The Prince of Ponzi Bernie Madoff has been beaten in prison, reports The Wall Street Journal.

According to the WSJ, Madoff was subsequently treated for a broken nose, fractured ribs and cuts to his head and face. Not that the people who lost their live savings in his $20 billion fraud would care.

The paper says the Bureau of Prisons claims it investigated the incident, and even interviewed Madoff and says it has found no evidence of the assault. It reports: 'In December he told staff he was not assaulted, and an investigation was completed following his statements, which corroborated his statements, ' said Traci Billingsley, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman. 'Not one inmate has told staff he was assaulted.'

And what about the alleged assailant? He is not someone to be messed with. The WSJ says he is a big bloke serving time for a drug conviction who also happens to be a body builder and judo black belt.

Still, it's also interesting to read about the company Madoff keeps these days. When he is not giving financial advice, he is hanging out with Colombo crime-family boss Carmine Persico.

As they say, birds of a feather.

Years ago, it was Google versus Yahoo. In recent times, that's changed to Google versus Facebook.

And if the Financial Times is to be believed, Facebook has overtaken Google's popularity among US Internet users. According to research firm Hitwise, Facebook and Google accounted for 14% of all US internet visits last week. Facebook's home page recorded 7.07 per cent of traffic and Google's 7.03 per cent. Now that's a slim lead but IT analysts are falling over themselves saying its significant.

All this coincides with a Wall Street Journal report that the Facebook float would be worth more than Google's. When Google listed, it was valued at $23 billion but some analysts are saying Facebook would be worth somewhere around $35 billion - $40 billion.

Actually, these highly paid analysts need to have a cold shower. Despite Facebook's growing popularity, it's nowhere near being as profitable as Google. Facebook's revenues are purportedly somewhere around $1 billion, while Google took in $23.7 billion last year.

And it's hard to work out how Hitwise developed those numbers. Google is a search engine so it gets millions of visits per second. Compare that to the number of times people might visit Facebook during the day.

It's hard to say where Facebook will be 10 years from now but given our dependence on search, Google will still be around.

Two years ago, the International Energy Agency was telling countries that the global economic crisis was an opportunity to mitigate climate change. Less production and less economic activity would result in lower emissions. Or so the thinking went. How wrong they were.

Now Scientific American tell us that levels of main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010. That's despite an economic slowdown in many nations that slowed down industrial output. Scientific American reports: "Recession in 2009 in many nations has not apparently affected gains. The International Energy Agency estimated in September that emissions of carbon dioxide would fall about 2.6 percent in 2009 because of a decline in industrial activity."

Why is this happening? Actually, it's quite simple. Each carbon molecule emitted typically lingers in the atmosphere for many years. Economics has zero impact.

The scary part is that the International Energy Agency didn't know this. And they're supposed to be the experts!

Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay and Conrad Black - all corporate psychopaths who felt absolutely no remorse or twinge of guilt about their crimes. Indeed, none of them ever admitted any wrong doing and said they were unfairly treated.

The inability to feel any remorse is the psychopath's calling card. But according to Vanderbilt University research, we need to look at what drives them.

The report says: "Previous research on psychopathy has focused on what these individuals lack-fear, empathy and interpersonal skills. The new research, however, examines what they have in abundance-impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards and risk taking. Importantly, it is these latter traits that are most closely linked with the violent and criminal aspects of psychopathy."

In other words, psychopaths have a higher than normal attraction to risk taking.

If nothing else, it's a warning to be careful about all those who get off living on the edge. That's the danger signal.

First there was Andersen, now it's Ernst & Young. The Enronisation of Lehman Brothers continues with the New York Times reporting that Lehman Brothers' auditors Ernst & Young could face legal action over their collusion in the collapse of the financial services firm.

As I reported here last week, Ernst & Young signed off on those accounting tricks that allowed Lehman Brothers to hide toxic assets and make its debt levels look better than what they actually were. A report from the court-appointed examiner finds there is sufficient evidence to bring claims of malpractice against E&Y.

The audit model needs to be overhauled. As accounting critic Prem Sikka warned two years ago, the way things are run will inevitably result in malpractice.

Sikka writes: "Time and time again it has been shown that the basic audit model is faulty. Private sector auditors cannot be independent of the companies that they audit. This fundamental faultline has not been addressed by the post Enron reforms. In addition, the ex-post financial audits are too late and cannot alert financial regulators of problems."

Sikka says audits of major companies, particularly banks and financial institutions, are carried out directly by the regulators.

But given the performance of the Securities and Exchange Commission, you would have to wonder whether regulators have the expertise. Perhaps it's time for governments to start looking at this. Because it will happen again.