As applicants to appear on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Washington, D.C., Tareq and Michaele Salahi had signed a contract with the network limiting their television appearances. And according to a booker at a rival network, an NBC staffer has admitted that Bravo prevented the Salahis from giving their initial exclusive interview to anyone other than NBC News, which is under the same NBC Universal corporate umbrella as Bravo.

"They had a Bravo contract before the state dinner," the NBCer said, according to our source. "Bravo just held them to it," comparing the situation to what the TLC network did with John and Kate Gosselin after that pair became front-page news.

Bravo's contract with Real Housewives of New Jersey participants has been posted online, and the relevant portion of that contract—which we'd imagine would be quite similar to what the Salahis signed—is here:

In addition to obligating participants to make themselves "reasonably available" to market the show, it prevents them from appearing on any "unscripted, reality-based programs" without Bravo's written consent. If the Salahis signed a contract like this, Bravo could have prevented them from giving their exclusive to anyone other than Today.

The Salahis had been scheduled to break their silence on CNN's Larry King Live last night, but the appearance was "rescheduled" without explanation. ABC News and CBS News were also pursuing the Salahis, and the Associated Press has reported that the couple was demanding "a payment in the mid-six figures range" in exchange for access.

It's an open secret that morning news shows will pay money to land interviews — they are just very clever about it, never cutting a check directly for an interview. The spurned rival saluted former Today honcho and present NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker's creativity in securing the biggest get of, well, the month so far.

Still, Lauer insisted this morning that NBC News hadn't paid the Salahis:

Matt Lauer: Based on some of the things that have been reported over the last 48 or 72 hours I feel the need to say this and ask this : are you appearing here today in any way because of any financial deal that you have made with this network? Are we paying you for this appearance in any way?

Michaele: No you're not.

Tareq: No, absolutely not.

Michaele: And at no time, Matt, have we ever even talked about doing that with anyone.

It depends on what "this network" means. Did they have a financial deal with NBC? No. Did they have one with Bravo? Absolutely.

"I'm OK losing," said a rival booker, "but to watch Matt Lauer say 'we didn't pay them'" when NBC News' corporate sister Bravo used its contract to force them to Today was too much. Not to mention that the Salahis will be paid, handsomely, when they are inevitably selected for the final cast of Real Housewives, which they almost certainly will be.

UPDATE: Cameron Blanchard, a Bravo spokeswoman, says "it's categorically false" that Bravo played a role in the booking: "Bravo was not involved at all." When we asked Blanchard whether Bravo had, as the Real Housewives of New Jersey agreement seems to indicate, a contractual right to determine which television programs the Salahis appear on, she said "we don't comment on the contents of contracts." Then, commenting on the contents of the contract, Blanchard added that "every contract is different, and to imply that the Salahis signed something like the Real Housewives on New Jersey contract is not accurate."

SECOND UPDATE: NBC News spokeswoman Lauren Kapp says, "Bravo was not involved. This was a separate situation. While I can't speak for the Salahis, the fact that they chose to appear on the number one morning news show should not seem odd." Asked if Bravo had a contractual right to sign off on the Salahis' television appearances, she said, "You would have to ask Bravo about the contract." When we asked Kapp why the Salahis would initially decide to appear on CNN's Larry King Live instead of the "number one morning news show," she said, "They chose to, and then they changed their minds, and you'd have to ask them why they did."

The lucky lady: Kathryn "Kate" Rogers. We're not sure where the wedding is taking place, yet, but Rush reads the site, so maybe he'll let us know!

Rush loves the holidays: his last wedding was on Memorial Day, 1994. Prior to that, his second wife left him on Christmas.

Kaelin was famous for being a guest of OJ Simpson's when the latter did not stab his ex-wife. He now seems to have moved to leeching from Durham, an equally pleasant character. Last week the obnoxious big-spender's offices were raided by the FBI. Pictures of the raid's aftermath can be found here, along with one of a notice that disingenuously just says Fair Financial, Durham's company, is closed for the holidays.

That's consistent with what Durham is telling friends and family. One tipster, who was at the Durham household for Thanksgiving, said Durham was always on the phone and just said he was "handling business." The tipster, who says he thought Durham was a billionaire from the way he spent and talked, took a look at the fat-faced financier's car collection too - which he boasted was worth over $4m. It includes a Rolls Royce Phantom convertible, an Aston Martin, a Ford GT40, a Bentley, an AMG Mercedes "and of course his Bugatti." Of course. The wonderfully nosey source also noticed that Ludacris has his own room in Durham's mansion. There is no word yet on how often Luda is there, but he should make the most of it while he can. The FBI has moved to seize the house.

A second source pointed out that Fair Financial had recently taken to targeting elderly Amish and Mennonite people. Who knows what kinds of investments they're after — perhaps shire horse derivatives — but here's a picture the tipster took of the new Fair Financial offices in Millersburg of a notice in the window of another office announcing a new location in Millersburg, in the heart of Amish country.

Durham may soon have a line of carts outside his door, if allegations of a Ponzi scheme are to be believed. If a woman we hear is his "right hand lady," Shannon Frantz, deals with those irate investors, we hope she's wearing more than this (very NSFW).

Last week there was much moralizing when it was revealed that the son of Equatorial Guinea's dictator was rolling around the US spending his country's oil wealth. But he may not even be the worst case of a dictator's offspring turning America into their personal playground.

