Bernie Madoff, whose formerly lavish lifestyle included a share in a private jet and houses in Palm Beach, Fla., and France's Cap d'Antibes, is now making wages akin to those earned by Bangladeshi garment workers.

Madoff told CNNMoney's Aaron Smith that he's making $40 a month by performing menial labor in prison. Because his prison phone account was out of money, he had to place a collect call to the publication. 

The convicted swindler is making his meager earnings by taking care of the prison's phone and computer systems. That means Madoff, whose name is now a byword for a grand cheater, is earning about the same amount as garment workers in Bangladesh, as the Huffington Post notes. 

 

 

While Facebook (FB) is set to mark the one-year anniversary of its IPO, a startling new statistic calls into doubt the accuracy of its claim to more than 1 billion members.

Figures gathered by other companies and analyzed by eMarketer show that the company last year actually had only 889.3 million users who are people. Facebook, though, had claimed 1 billion members in 2012. So what are the other 100 million accounts? 

Well, according to eMarketer, they're mostly pets and brands. Basically, if your friend set up an account for her cat, Facebook's counting Miss Snuggles as a member. 

 

Life is fun when you have $600 million on your hands. Just ask the folks at Powerball.

The lottery has quite a sense of humor on display on its information and its "real letters" pages. The Multi-State Lottery Association gets tons of email -- as much as one per minute on days like Friday when Powerball fever is at its peak -- and so it set out to answer some of the most common player questions.

Here are some of the words of wisdom from the stand-up comedians over at Powerball:

Leave the chickens alone. "Swinging a live chicken above your head while wishing for the future numbers does NOT work," the site notes. "There is no improvement to be had by swinging a dead chicken. Although I have not tested it, swinging a bucket of extra crispy is not likely to work either." This will not be welcome news at Yum Brands' (YUM) KFC. 

Did you catch this week's season finale of "American Idol"? Well, if you didn't watch the big climax to the Fox network's singing competition, you had plenty of company.

Fans just seem to be losing interest in the show despite the never-ending backstage drama. And that's bad news for Fox parent News Corp. (NWS), whose earnings have been hurt by the show's weak ratings.

As The Hollywood Reporter and other outlets have noted, Thursday's conclusion of season 12, with Candice Glover crowned the winner of the singing competition, averaged just a 3.4 rating among viewers ages 18-49, the demographic most targeted by advertisers. That's a 47% drop from last year's final show. In terms of total viewers, a 3.4 rating equals 13.6 million, down from 21.5 million a season ago. This is also the first time that the "Idol" season finale hasn't been seen by at least 20 million viewers. 

Domino's (DPZ) is testing a DVD in Brazil that looks and smells like pizza. The idea goes something like this: When people finish watching a movie and remove the DVD disc from the player, Domino's is going to assault their senses with pizza in hopes it leads to sales.

DVDs tend to get hot when they're being played. And so Domino's is stamping discs with heat-sensitive thermal ink and a pizza-scented varnish, Advertising Age reports.

It doesn't sound like the varnish is strong enough to send the smell of pizza wafting across the room. Instead, when someone ejects the DVD disc from a player, the discs smell like pizza. They're also printed with thermal ink to look like mini pizza pies, and feature this message: "Did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino's Pizza." 

Crowd sourcing has helped revive the "Veronica Mars" movie and funded countless books, games and music projects. 

Now an advocacy group wants the power of little investors to save the Los Angeles Times from the hands of what it calls "infamous right-wing billionaires."

Those billionaires, Charles and David Koch, are said to be eyeing the Los Angeles Times and Tribune's (TRBAA) other newspapers. The brothers have been called "the 1% at its very worst" and are about as popular with liberals as bratwurst at a vegan restaurant.

Enter the little guys. 

The Other 98%, an advocacy group, is asking people to pitch in as little as $10 to help raise $660 million to buy the Tribune newspaper group and rescue it from the clutches of the Kochs.

 

People are working harder and retiring later, according to a new survey from pollster Gallup. U.S. retirees say they stopped working at an average age of 61 -- up from 57 two decades ago.

And younger people who are still working say they have a long road ahead. Gallup asked working Americans when they expect to retire, and the average answer was age 66. That's up from 60 in 1995.

The 2008 recession isn't completely to blame here. The average retirement age began climbing long before then, hitting 60 around 2004. "This shift may reflect more than just a changing economy," Gallup said about the results. "It may also indicate changing norms about the value of work, the composition of the workforce, the decrease in jobs with mandatory retirement ages, and other factors."