REAL ESTATE
• The Rent Guidelines Board, which regulates the city’s 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, recommended increases of 3.5 percent to 7 percent for one-year leases and 5.5 percent to 9.5 percent for two-year leases. [NYT]
• It sort of makes us feel better that even Kanye West can’t get a discount on rent. [NYP]
• More than 100 artists are returning to their loft spaces in Brooklyn about three months after the Fire Department cited their landlord for code violations and forced the tenants out. [NYT]
FINANCE
• NYSE Euronext’s profits tripled in the first quarter. [CNN]
• Billionaire investor Eddie Lampert was under scrutiny at the Sears’ Holdings shareholders’ meeting yesterday as he went up against his sometime nemesis, hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman. “We think Sears is undervalued,” Ackman said to Lampert. “Your disclosure is not as forthcoming as it should be.” [NYP]
• Meanwhile, Ackman convinced Target to sell a 47 percent interest in its credit-card receivables to JPMorgan Chase. [DealBook/NYT]
MEDIA
• A character in James Frey’s new novel is based on Perez Hilton. We’ll hold off on cracking a joke about a million little page views. [Gawker]
• Just in time for Mother’s Day, Gourmet editrix Ruth Reichl got a book deal thanks to a speech she gave where she said that her mother “was everything I didn’t want to be, and to this day I wake up every morning grateful not to be her.” [WWD]
• Poster girl Arianna Huffington is more powerful than ever. [W]
LAW
• Yahoo’s lawyers over at Skadden played a key role in scaring off Microsoft. [Law.com]
• Cadwalder is shrinking its summer-associate program to 58, which is just over half of what it was last year. The firm says the reason is retention, not the economy. [Law.com]
• Naps in first class don’t cost as much as they used to: Lawyers no longer bill at the full hourly rate when they are traveling but not working. [WSJ]