People with knowledge of their movements say Saif and Hannibal have been in the U.S. this year. The State Department would not confirm or deny the reports and the Libyan Embassy did not return repeated calls for comment.

They're every bit as ridiculous as Teodoro Nguema Obiang, the heir to power in Equatorial Guinea, and have — if anything — greater freedom to spend their ill-gotten gains in the US. Let's start with Hannibal, pictured on a placard here in a protest against his imprisonment by Swiss authorities (more below):

He enjoys beating women (allegedly) and driving his Porsche the wrong way down the Champs-Elysees in Paris at 90mph. He has pulled a 9mm gun on police in that city and attacked Italian cops with a fire extinguisher. He wriggled out of charges in each instance using diplomatic immunity. Again, the State Department would not confirm or deny that, if Hannibal was here, he was travelling on a diplomatic passport. But it seems unlikely he'd leave it at home after he sparked an international incident in Switzerland in 2008.

His brother Saif, in the main picture, is known as the sophisticated one. He impressed the Council on Foreign Relations on a recent trip to New York, and hangs out with the Rotshchilds, according to this Daily Beast report on his efforts to free the Lockerbie bomber. He's also well-known for keeping two pet tigers. His charm offensive is not winning fans everywhere though - one journalist, who met him when he was promoting his own paintings in Canada, described him as "clearly a little shit" beneath his calm exterior.

Western relations with Libya have warmed in recent years. But it seems that tolerance is as blatant an oil-grab as the collective ignoring of Obiang's Bugatti Veyrons and Rodeo Drive spending sprees. Like Equatorial Guinean dictator Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mbasogo, Gaddafi is strongly rumoured to take a cut of each barrel of oil he sells to the West. Like Equatorial Guinea, Libya is rated as not a free country, and receives the lowest possible scores for Political Rights and Civil Liberties from watchdog Freedom House.

And as with Equatorial Guinea any efforts to enforce a presidential order and act of congress that bar corrupt foreign officials will probably be met with an awkward silence.

Let's just hope that Saadi, another of Gaddafi's eight children, doesn't decide to visit the US. He's a failed soccer player who took steroids, once had a crowd shot at for booing him and tried to make movies with his dad's money.

Our tipster notes that Nancy is "just emailing everyone she knows, asking you to pass it on! So I did." As will we. No need to thank us, Nancy. Since you gave $10 million to Scientology, you need every penny.

Some pictures of the bed follow.

The insider, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of ending up in the infamous Black Beach prison in Equatorial Guinea, said Obiang regularly spends up to $200,000 in a day on frequent LA shopping sprees - his $35m estate, pictured above, is in Malibu. "Everyone knows Nguema because he is one of the biggest customers on the street," she explained.

The identity of his girlfriend/cousin was revealed to a store assistant, with whom they're "regulars", when the two were buying $70,000 in Italian designer clothes and shared a fitting room. What will his ex, the rapper Eve, think?

UPDATE:

A source tells Ken Silverstein, at Harper's, that senior congressional staff are going after Obiang's visa. Calls are even going as far as "the seventh floor [where Secretary Hillary Clinton has her office]."

We previously speculated that the rumors might refer to Hamad Al Wazzan, an associate of Low's named in the New York Post story that brought Low to light. He is a Kuwaiti whose family run a businesses conglomerate, the Al Wazzan Group, in the emirate. Their dealings are certainly vague enough to encompass arms dealing. And, totally circumstantially, he's a fan of Megan Fox on Facebook.

A tipster shed some light on the murky back story. Securities and Exchange Commission filings link the Al Wazzan Group to the Shaw Group, a US firm that specialises in infrastructure and energy but whose interests extend to security and defense. Al Wazzan also seem to have won computing business from the Defense Department back in 2004.

More convincingly, the group themselves have a security arm called Injifa Security Services. A look at their website seems to show that they are responsible for the security of several high-profile Kuwaiti ministries, the national banks, the airport and the petroleum company. Here are a couple of screengrabs:

They also sell weapons. There are no AK-47s and cluster bombs listed for sale on the site, but you can buy body armour, batons, restraints, and what appear to be gas projectiles. One would presume that the 50mm machine guns would not, if available, be listed publicly.

There is a pretty high demand for US-friendly security in Kuwait. The country is a major staging post for US troops deploying to Iraq. A rumoured CIA black site, Camp Bucca, on its border with Iraq, closed in September.

If Hamad Al Wazzan is the money behind Jho Low, at least he's learned some subtlety from his predecessors.

In an interview he just finished with Playgirl editor-in-chief Nicole Caldwell, Levi says of the invite, "You could tell by her laugh she was full of it." The petition to come over for some turkey was part of a segment the former Alaska governor taped for an Oprah episode that airs Monday.

Levi also that it was a "nice gesture, but she didn't mean it" and if he went, it would be "awkward." He also tells Entertainment Tonight, "Either she's telling a little spoof here or she's going to ask me in the next couple of days. I couldn't care less to go with Sarah Palin, but I want to be with my kid. It would probably be a little weird. It would be uncomfortable, but I'd go for my son's sake."

Well, between Levi's upcoming issue of the magazine and Palin's book, we think that a Thanksgiving dinner together (promptly followed by a food fight) would be just the photo op these two need to keep their prolonged dance of death going.

