A call to Red Herring publisher Alex Vieux through his old office line, 650 428 2900, was answered today by a man with an Eastern European accent who said Vieux wasn't there. Why was anyone there to answer the phone? Yesterday, the Herring's landlord sent a locksmith, an attorney, and sheriff's deputies to evict Vieux from the building, prompting a hasty exit. Vieux claims he has a new office, but wouldn't give out its address. If so, it's possible Vieux had the phone line forwarded there. But it's also possible, a former employee says, that Herring employees broke into their former office: "I wouldn't be shocked if Vieux & Co. just went in through one of the side doors that is not well secured." Wouldn't that be trespassing, though?

Jeffrey Hawn, the founder and CEO of Seattle-based business-software company Attachmate, turned himself into authorities, charged with animal cruelty, theft and criminal mischief. Hawn and hired hands shot and killed 31 or 32 bison, the majestic symbol of Americana, which had wandered onto his property from a neighboring ranch in Park County, Colorado — including cows carrying calfs, and scattered across hundreds of acres, some owned not by Hawn but the Bureau of Land Management. What's really shocking, though?

With Facebook and MySpace being tasked with keeping registered sex offenders off their sites, tinier U.K.-based Faceparty may have been feeling left out. So they've deleted the accounts of many users aged 36 and up. The site explains:

Note to the kids: I know you are not gonna stop sending each other naked photos of yourselves, but when your hot girlfriend becomes your ex, do not post those photos on MySpace with the caption "Yo tell me this bitch desurves this!!!!!!! This is HLK yall! Yo, U see how big her hole is! Its from me! TF gets my leftover's to bad she fucked." That's what Alex Phillips did to his 16-year-old ex, and now the 17-year-old boy is facing charges of sexual exploitation of a child and possession of child pornography. Obviously he's a twat and deserving of the defamation charge that he's also getting. But is this really a child porn case?

Lou Pearlman, the impresario behind boy bands like Backstreet Boys and O-Town, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and money laundering. The big, fat, blustering Floridian bilked banks and private investors out of $300 million over the past twenty years. (Incidentally, Pearlman has also been accused of getting a mite molesty with the young lads in his bands.) Now he'll stand in a prison yard, staring at the little house across the way, the happy family enjoying the day. He'll sigh and say "I want it that way."

The Brits are rather less enthusiastic about the whole "free speech" concept than the US is. A 15-year-old kid was holding a sign that said "Cult" at one of the Anonymous protests against Scientology in London. The precocious young scalawag had even memorized a 1984 UK court ruling in which a judge called the science fiction-based religion a "cult." But the police gave him a summons and confiscated his dangerous slogan-bearing poster, and now he has to go to court to defend himself.

Here's the key section from the legal complaint against wacko famous girl Lindsay Lohan for stealing a college student's mink coat from a club in New York. She didn't just pick it up accidentally, the complaint says; her actions were "intentional, oppressive, and malicious," and the coat-deprived girl was "injured." Ouch, my mink is gone! Click to enlarge. [via The Insider]

Spotted on Google Maps: a kid pointing a gun at a younger kid. (Okay, it's probably a toy gun.) What is it about Chicago? We've already seen a drug deal on the South Side and a girl flashing the camera in Homewood.

Lindsay Lohan is being sued over that incident in which she left a nightclub wearing someone else's blonde fur coat, a coat she had not been wearing previously, and that the owner did not give her permission to take. This means Lohan is probably going to have answer uncomfortable questions raised by the situation under oath, assuming she doesn't settle first, which she'll quickly do if she's smart. The owner of the coat, a Columbia University student of Russian extraction, received it as a gift from her grandmother and thought it was lost forever, until she saw paparazzi pictures of Lohan wearing it. She raised a stink, and the $12,000 coat was returned through intermediaries, with no explanation forthcoming. At first she asked for $10,000 compensation for the three weeks the coat was gone, but now she's likely to ask for a six-figure sum, as her attorney vowed earlier this month. If Lohan starts negotiating now, she could probably get that down to something in the mid five-figures, and avoid both a costly court battle and further damage to whatever is left of her acting career. That's, what, a couple of night's worth of coke and bottle service? [Post] (Photo: Splash)

AOL's dirty dealings are all in the past, right? With the SEC filing charges against eight former AOL Time Warner execs for their roles in inflating AOL's online ad revenue between 2000 and 2002, that's no doubt what present management would like you to think. Former head of business affairs David Colburn, former controller James MacGuidwin, and two others agreed to settlements and will pay back all ill-gotten gains with interest. The four others — former division CFOs John Michael Kelly and Joseph Ripp, executive Steven Rindner, and accountant Mark Wovsaniker — will contest the SEC's charges. The charges stem from an investigation the Washington Post began in 2002, which revealed that as it merged with Time Warner, AOL's business-affairs group completed a series of unconventional deals in order to boost its online ad sales numbers. In July 2002, the Post reported:

British Columbia's child-welfare services have identified five women between the ages of 15 and 17 who used Craigslist to work as prostitutes. "There's an argument that [Craigslist is] really sort of pimping," says University of British Columbia Associate Law Professor Janine Benedet. While prostitution is quasi-legal in Canada, "communicating for the purposes of prostitution" is flatly illegal, as is underage prostitution. So Craigslist ought to face penalties, say the Canadian cops and social workers, for providing a venue where teenagers can post photos, rates, and collect customers — or where pimps can do it for them.

