get us to profitability,’’ said Daphne Koller, a co-founder of Coursera. “We haven’t really focused yet on when that might be.’’

Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif., previously raised $22 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; New Enterprise Associates; and the University of Pennsylvania and California Institute of Technology, two of its university partners.

Over the next few months, Coursera plans to double its employees to about 100, and expand in several areas, including mobile apps and its Signature Track offerings, which charge a fee to students who want an identity-verified certificate upon successful completion of Coursera’s free courses. Since January, when the Signature Track option was first offered in five courses, Signature Track fees have produced more than $800,000, Ms. Koller said — and in the long run, she said, such revenue may be enough to make the company sustainable.

The company also plans to invest in international expansion, through localization, translation and distribution partnerships, and techniques for blended learning, in which Coursera’s online materials are used alongside classroom sessions with a professor.

“We see great potential for using some of the Coursera materials in our universities, so there is a strategic element to this investment,’’ said Douglas L. Becker, chairman and chief executive officer of Laureate. “The I.F.C. made the largest education investment they ever made in Laureate, and they’re joining us in this investment. Coursera allows us to invest in something we see as a rising technology impacting higher education, and gives us access to their content and curriculum.”

Coursera has grown with stunning speed since it began in April 2012, with four university partners. Now, the company works with 83 educational institutions on four continents, offering about 400 free college-level courses to more than four million students from every country in the world.

But after the initial burst of enthusiasm last year about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, and their potential for democratizing higher education worldwide, this year has brought some pushback. Faculty members at several institutions have expressed concern about how the courses may change higher education, how quickly university administrators signed on to work with MOOC providers, and whether the aim is more to save money than improve the quality of education.

So far, most of the students who have completed Coursera MOOCs have been college graduates, and it is still unclear how well the format will work to help students without degrees earn college credit for their online work. Coursera has recently started to market its materials for use by public universities in blended on-campus classes. Universities that use the materials will pay licensing fees, which Coursera will share with the universities that produce the courses.

Bits Blog: T-Mobile to Pay $308 Million for More Spectrum

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DealBook: Citigroup to Pay Fannie Mae $968 Million Over Mortgage Claims

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DealBook: Steinway Sold to Private Equity Firm for $438 Million

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Cleric Arrested in $26 Million Plot, Leaving New Blot on Vatican Bank

Claiming to have foiled a caper worthy of Hollywood, or at least Cinecittà, the Italian police on Friday arrested a prelate and two others on corruption charges, saying that the priest plotted last summer to help wealthy friends sneak the money, the equivalent of about $26 million, into Italy while evading financial controls.

Along with the prelate, a financial broker and a military police agent deployed to the Italian Secret Service were arrested after an investigation that developed out of a broader three-year inquiry into the Vatican Bank. The case is the latest black mark on the bank, which under Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI has been trying to shake its image as a secretive tax and money laundering haven and bring itself into compliance with European norms so it can use the euro.

Rome prosecutors say the three men hired a private plane last July with the intention of bringing the cash into Italy from Locarno, Switzerland. The money was to be carried by the Secret Service agent, Giovanni Maria Zito, who would not be required to declare it at the border. But the scheme fell through, the prosecutors said, as the three began bickering and, eventually, lost their nerve. Cellphones used by the three in arranging the money transfer were later burned, prosecutors said.

The European Union and the United States have served notice in recent years that they will no longer tolerate the wall of secrecy in tax havens like Switzerland, Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands. As a result, major account holders have been growing increasingly nervous.

Nello Rossi, the Rome prosecutor who led the investigation, said that discussions picked up on wiretaps seemed to indicate that the 20 million euros in Switzerland was tied to the D’Amico family, Salerno shipping magnates.

Even before his arrest on Friday, the prelate, Msgr. Nunzio Scarano, was known to the authorities. An employee of Deutsche Bank before entering the priesthood, and until recently an accountant in a top Vatican financial office that oversees the Catholic Church’s real estate holdings, Monsignor Scarano was under investigation by magistrates in Salerno on accusations that he illegally moved $730,000 in cash from his account in the Vatican Bank to Italian banks, his lawyer said.

Monsignor Scarano’s lawyer, Silverio Sica, said his client would contest the charges. “I am certain he will want to speak to prosecutors to clarify his position,” Mr. Sica said. He added that Monsignor Scarano had had no previous dealings with the police or with judicial investigations.

In a statement on Friday, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said that Monsignor Scarano had been suspended from his position at the Vatican “more than a month ago, ever since his superiors were informed that he was under investigation.”

He added that the Holy See “has not yet received any requests from the competent Italian authorities, but confirms its willingness for full collaboration,” and that the Vatican’s internal financial watchdog was following the matter and would take, “if necessary, the appropriate measures in its competency.”

Only priests, members of religious orders, Catholic institutions, employees of the State of Vatican City and diplomats accredited to the Holy See are allowed to keep accounts at the Vatican Bank, known as the Institute for Works of Religion. But rumors have long swirled that accounts were being used as fronts for other interests, including organized crime and Italian politicians.

In the Salerno case, prosecutors accuse Monsignor Scarano of having illegally moved 560,000 euros, equivalent to $730,000, from his account in the Vatican Bank. Mr. Sica said that the monsignor had told prosecutors that the money came from a “generous donor” and was intended to finance a hospice for terminally ill patients in Salerno.