Since summer people in the nightclub industry had been talking about a big spending arms dealer who was keeping them afloat with his profligate spending. When the Post broke this story about Jho Low, and his cavorting with Megan Fox, it was assumed that it was he. But it didn't quite fit — weapons don't seem like a young Ivy League-grad's first occupation. An anonymous source even specifically told Page Six, apparently unprompted, that Low is not an arms dealer.

In separate interviews since the story broke nightlife sources who have spent time around Low and his crew have aired their theory that he "is just a surrogate, for one of the Arab or Balkan guys who are always around," said one. "I heard that the big spender in the group was a kind of 'I may not be alive tomorrow' type, not a U Penn dude," said another, by email. "He's the guy behind the guy. He works for some sketchy people who don't want to be seen spending," said a third.

The only associate of Low's named in the coverage so far has been a Kuwaiti called Hamad Al Wazzan. There are a few companies based in Kuwait under that last name. The only one that directly mentions anyone named Hamad is The Al Wazzan group of companies, of which Hamad is the chairman and CEO. The group seems to have its fingers in many pies - the website lists automobiles, healthcare, construction and road safety among eleven very disparate fields. 'Security' is included, as is the vague term 'trading'. No further details are given.

This is just conjecture and may, of course, be an entirely different Hamad Al Wazzan, though the size of the company and the vagueness of its interests seem to fit the profile of the man-behind-the-man several sources have described.

In any case it seems there's more to the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars now washing around the city courtesy of some combination of Low and whoever is funding his high-jinks.

Spend even a few minutes on a politically-inclined blog that leans to the left, and you'll spot the little red-and-white "News1News" logo (above) attached to the upper-left corner a YouTube clip, usually of Glenn Beck ranting hilariously or otherwise being horrible. News1News specializes in capturing and uploading Fox bloviator's most outrageous statements for all of eternity. And each day, we bloggers—from the Huffington Post, Mediaite, Truthdig, Gawker, etc.—plucked newsworthy clips from News1News' Youtube channel, surrounded them with our words, and put them on our sites. (In fact, Mediaite's feature "Your Moment of Glenn" is all News1News clips.) From all this blog love, News1News videos had more than 20 million cumulative views by the time it was shut down. It was the simple, convenient way to stoke Liberal ire!

But today, it appears that Fox News determined it was time to close this one-stop Liberal blog fodder shop: They sent more than 150 DMCA takedown notices to YouTube regarding Fox News clips on the News1News channel, said the channel's proprietor, John. (John, a doctor living in Washington, DC, didn't want his last name used.) This put the channel well over YouTube's controversial "three-strike" copyright violation limit. News1News was shut down, and John was inundated with emails from caffeine-addled bloggers asking, frantically, "what happened!?"

Because, now, if you try to watch Hannity's infamous apology to Jon Stewart on the Huffington Post, or Michael Jackson's "ghost" on Gawker, or Glenn Beck saying dumb stuff on Truthdig, you will only see "This Video is no longer available due to copyright claim by Fox News LLC". (SPOOKY!!)

Which, granted, these clips did belong to Fox, and they were well in their rights to have them taken down, as specified by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So how do we know this is a politically-motivated move by Fox to hinder the liberal blogosphere's ability to make fun of them? Because plenty of Fox News clips are still available on YouTube—only on conservative-leaning channels: GlennBeckDailyClips, for example has more than 630 clips of, well, the Glenn Beck Program. And ConservativeNation has 186 stomach-churning videos from the whole spectrum of quality Fox News programing. Also: Duh, Fox News would totally do something like this.

News1News is back up, at a new address—at least until Fox takes it down again. But what's surprising about this whole episode isn't that Fox will use digital copyright law to fight back against its political opponents; it's that the operators of these popular cable news-ripping YouTube channels are actually pretty important players in the blog game. Think about it: They not only get to select which cable news clips have the possibility of "going viral" and becoming news themselves, but if they're taken down, whole swaths of video-based blog posts become a lot of words surrounding a big empty space.

Fox News thought John was important enough to take down, even though he's just some guy whose hobby is clipping videos and putting them on YouTube. And John said that network bigwigs took enough notice when one of his MSNBC clips hit 500,000 views that VP of Digital Media, Mark Lukasiewicz, personally called him to say they had their eye on him. (Mark Lukasiewicz could not be reached for comment because he is important and it is 9:30pm.)

How does John do it? "I DVR things," he said. "I know what people are going to find interesting. You can watch a Bill O'Reilly show and you can pick out the things that are going to make heads explode. Literally, when my head explodes I know it's going to be a good clip."

UPDATE: Fox filed three takedown notices against the new News1News account this morning. (See below.) STEEEERRRRRIKE ONE!

UPDATE 2: It appears that both GlennbeckClipsDaily and ConservativeNation YouTube accounts are now "suspended". A commenter claiming to be the owner of ConservativeNation says: "it seems as though Fox is hell bent getting ALL their clips off You Tube..I don't think this is aimed specifically at liberals." That could certainly be true—but the fact that these accounts didn't go down until after this article went up still suggests a preference for targeting liberal channels. (ConservativeNewMedia—a popular conservate channel that wasn't mentioned originally in this article—remains active. Let's see it it goes down now!)

British writer and analyst Charles Leadbeater, and researcher Annika Wong, have put together a report called Cloud Culture to be published by the British Council next year. Their statistical study, provided to me by Leadbeater, is based on figures from the social media analytics company Sysomos. It shows that such a tiny proportion of Iranians are on Twitter that any stories about a new movement based on the social network are meaningless. The figure they provide, by they way, includes the thousands of foreigners who changed their Twitter location to Tehran when the 'Iranian internet revolution' story struck after the elections in June and Facebook and Twitter were afire with Iran sentiment. So the likely figure is even lower.

