Bernard Madoff was sentenced to prison today after he admitted to running one of the largest and longest financial frauds in recent history.

Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me to help them compose a winning sales letter to market their professional services. “What is the magic formula,” they ask, “for writing a letter that results in clients?” Unfortunately, there isn’t one. And a whole lot of folks are wasting precious marketing time trying to create the perfect letter to jumpstart their marketing.

A lookalike Air Force One accompanied by two F-16 fighters, flew low over parts of New York and New Jersey on Monday morning April 27, 2009. The lookalike plane is a back up for the one regularly used by the President. The White House Military Office Air Force photographers wanted to update their photos of Air Force One zooming across the metropolitan area. The project, which was scheduled between 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m., was coordinated with an on-board “training exercise” for crew members, an official said.

You can get Free Ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s around the world today between 12:00 noon to 8:00 PM! Get any cone or cup of ice cream from their scoop shop absolutely free.

The HP Pavilion DV6T laptop is a new makeover of the previous HP DV7T laptop which was released last month.

We noticed that the amount of spam we were getting was significantly increasing each month. A couple of months ago, we were each getting about 30 to 50 spams a day! Spams had gone from being a real nuisance to a serious problem.

This past week, the stock market made a stab at recovery. This was its best performance in months after pessimistic remarks from bank CEOs and economic data led investors. Since the bear market began in late 2007, the Dow Jones industrial average had fallen into a pattern of huge declines, big gains, and then even larger declines.

Cell phones have changed our lives, but so have cell phone scams… This clever technology that keeps us constantly in touch with friends, relatives and even the Internet may be a boon, but it has also opened up more of the airwaves to crooks and snoopers. In some cases, further technological advances have made it tougher for certain cell phone scams to work, but elsewhere the crooks are having a field day. In this Scambusters issue, we identify 10 of the most common cell phone scams and the action you can take to avoid or reduce the risk of them.

Rep. Hilda Solis of California will be nominated as labor secretary by President-elect Barack Obama. In 1994 Solis was the first Latina elected to the California Senate, where she led the battle to increase the state’s minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75 an hour in 1996. She wrote a measure in Congress that authorized $125 million for work force training programs in areas such as energy efficiency retrofitting and “green building” construction.

After spending two years building my own website, I was very disappointed that my Alexa ranking was still higher than one million. Alexa ranks each website based on the number of visitors it receives. The top ranked website, Yahoo! has an Alexa rating of 1 or 2. Less popular sites could be ranked up to 5,000,000. In order to improve my Alexa rating, I spent about three weeks combing the web to find tips, secrets, and proven strategies for increasing my Alexa ranking. Unfortunately, many of the sites offering advice didn’t even have a high ranking themselves. Finally I discovered a number of sites ranked within the top 100,000 that were all applying the same “Alexa techniques” to improve their ranking. I’ve begun implementing a number of these techniques and have improved my Alexa ranking by 250,000 spots in just one week.

My Christmas Story… Written By Trina L.C. Sonnenberg Oh, about sixteen years ago, I was spending Christmas as a newly divorced, single mother. I was 26 years old and my son was three. I worked two jobs, just to afford to live in a housing project, in a very scary neighborhood. I had no Christmas tree, I had no money, I had no gifts for my little boy. Not one! Talk about depressing… Thank God for the U.S. Marine Corps. and a very special friend with a very special family.

An angry Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush during a news conference in Bagdad, Iraq today. The Presidant was making a farewell visit with Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in his palace in the heavily fortified Green Zone when the man threw his shoes one-at-a-time towards Bush. The President ducked his head while the flying shoes missed him.

By Scambusters.org As we never tire of pointing out, not all scams are illegal. Take this week’s main story for example, where high schoolers are fooled into paying for expensive trips believing they’ve been invited to the Presidential inauguration. The trick is to mislead by implying one thing but then to put the truth in the small print.

Sony became the region’s highest profile technology company to announce major layoffs on Tuesday. Howard Stringer, Sony CEO announced he is slashing 16,000 jobs. Stringer’s newest cuts, announced last night were 8,000 full-time positions, plus 8,000 seasonal and temp workers. This sounds a lot like the cuts he made in 2005, when he had just taken control of the company. 3 years ago, when Stringer fired 10,000 workers, he was trying to restructure Sony (SNE) so that it could focus its diffuse product line and compete with an array of rivals, from Apple (AAPL) to Samsung. But now he’s just cutting because the world’s economy is in miserable shape.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his chief of staff were arrested this morning on conspiracy and bribery charges, including allegations that the governor was seeking to benefit financially from his appointment of a successor to the U.S. Senate seat that was vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told a news conference prosecutors make “no allegations” Obama was aware of any alleged scheming.