Maybe Robert Lane, chairman and CEO of Deere & Company, is underpaid at $50 million a year?

Tuesday, with world stock markets melting down and the Dow off nearly 130 points, Deere shares gained nearly nine percent. One analyst even raised the target price for Deere stock, saying the prospects for the company’s tractors and other farm equipment are strong.

The trial of Rep. William J. Jefferson, D-La., begins next month with the nine-term congressman and former chairman of the U.S. congressional caucus on African trade facing a 16-count indictment including fraud, bribery, racketeering and money laundering.

It was a rare moment, a journalist and a politician actually letting their frustration with each other show.

In one corner at a Staples in Columbia, S.C., last week was Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts and candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Advocating locally grown food has taken Alice Waters far beyond Berkeley, home of Chez Panisse, the restaurant she founded in 1971.

Waters is author of nine cookbooks, head of the Chez Panisse Foundation, vice president of Slow Food (as in the opposite of fast food) International. And this week, she will be rubbing elbows with the global muckety mucks attending the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Lou Dobbs, the tough-talking anchor for CNN, is expert at riding popular opinion. Last week, a group called Americans for Legal Immigration attached itself firmly to Dobbs’ popularity as it launched an effort to draft him for president.

If nothing else, it was a good public relations move by ALIPAC, headed by William Gheen. The group shares Dobbs’ fervor against illegal immigration.

Do a Google search for Dr. Larry Brilliant and you’ll get links to the worlds of medicine, technology, music and religion.

Prominent, too, is a link to Google Inc. itself, as Brilliant, 63, is now the executive director of Google.org, the Internet company’s philanthropic arm.

Tracking the break-up aftermath for Spice Girl Melanie Brown and Eddie Murphy, it would seem that Scary Spice is coming out on top.

After ending his romantic involvement with the pregnant Brown in 2006, Murphy famously said, “I don’t know whose child that is until it comes out and has a blood test.” Brown and Murphy went to court to determine the paternity of Angel Iris Murphy Brown, and it was determined that Murphy was the father.

Since then, Melanie Brown has had a record year.

In yet another consolidation of the world’s stock markets, NYSE Euronext announced late yesterday that it was buying the American Stock Exchange.

The two exchanges, both located in lower Manhattan, were once fierce competitors. But Amex’s star has fallen since the 1990s, as NASDAQ tech stocks became increasingly popular.

Musicians can be an unruly lot. Just ask British investor Guy Hands.

After Hands’s private equity firm, Terra Firma, bought EMI Group, it announced a “fundamental restructuring” that included elimination of up to 2,000 jobs and cost reductions of nearly $400 million.

This didn’t go over well with the artists.

Sheldon Adelson, the New York Times writes today, “may well be the richest American that most people have never heard of.”

But Republicans certainly know the name. Adelson, who personally cleared $500 million when he sold the Comdex trade show to Softbank and has since made millions more in the casino & convention industry, is a major donor to GOP causes.