The report adds that only one third of Iranians have internet access at all. And because opposition supporters are young, and on the internet, and Ahmadinejad supporters tend to be older and rural, the picture on the ground is likely skewed by any analysis that relies on tweets.

Leadbeater and Wong also compile a series of hyperbolic quotes from a variety of media sources at the time of the protests:

• "Twitter has become a key information conduit as the authorities in Tehran have cracked down on reporting by traditional media." Chris Nuttall and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times.
• "After disputed election results and massive street demonstrations in Tehran, Iran, information is flooding out of the country – on Twitter." Ashley Terry, Global News.
• "This is it. The big one." Clay Shirky of NYU.
• "We've been struck by the amount of video and eyewitness testimony... The days when regimes can control the flow of information are over." Jon Williams, BBC World News editor.

The meme was just too tempting, it seems, for anyone to dig into its veracity. The media — this site included — loves to write about Twitter, and loved doing so even more in summer when it was even newer and shiner. The storyline also fit the fact that Iran is a young country, and chimed with the heartbreaking YouTube video of the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan.

The solidarity that thousands, even millions of Americans showed with the people of Iran during June's elections and the subsequent protests was admirable. It was also potentially dangerous. I was at the UN protests against President Ahmadinejad earlier this fall. Several young men were wearing dust masks they had purchased from hardware stores. I asked one why. "I am wearing it because I have to go back to Iran," said a softly-spoken and shy 28-year-old student who gave his name only as Mohammed. "I return next year and this is for safety, in case they are watching," he added, pointing to his mask. "It could be the best $3 I ever spend."

If Mohammed is picked up despite his dust mask, the fact that the protests in Tehran were partly fomented by Western support based on a false story about Twitter will be of no consolation. It's probably not much comfort to these people either.

On March 10, 2008, few people on the planet had more difficult jobs than Christine Anderson and Errol Cockfield. They were the communications director and press secretary, respectively, for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, and at roughly 1:07 p.m. on that afternoon, the Times went live with a story documenting their boss' entanglement as "Client No. 9" in a federal investigation of a high-end prostitution ring. We were curious what the inside of a PR meltdown looks like, so—following in the footsteps of The State's investigation into the media's efforts to land an exclusive interview with Mark Sanford while he was hiking the Appalachian Trail—we used New York's open records law to obtain e-mail traffic between Anderson, Cockfield, and the dozens of reporters barraging them with inquiries in the days following the Spitzer revelations.

The e-mails total 1,300 pages, and we're still reading through the stack of paper. Any other interesting finds will be going up in subsequent posts. But what we've seen so far has been surprising: You'd think that, with blood in the water, the traditional coziness that develops between official flacks and the beat reporters who have to talk to them every day would break down into some kind of last-man-standing slugfest. But in the Spitzer case, the opposite happened. The revelations upended the worlds of both reporter and flack alike, and the uncertainty, long hours, and breakneck pace of the scandal actually seemed to throw them together as they worked toward what seems, if you read the e-mail exchanges, like a common goal of getting the news out and behind them.

Which makes sense on a human level. But sometimes good reporting—especially of the government watchdog variety—requires an inhuman suspension of compassion. The infractions documented in these e-mails are misdemeanors, but—in addition to being an unvarnished peek inside the media machinery—they're indicative of the creeping social and professional alliances that inevitably develop between PR handlers and their overworked, easily manipulated charges in the press corps. And they give the lie to the myth of the vigilant watchdog press that keeps the government on its toes. Next time you hear New York Times editor Bill Keller claim that newspapers are uniquely situated to do the "hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work [of] quality journalism," remember that his reporter broke the story of Spitzer's dalliances with prostitutes. But also remember the time his reporter e-mailed Gov. Paterson's flack to request permission to call Paterson's former mistress.

This first installment documents the shocking amount of control that Keller's Times allowed Anderson, a former Good Morning America producer and PR veteran of the Clinton White House, to exercise over his paper's coverage. After bringing Anderson's world down around her head by breaking the story, Times reporters previewed portions of their stories with her before publication, asked for her permission before contacting sources, and let her tell them how to characterize its reporting in the paper.

We'll begin at the beginning: On March 9, 2008, Anderson had not yet been informed of Spitzer's transgressions. Which makes this e-mail exchange with Times reporter Danny Hakim, who broke the story along with William K. Rashbaum, almost painfully poignant in retrospect.

Clueless, Anderson tried to sniff out what Hakim was up to, apparently to no avail (Spitzer himself broke the news to his staff early the next morning):

Hakim and Rashbaum's story went live the next day at roughly 2:08 p.m., using the Drudge Report Archives' timeline as a chronological guide. At 1:34 p.m., Hakim was still working his scoop, and e-mailed Anderson to make sure he had a detail right about how Spitzer broke the news to his staff. The subject line was, "can i do this?", and the message body appears to be the actual text Hakim planned to write—in other words, he appears to have been previewing his copy for the woman charged with managing Spitzer's image crisis, and seeking her signoff.

Anderson had a minor quibble with the facts—there was no single meeting at which Spitzer made the announcement—but she objected to the idea of repeating the phrase "ensnared in a prostitution ring," and asked Hakim to simply say Spitzer told his staff about "the matter."

The original Times story has been repeatedly updated, but the current version renders that detail thusly: "The governor informed his top aides Sunday night and this morning of his involvement."

Two days later, Spitzer announced his resignation, and the media scrum's attention turned to then-Lt. Gov. David Paterson. Paterson had his own press aides, but Anderson stayed on while Spitzer was still nominally in office and managed the coverage of the transition. On March 14, Times reporter Jeremy Peters was working on a profile of Paterson's chief of staff, Charles O'Byrne. He interviewed O'Byrne for the story, apparently working under an agreement that any quotes had to be cleared through Anderson.

Anderson replied that none of the quotes could be used, and recommended some of O'Byrne's friends for Peters to call for (presumably positive) quotes, a fairly routine practice.

Peters didn't push back. He simply asked Anderson how best to characterize O'Byrne's refusal to be quoted. "Say he declined to be interviewed?" asked Peters. Of course, O'Byrne didn't decline to be interviewed—he just declined to be quoted, a distinction that Anderson caught:

It's a bizarre world where flacks are more vigilant than reporters when it comes to trying not to mislead readers. The exchange continued, with Peters trying to gather competitive intelligence from Anderson and Anderson trying to make sure Peters spoke to the sources she wanted him to speak to.

Peters' O'Byrne profile eventually ran on March 20, including a proviso that "Mr. O'Byrne would not comment for this article" and several positive quotes from Ethan Geto and Eric Schneiderman, another source recommended by Anderson.

The PR disaster didn't end with Spitzer's resignation: Just days after Paterson ascended to the governor's office, the New York Daily News reported that both Paterson and his wife had engaged in multiple infidelities. The question of the hour on the afternoon of March 18 was the identity of the governor's office employee mentioned in the Daily News story as one of the new governor's ex-flames. Hakim knew who it was, but the Times would never stoop to delve into someone's private life so tastelessly. Unless the Daily News does it, in which case, yeah, maybe they would. So Hakim checked in with Anderson to find out if some filthy tabloid was getting ready to be first out the gate with Kirton's name, in which case he'd try to beat them.
Worried, Hakim sheepishly—"again, if others are calling her"—asks Anderson for permission to make the call.
Astonishingly, Anderson gives him the go-ahead, and provides him with her phone numbers.

Kirton's name came out a few hours later online. The Times never ended up mentioning her name, because only filthy tabloids do that.

For a sense of the differential treatment that flacks dole out to reporters, have a look at how Anderson responded to Daily News political correspondent Celeste Katz's request for confirmation about Kirton after the name came out—Anderson confirmed it off the record, but offered no contact info unbidden. Perhaps Katz should have asked for permission to call Kirton.

Newsday's Melissa Mansfield made the same request of Anderson's deputy Errol Cockfield, and got even colder treatment:

Mansfield didn't mind the brush-off, and responded with the same sort of sheepish, we-don't-do-gossip ass-covering that Hakim employed:

LOL, indeed. This is just from our first read of the batch of e-mails. There's much more to come. We contacted Hakim and Peters for their responses, but neither reporter agreed to comment for the record.

UPDATE: Diane McNulty, a New York Times spokeswoman, responded in an e-mail to Poynter's Jim Romenesko:

Any suggestion that the Times went too easy on the Spitzer administration seems a bit absurd in this context.

Our goal, always, is to get the facts right. Dealing with sources responsibly and professionally serves that goal, and that is what our reporters did in this case.

This is Dimon's 1974 yearbook senior page from the Browning School, the upper-east-side private academy he attended. We first learned about the yearbook in Duff McDonald's biography Last Man Standing, and knew that we needed to see the whole thing for ourselves. We put out some calls to find the rest of it and got a friendly source to scan in Dimon's whole page from the Grytte.

Sadly, Dimon didn't share Neel Kashkari's high-school obsession with sports cars. But he did clearly fit in with the waning hippie look of the mid-1970s.

Dimon's still got a reputation as something of a poor dresser. Here's how Last Man Standing biography describes his sartorial acumen:

He also eschewed the traditional uniform of the B-school student-khakis and button-down shirts-and wore jeans and often a blue leather jacket. His classmates actually remember that of the 75 students in their year, Dimon was the absolute worst dresser.

[snip]

His casual weekend wear was black jeans and a black t-shirt. "Jamie was dressed like Johnny Cash," laughs one executive. "I guess he thought he looked cool. But he didn't."

And here's what Andrew Ross Sorkin's new bailout book has to say about his jeans preferences:

A fed staffer announced to all the CEOs that Paulson, Geithner, and Cox would soon be coming downstairs. When Jamie Dimon, dressed in tight blue jeans, black loafers, and a shirt showing off his muscles, wandered into the room, Colm Kellcher whispered to John Mack, "He's in pretty good shape for his age."

You'd think someone who made $30 million in 2007 would be able to afford to pay someone to dress him better. Here are some close-ups of the good pictures.

The educational mission at Browning's is to turn out "Browning gentlemen," and Dimon sure looks like a gentleman, doesn't he? Right down to the ruffled jeans-and-tie bit and the long-haired Himalayan searcher pose.

Dimon chose to adorn this photo the Hamlet motto, "This above all: To thine own self be true," rounding out the nonconformist-outsider theme of the page. We wonder if he once shared former Bear Stearns chief Jimmy Cayne's penchant for pot—which would be funny, seeing as how Dimon earned his reputation as Wall Street's last man standing after he bought Bear Stearns at a measly $2-per-share, averting a financial catastrophe.

He's thankfully trimmed his hair down to a more manageable—and less androgynous—length.

A source familiar with the discussions inside ABC tells Gawker that among the options Disney/ABC Television Group president Anne Sweeney is considering for GMA is returning some or all of the broadcast to the network's entertainment division, a move that would simply formalize the de facto devolution of GMA—along with the other the morning newscasts—into a music-and-cooking show dressed up as a news broadcast.

Charlie Gibson is hanging up his hat at World News Tonight in December, at which point Sawyer will ascend to the anchor chair. ABC is in panic mode as it tries to figure out how to remake the broadcast in her absence. CNBC's Dylan Ratigan was supposed to join the network and fill Sawyer's pumps after Gibson retired, but he reneged on his commitment to do so and jumped to MSNBC in May instead. Gibson and Sawyer declined to delay their own plans, so now ABC is casting about for a replacement—George Stephanopoulos, Bill Weir, and current GMA co-host Chris Cuomo are all being mentioned as potential anchors around which the show can be rebuilt.

But the makeover plans could extend beyond simply shuffling personnel: Sweeney, who is personally commanding the network's strategy for GMA, is considering more drastic options, including bringing the show into the fold of the entertainment division. The whole show could be run out of Los Angeles, or the first hour could be produced as a newscast by the news division with the remainder being handed over to entertainment.

A decision hasn't been made, and we're told that the idea is still just that at this point. Spokesmen for both ABC News and the network both vigorously deny that handing over any part of GMA to the entertainment division is on the table—news division spokesman Jeffrey Schneider says there's "zero discussion" of a handover, and network spokesman Kevin Brockman says "someone is blowing smoke up your skirt."

It's not a crazy idea: GMA may have been a laughingstock among "serious journalists" when it answered to Hollywood, but it was also the number one morning show until 1995, the year ABC handed it over to the news team in New York. And the intervening years haven't been kind to the notion that morning newscasts ought to be run with news values in mind: GMA producers digitally altered Whitney Houston's voice to make it sound less crack-addicted last month after the show's entertainment producer appealed to network brass in L.A. for permission. Any serious distinctions between the news side and the entertainment side went out the window long ago.

Such a move would be disastrous for ABC News—GMA reportedly brings in more than half of the news division's revenue, and the show is the division's biggest power center. But relieving it of the pretense of having to behave like a news show would free ABC up to engage in all sorts of advertiser-whoring behavior and ratings-friendly booking arrangements—the stuff that it already does in a half-assed way and has to pretend not to—and give it a chance to beat Today like it used to, before it had to pretend to be news. So it could be a tempting idea.

Are these the "Free Love Cookies" in question? Or is that some sort of romantic literary reference that sailed over our heads? In any case: As you would expect, Min and Salman's modern friendship blossomed on the Facebook.

Llongots? We don't even know! And what else of Min herself—one doesn't get into Harvard just by loving models and going out with models and being way attractive, you know. It turns out she wrote quite a readable blog! It was called "Mongol Whored." Its most recent entry is from January of 2008, and it's now set to private, but the Google caches everything, you know.

"How do we know this is really Min's blog?" we asked ourselves. Well: "Here's how I roll: me: half Chinese, half Hungarian." And also, for example:

To: Hot Babe
From: Min
Subject: last night
Text: lovely to meet you last night—i had such a wonderful time. though am being punished for our revelry with a merciless hangover. totally worth it, though :) oh my god, smileys are so not my style (incredibly cheesy, no?), but i can't help smiling at some of the shit we pulled last night. we're quite a pair, don't you think?
love to see you again,
xoxo,
m

Steamy! We are fanning ourself—as, we expect, is Salman—over things like, for example:

In the graph of my (ineffectual) picking up men with lascivious intent, it's plotted with desire as the constant, and availability as the variable. There's no fucking mention of time, which I suppose is tied to ideas of decorum and the other things I missed when being raised at wolf-tit. I've had mixed success with my all-hours tactics...

I don't begrudge odd-hour requests of me, either. 19, taking the Greyhound back from Nova Scotia through New Hampshire I was stretched long in my seat, feet dangling in front of me. I woke, shoes and socks off, to the warm lapping on my toes. There was a guilty smile on the man sitting ahead of me, and I sized him up sleepily, not nasty. I thought briefly of the ripeness of my feet, nasty. And I mumbled, "do them evenly, yo."

We too would like 2 B Facebook friends 2 get 2 no U, gurl. Let's have one more.

I was writing, if you remember, about songs that make me wish I was in college again. The song of my senior year, of course, was Nelly's "Hot in Herre." The next year, the first year of my nostalgia, was "Hey Ya," and this year it's "Promiscuous" and "Buttons." I speak of this with my old college roommates, and we wistfully speak of the days where we mixed Red Bull, vodka, and champagne, and called it a cocktail, of dragging ourselves into an 11am sections and thinking it was early, of when scabies and self-loathing were the most serious STDs floating around campus. My musical tastes usually run to the more, well, good, but not in the case of these particular songs, these songs of if not love, then youthful experimentation and inexperience. And the rare moment when I'm walking past a homeless dude selling some acrylic gloves and pleather cellphone holders and I hear "Promiscuous," I think, damn, wish I were in college. But that I'm moved to undulate, grinding with an imagined partner on W 23rd street, reminds me, hey, maybe it's a good thing you're not in college anymore, maybe it's some sort of silver lining blessing kinda thing, maybe college Min couldn't have handled this kinda shit. Now I hear "Promiscuous," and think, damn, shame that I'm missing making out with 20 year olds to this song, but I probably saved myself an abortion or ten.

