Can Playboy Enterprises successfully retool its image and its business model?

It's a whole different world since Hugh Hefner's ground-breaking magazine with nude centerfolds helped usher in the so-called Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

In recent years, with a rapidly changing culture and the availability of sexual content nearly everywhere on the Internet, it appeared the whole once-hip "Playboy Lifestyle" marketed by the company had become as passé as an old Rat Pack movie.

So, Playboy is facing twin challenges: to remain both culturally relevant and financially viable in a fast-changing world.

 

In the first day of Macy's (M) courtroom fight against J.C. Penney (JCP), the real loser appears to be Penney CEO Ron Johnson. 

Macy's is trying to show that Johnson (pictured), a former Apple (AAPL) executive, schemed to lure domestic diva Martha Stewart away from her long-standing merchandising deal with the department store.

Johnson's emails paint him as gloating over his score against Macy's, reports The New York Post. Macy's attorneys are trying to prove that Johnson had a scheme to trick Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren into dropping its Stewart products.

"We put Terry in a corner," Johnson wrote to Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund manager and a major shareholder of Penney's, the day after he announced a $200 million licensing deal with Stewart.

 

Some Pakistani fashion houses are avoiding using women in their advertisements after campaigners last year blacked out images of models on billboards.

It might be hard for Americans to picture how a fashion company can demonstrate the beauty of its clothing without models, but one Pakistani line says it's using sailboats to get the message across, according to the U.K.'s Telegraph.

How? The vessels' sails are made from their new "lawn prints," or lightweight fabrics worn in summer. Gusts of wind puff out the sails, with their colorful patterns glinting under a blue sky. 

"We feel that women are not to be flaunted across the city on billboards," Nadir Khan, customer relations manager of J Lawn, told the Telegraph.

 

An engine fire, five days stranded in the Gulf of Mexico, fights on food lines and raw sewage running down the walls weren't on the Carnival (CCL) Triumph cruise liner's original itinerary when it left port in Galveston, Texas, on Feb. 7.

A class-action lawsuit filed by passengers days after the ship was towed to its dock in Mobile, Ala., last week should have been a little easier to foresee.

CNN reported Thursday that Triumph passengers Matt and Melissa Crusan of Oklahoma filed suit on behalf of other passengers earlier this week in federal court. The suit claims that Carnival "knew or should have known that the vessel Triumph was likely to experience mechanical and/or engine issues because of prior similar issues."

 

Stewart Parnell has waited for years to see if the federal government would go after him for a nationwide salmonella outbreak that allegedly began at his company. Tuesday, he got his answer.

A federal grand jury has indicted Parnell (pictured), who owned the Peanut Corp. of America, along with his brother and two other former employees. The company is considered to be ground zero for a 2009 salmonella outbreak that killed nine people and made hundreds of others ill, according to The Associated Press.

The indictment charges the four employees with numerous offenses, including conspiracy, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. Parnell's company has gone bankrupt after several lawsuits from salmonella victims. 

Wal-Mart's (WMT) struggles, as seen in its latest quarterly report, are obviously not good news for shareholders of the world's largest retailer, but they might not be bad news for the country as a whole. That's because many of Wal-Mart's rivals are doing just fine.

When the U.S. economy started to tank, the Bentonville, Ark., company's low prices attracted cash-strapped consumers. But now, as the economy continues to rebound, consumers may be less worried about prices and more attuned to other aspects of their shopping experience such as customer service, which has never been a forte of Wal-Mart.

According to Wal-Mart, many people continue to struggle because of the rise in the payroll tax and delays in getting tax refunds from the IRS.  

The finding of glass fragments has prompted Kellogg (K) to recall some Special K Red Berries cereal, a version of the classic cereal that includes "deliciously sweet strawberries." It's geared toward health-conscious consumers, who presumably wouldn't view cut lips as a health benefit. 

The recall involves 36,000 boxes and three sizes of the product, which had been distributed across the U.S. to some grocery stores, Reuters reports. No injuries have been reported, the company said. 

Kellogg didn't say how the glass was found or what caused the problem, but it's the second grocery-store product to encounter a recall due to glass this month alone.

 

The Oscar trophies handed out at the upcoming Academy Awards cost about $400 each to produce and weigh 8.5 pounds. Their economic weight, however, has a huge impact all across Hollywood and its environs, benefiting a wide spectrum of businesses that serve the movie and entertainment industries.

Analysts say Oscar time injects tens of millions of dollars each year into local businesses and economies in LaLa Land --  some estimates run to $130 million -- pumping cash into everything from hotels to catering to transportation.

In Los Angeles ahead of the Oscars, bubbles Britain's Sky News, “hotel vacancies become non-existent despite massively escalated rates. Restaurants book up and caterers pour out case upon case of the good bubbly. Neither love nor money will hire a town car or limo this week if you didn't book months ago."