Facebook Says Technical Flaw Exposed 6 Million Users

Facebook blamed the data leaks, which began in 2012, on a technical flaw in its huge archive of contact information collected from its 1.1 billion users worldwide. As a result of the problem, Facebook users who downloaded contact data for their list of friends obtained additional information that they were not supposed to have.

Facebook’s security team was alerted to the problem last week and fixed it within 24 hours. But Facebook did not publicly acknowledge the flaw until Friday afternoon, when it published a message on its blog explaining the situation.

A Facebook spokesman said the delay was because of a company procedure stipulating that regulators and affected users be notified before making a public announcement.

“We currently have no evidence that this bug has been exploited maliciously, and we have not received complaints from users or seen anomalous behavior on the tool or site to suggest wrongdoing,” Facebook said on its blog.

While the privacy breach was limited, “It’s still something we’re upset and embarrassed by, and we’ll work doubly hard to make sure nothing like this happens again,” it added.

The breach follows recent disclosures that several consumer Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo, turned over troves of user data to a large-scale electronic surveillance program run by American intelligence officials.

The companies, led by Facebook, successfully negotiated with the United States government last week to reveal the approximate number of user information requests that each company had received, including secret national security orders.

Questcor Pays $135 Million to Acquire Rights to a Competitor’s Drug

The company, Questcor Pharmaceuticals, has acquired the rights to Synacthen, a drug from Novartis, that is sold in Europe but not in the United States. Synacthen is similar to Questcor’s drug, which is called H.P. Acthar Gel and used to treat various immune-related ailments.

Questcor’s agreement to pay Novartis at least $135 million trumped a bid from a start-up company called Retrophin that had hoped to sell Synacthen in the United States for a few hundred dollars a vial, sharply undercutting Acthar’s price, according to people briefed on Retrophin’s negotiations.

Questcor’s stock shot up 15 percent on Tuesday, the day its deal to acquire Synacthen was announced. “We believe the acquisition removes a key overhang as a potential competitor to Acthar is removed,” Biren Amin, an analyst at Jefferies & Company, wrote in a note.

One antitrust lawyer, not involved in the negotiations, predicted the deal would receive “intense scrutiny” by federal antitrust regulators.

“The type of acquisition that raises the most concern under the antitrust law is when a dominant firm acquires a potential rival,” said the lawyer, David A. Balto, a former policy director of the Federal Trade Commission who now calls himself a public interest antitrust lawyer.

But Steve Cartt, the chief operating officer of Questcor, disagreed. He said Questcor did not have to report the transaction to antitrust regulators because Novartis, the licenser, would retain some manufacturing rights to Synacthen.

The Federal Trade Commission is now proposing new rules to end such exemptions from notification.

A spokesman said the trade commission did not comment on whether it was reviewing particular transactions but said it could even when that was not required.

Questcor, based in Anaheim, Calif., has achieved huge success with Acthar, a hormone purified from pig pituitary glands that was selling for only about $40 a vial when the company acquired the drug in 2001.

Questcor began increasing the price. In 2007, it was raised to about $23,000 a vial from $1,650, provoking howls from some doctors and patients, and has continued to raise the price since then.

The company initially said the high price was necessary because the main use of the drug was to treat a very rare condition that causes spasms in babies. But the company has aggressively marketed the drug for more common immune-related disorders like multiple sclerosis and nephrotic syndrome. Sales reached $509 million in 2012, and the price of the company’s stock has soared since 2007.

But insurers are now making sure that Acthar is used only when far cheaper steroids cannot be. The federal government is investigating Questcor’s marketing practices. And many short-sellers have been betting Questcor’s stock will fall.

The most obvious threat to Questcor’s business was the possibility of someone bringing Synacthen to the United States. Synacthen is a synthetic fragment of the hormone in Acthar.

Questcor eliminated that competitor by licensing the exclusive rights to the drug in the United States and various other countries, excluding 13 in Europe, according to a company regulatory filing.

Its initial payment of $60 million to Novartis greatly exceeded the $16 million Retrophin was offering, according to a summary of the tentative deal terms that Retrophin was circulating to investors in an effort to raise money to buy Synacthen. Retrophin, however, was offering Novartis a 20 percent royalty on sales, which is likely to be far higher than what Questcor agreed to pay.

Retrophin, which went public through a reverse merger with a shell company, is based in New York and is run by Martin Shkreli, a former biotechnology hedge fund manager. He declined to comment for this article.

It is not clear if there were other bidders. Novartis declined to comment.

Novartis can revoke the rights if Questcor does not meet deadlines in terms of testing Synacthen in clinical trials and seeking approval to market it in the United States, according to a regulatory filing by Questcor. The deadlines are not being made public.

Mr. Cartt of Questcor said the company would spend millions of dollars testing Synacthen to see if it could help American patients. “That is the essence of discovery and competition, not their elimination,” he said in an e-mail.

In the past Questcor executives have disparaged Synacthen.

“We believe it is unlikely to be a competitor to Acthar,” David Young, Questcor’s chief scientific officer, said in a call with analysts last July. He said it was not a protein produced by the body like Acthar was and added, “Synacthen contains benzyl alcohol, which is toxic to children and can potentially cause gasping syndrome, which can be fatal.”

But in a news release this week, Dr. Young said that Questcor intended to test the drug “not only in conditions different than Acthar but also in conditions where Synacthen would potentially provide a clinical benefit over Acthar.”