We totally like that song, too—and its message. Salman Rushdie, you are one charismatic fella.

Wang had previously told the New York Post about the fake wedding, but this is the first photographic evidence. On a trip through Croatia and Venice, English rented a boat and had the ship's chef (fitting) perform a wedding ceremony that was not legally binding.

It was all very sweet. They both wore all white, fake wedding bands, fake wedding certiciates, and even looks like there were real tears. You can almost feel the fake love. From this picture we can't tell if the wedding rings are the nice, simple silver bands, or the big, honkin ugly ones with the stones. Maybe both?

"I love a good surprise, what chick doesn't?" Wang told the Post. Well, we don't think she liked the surprise when he didn't show up to marry her!

Wang also told the Post, "He said he wanted that day to be a memory only the two of us could share." Well, now it's something the whole world can share too!

It will be interesting to see how these pictures play into the ongoing PR war between the two, which climaxed with English pressing assault charges against Wang. She then turned herself in. That doesn't sound like a way for man and (fake) wife to behave, now does it?

It's one of the ironies of Morgan's career that he's found bigger stardom as the star of a parody of Saturday Night Live than he ever did on the real thing. And in his upcoming book, I Am the New Black, he mentions who treated him like shit, namely then stars Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri. Morgan writes, "All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That bitch can't even get arrested."

But the grudge apparently runs even deeper, because when Morgan sat down to record the audio version (in the clip above) of that passage, he started ad-libbing, expanding on his earlier points: Morgan says he still counts Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon and Colin Quinn as friends, but as for Oteri and Kattan: "Fuck 'em."

Amazing. It's not everyday you hear Tracy Morgan acting like a demanding, slightly unhinged television star who feels underappreciated by his co-workers. It's more like every week.

We're told Mogan will be at the Union Square Barnes & Noble Thursday Oct. 22 at 7pm if you want to see if he'll curse more old colleagues.

Blame this altogether more sinister portrait of Decker as narcotized, philandering spy on her increasingly messy divorce, which involves a custody battle over her children. The accusations are mentioned in a September 29 letter we've obtained, sent to Decker's legal team from the San Francisco attorneys representing her husband (Click here to read the eight-page letter) .

Notice of the breakup first surfaced nearly two years ago. There didn't seem much reason to believe the parting was especially bitter. Though Decker led a series of power grabs at Yahoo, elevating herself from CFO to president and would-be CEO, her divorce generated little such noise. Divorcing couples tend to fight over money, but in April 2008 it emerged that Decker's husband Michael Dovey was not seeking alimony; he told people he was independently wealthy.

But an increasingly contentious court battle has nevertheless erupted, judging from the September 29 letter. The attorney for Dovey references hearings and letters attempting to resolve how to handle discovery, the early legal phase in which evidence is collected.

Dovey's legal team is using discovery, in part, to collect evidence concerning Decker's purported and unspecified "accusations about" her husband — including personal emails Decker may have sent referencing his conduct, "state of mind and/or mental or physical well being," according to the letter.

Some of this material may reside on old Yahoo computers, and Decker's legal team is trying to win the ability to selectively block the disclosure to Dovey's legal team of evidence as it emerges, according to the letter. Dovey's team wants much more: all potential evidence not protected by attorney-client privilege or "attorney work product protection," with particularly sensitive material handed over and protected by a confidentiality agreement.

Near the conclusion of the letter, Dovey's attorneys hint at what else they might be looking for in discovery — and what else Decker's attorneys might be trying to keep a lid on:

These sorts of allegations are relatively common in nasty divorces and custody battles and Decker, for many years a fixture of Yahoo's quarterly conference calls with stock analysts, knows how to mount a strong defense in the bright glare of the public spotlight. Still, a woman who quit Yahoo in January and just bought a waterfront home in the San Francisco Bay Area's quiet Marin County can't be happy to be caught in such a maelstrom of mudslinging. Nor, one would venture, can her former colleagues.

We've posted the full eight-page letter here.

Update: Richard Rados, who wrote the letter, declined to comment on the divorce because of "pending litigation" and added, "I don't want to contribute to ill will between" the parties involved. We left a message for Jennifer Wald, Decker's attorney, and will include any comment when/if she gets back to us.

(Top pic: Decker at an "All Hands" company meeting last year. From Yahoo Blog's Flickr account.)

Gawker Media has not yet received the official court filing, so no one here is able to respond in full. Our overlord Nick Denton, however, filed this very to the point retort on on his twitter feed:

To quote the great Marty Singer — Eric Dane's lawyer — if you don't want a sex tape on the internet, "don't make one!"

We are as anxious as anyone to see what the happy pair allege, so we'll share with you what we know, when we know it, but for now, feel free to take a trip down memory lane to the video that started it all.

The last we paid attention to Spector, 69, he had been un-wigged and locked up for likely the remainder of his life after Clarkson "kissed the gun" he put in her mouth one drunken night in 2003. But he still has supporters, including Sandra Horine, a 43-year-old mother of two from Alice, Texas, who has become one of his prison pen pals.

A letter that he wrote to her in July (reproduced in full below) paints a picture of Spector as an angry and bitter man, remorseless about his crime and consumed by a victim complex. Spector, who signs off as the "Wizard of Iz," listed a raft of complaints about life at the Corcoran State Prison where he is locked in a 7 foot by 3 foot cell 23 hours a day, from how the guards intimidate him, to not being able to see his wife, Rachelle, to the "cruel" way that he was sent away before he had a chance to settle his business affairs. "They call this a "civilized" society. Bugs live more civilized beneath their rocks!"

Though it was more than six years between is first indictment for Clarkson's death until his sentencing last May (his first trial resulted in a mistrial), he complains how "cruel" it was for authorities to send him to jail before he had a chance to "tidy up my business affairs." He writes that it's "insane and very dangerous" when guards declare a lockdown six times a day. He accuses prison officials of playing "mind games" and being "jealous" of him when they won't allow him to see his wife Rachelle. And of the judge who sent him away, he writes, "I'm enraged with hate at that ... judge for sending me here and [it's] hate that keeps me going." Perhaps most galling to Clarkson's friends and family, he concludes, "They call this a "civilized" society. Bugs live more civilized beneath their rocks!"

A few of Spector's jailhouse missives have emerged since he was sent away last May. A letter he wrote to his friend Steve Escobar complained that he had been locked up in the same prison as Charles Manson, though he's held in a different complex reserved for prisoners undergoing substance abuse treatment. And as much as he says he hates Corcoran, he successfully protested being moved to another prison where his wife told the New York Post he thought he'd be killed.

Horine, who designs signage for a beer distributor, told Gawker that she closely followed both of Spector's trials and thinks that he is innocent. After he was sent to prison, she began writing him unsolicited letters. "I never in my wildest dreams thought he'd write me back." She's now lost count of how many letters they've exchanged — the latest, which she had in her purse when we reached her on the phone, arrived on Aug. 28 — and they even sometimes speak on the phone. More recently, she says, Spector's spirits have been up: "He's much better since he's gotten to see his wife."

At first, Horine forwarded the letters on to members of a "Free Phil Spector" email list she belongs to, and the internet being the internet, it ended up being passed along to us. But she's since started keeping her Spector correspondence private. "I don't want to share them with just anybody because these are letters he's writing me," adding, "Even though he's in there, he's still Phil Spector."

It's kind of gross, yes, but celebrity long ago superseded infamy. And, besides, there's no moral calculus in which corresponding with a murderer is worse than murders. For anyone who think what Spector did was heinous, the sputtering anger of an old man who's facing death alone and scared, this letter is evidence of justice being done.

The scans of the letter are tough to read, so we tried to transcribe it. There were some parts that were illegible, which we put in brackets, sometimes with our best guess of the missing words or letters.

[Rec]eived your 2 letters and I thank you [for] both of them and your kind words of encouragment + support. I am deeply most appreciative living in this "hell hole" which I call "The [Tar]antula Arms" or God's little acre [jus]t east of a rock + west of a hard place. I'm enraged with hate at that [ ] + judge for sending me here and [it's] hate that keeps me going. Some say hate is a good motivation. But I don't know how long it can last. This 24/7 lockdown life is slowly driving me insane and killing [me]. Did you know that six times a [day] they set off an "alarm" where [ ] you have to get face down on the floor wherever you are and remain there until the alarm goes off. Anyone who does not and is seen standing is "shot at"! They don't [tell] you if they use real bullets or not but they could. People have been known to die in this "drill." It's a warning to all prisoners not to "get out of line." And a way to keep the guards "sharp." It's insane and very dangerous. They play real [ ]ious "games" here in this prison.

Another note. Very rarely I am allowed out of my cell. In never go out-[ ]s as the desert heat daily is 112 degrees. But indoors I sometimes have access to a phone - sometimes. And [rar]ely. If I do I call Rachelle or my [daug]hter. Would you like me to try to call you if possible? The rules are strict and simple: I can only call collect (no credit cards are accepted). And I can only call to a land line - no cell phones. Rachelle forwards her land line to her cell phone to not miss my calls because she never knows when I might call. Would reimburse you at the end of the month through my trust fund for the amount of would appear on your phone bill "if" you wanted to do it and if I could call. [You] of course would have to send me your phone (land line) number. And if I could ever call it would be between the hours of 9:15 AM and 11:15 AM California time and one o'clock PM to 3:45 PM California time, weekdays only. Let me know if you are interested.

The appeal will take about a year and I [ ] I can endure this hellish prison [ ]e for that long. Rachelle has still not been "cleared" to see me. I have not seen her in person in almost 2 months. I think the prison is playing "mind games" with me. They are also [hol]ding back the mail she is sending [or] "pretending" she is not writing when I know she is. It's a thing they do with "celebrities" which they consider me. And older men who have younger wives. It's a "game" they play. [I th]ink they are just jealous. July marked the 3rd month I've been [ ]sely imprisoned 24/7, in a 7' by 3' cell. I have not felt this depressed, [alo]ne or lonely since my little boy (Nicole's twin brother) died at age 10 in 1992. This is a terrible + helpless feeling. Just as it was when they took me away in one minute with no chance to say goodbye or [ ] anyone or tidy up my business affairs. How cruel but apparently not unusual. And they call this a "civilized" society. Bugs live more civilized beneath their rocks!

I'm gonna go now. And remember in order to get from what was - to what will be - you've got to go through what is - and I'm the - "Wizard of Iz"

Love,
Phillip