One more thing that the good people who run TV Guide have to worry about: Henry Yuen, the company's former CEO, is now officially a fugitive. He was charged with obstruction of justice last week for destroying documents that the SEC requested (in relation to an earlier conviction for securities fraud, natch), but he failed to turn himself in. New owner Macrovision is already preoccupied with trying to sell the print magazine to rescue the entire enterprise from death, so they certainly could do without the headache of answering new questions about Yuen, who was fired in 2002. Luckily for them, this story is far too esoteric for TV outlets to cover. [Mediapost via Jossip]

The New York Post has canned Leonardo Blair, the black reporter who earlier this month filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD alleging racial harassment. Blair probably got the sense that his employer didn't really have his back when the Post ran an editorial ho-humming racial profiling complaints the same day that Blair filed his suit. Neither the Post nor Blair would comment on the end of his employment there. At least the Daily News is now free to commission Blair to write a scandalous tell-all of racial discrimination in the inner bowels of the Post. If they don't, you have to wonder whether they're sufficiently bloodthirsty (or rather, justice-thirsty) to play with Rupert Murdoch. [NYDN]

William Dalgleish, charged with downloading 16,000 "indecent images of children", is trying for a Google defense. "If companies like Google did not provide access to such sites, he would not have committed the offenses," his lawyer explained before a Scottish high court. Dalgleish's total haul? 16,535 images and videos — a total unexplained even if he were a researcher, or for that matter, a government official tasked with monitoring porn and sex crimes. Britain's own sex-offender database administrator was just accused of possessing 3,800 images himself. (Photo by pinkmoose)

Former CEO of PurchasePro Charles Johnson is facing 20 years in jail for his role in stock fraud at the company. An earlier prosecution of Johnson ended in mistrial, but this retrial included the original allegations plus an obstruction of justice charge related to the first effort. The Las Vegas-based PurchasePro sold enterprise software for business-to-business transactions online. PurchasePro executives worked closely with AOL dealmakers, who were implicated in the scheme to manufacture positive sales numbers in 2001 in order to puff up PurchasePro's once-astronomical stock price. AOL cut a deal earlier to defer prosecution. Other executives at PurchasePro had already plead guilty. PurchasePro went bankrupt in 2002, and the assets were scooped up by Perfect Commerce.

MySpace's contention that the social network was a victim, and not an enabler, in the suicide of Missouri teenager Megan Meier has paid off. A federal grand jury has indicted Lori Drew on one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization, with each count carrying a maximum of five years. The indictment cited how Drew and other unnamed coconspirators breached MySpace's terms of use by creating a fake account to trade messages with Meier, and "used the information obtained over the MySpace computer system to torment, harass, humiliate, and embarrass the juvenile MySpace member."

After the SEC accused Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli, founders of chipmaker Broadcom, of illegally backdating stock options for five years, Samueli stepped down as board chairman and CTO. Nicholas had stepped down from his post as CEO in 2003 amidst allegations of having a drug habit and flying friends and prostitutes from around the country to an underground party lair he'd built in his home.

Crystal says that a 23-year-old man raped her, and she's saying it on YouTube. Why not go to a shelter or a counseling center like girls are supposed to? Crystal isn't just doing teen-bedroom confessional; she's asking YouTube viewers to call the Florida state attorney's office to request that her case be prosecuted. But does talking about rape on YouTube do anything that the courts can't? The full video, after the jump:

Freaky deaky swinger singer R. Kelly is about to go on trial in his hometown of Chicago for the crime of child pornography. But first, they have to find a jury. And that seems to be more difficult that you would think, because, judging strictly by media coverage, Chicago is full of weasels, crazy people, and child porn supporters. After the jump, the five best reasons [from a longer list at the Chicago Tribune] that people have given to get out of serving on the jury in this case of the century:

A Dallas man has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for spitting at a cop. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, because he's HIV-positive. So his spit is made of death!!! Except, uh... we were taught many years ago that much as you can't get pregnant from oral sex, you can't actually get the AIDS from fucking spit. Look, here's the CDC: