Cheat Sheet

Chip East/Reuters

Even Rupert Murdoch may have a tough time getting out of this one. The Guardian reports that three of Murdoch's British newspapers paid more than £1 million, more than $1.5 million in U.S. dollars, to settle court cases that alleged his journalists hired private investigators who illegally hacked into the cell phone messages of "numerous public figures," including Gwyneth Paltrow and Elle MacPherson. The private investigators allegedly obtained confidential personal information, including tax records, bank statements and phone bills, though News Corp. claimed it had no ties to the investigators. Actors, sports stars, and cabinet ministers were all targets of the spying, according to The Guardian's investigation. Murdoch, meanwhile, maintained that he knew nothing about payments to the investigators. "If that had happened I would know about it," he told Bloomberg News. One News of the World editor was jailed for four months in 2007 for hacking into phones of members of the royal family's household.

Homeland security doesn't look like such a high priority to the security guards at 10 federal buildings in four U.S. cities: A report by the Government Accountability Office set to be released on Wednesday reveals that undercover agents smuggled real bomb parts into all 10 buildings and went so far as to assemble the bombs in bathrooms. The agents captured a photo of a security guard sleeping on the job, and also reported an outrageous incident in which "a woman placed an infant in a carrier on an X-ray machine while retrieving identification." The careless guard on duty actually allowed the baby to pass through the machine. Expect major reforms for the Federal Protection Service, the organization in charge of security at the buildings.

Nashville police have confirmed that former Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair was killed in a murder-suicide by his girlfriend, Sahel Kazemi, who had been driven to desperation by mounting debts and McNair's interest in other women. The police said that McNair was asleep when he was shot by Kazemi, a 20-year-old who worked at Dave and Busters restaurant. McNair was married and Kazemi was convinced he was going to leave her, but a friend said McNair's wife didn't know about Kazemi. On the football field, McNair was known for his remarkable toughness and performance in the clutch.

Finally, an alibi for the “I only read it for the articles” defense! Playboy magazine has bought the first serial rights to the late Vladimir Nabokov’s final novella, The New York Observer reports. The author’s son, Dmitri, sold Playboy a 5,000-word excerpt of the unfinished work, entitled The Original of Laura, in the magazine’s December issue. “I try forcibly to remind people of our literary history because it is very easy for people to dismiss us,” said Playboy literary editor Amy Grace Loyd. “I’m happy to tell you we’ve never paid this much for a book excerpt before, ever.” The issue arrives on newsstands Nov. 10, about a week before the unabridged book will be sold in stores.

Ron Edmonds / AP Photo

In an interview with the New York Times, 76-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg reiterates the need for a stronger female presence on the Supreme Court and says the pro-life movement is fighting a "losing battle." Ginsburg, the sole woman serving on the Supreme Court, eagerly awaits the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor and says that throughout her career, she has noticed the stereotypes that affect how her actions are perceived. In the interview, she recalls how an unintended interruption of former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor became a news story about rising tensions between the two, despite the fact that the male justices interrupt one another constantly. Lastly, Ginsburg says that the anti-abortion movement is "fighting a losing battle" by trying to make a woman's right to choose a decision for each state, adding, "Time is on the side of change."

The unfolding drama over Brooke Astor's fortune took another turn Wednesday, as Anthony Marshall, Astor's son, took a spill in a courthouse bathroom. Marshall, who is accused of duping his senile mother into leaving much of her fortune to him, reportedly became lightheaded and hit his head in a stall. He was rushed from the courthouse. He appeared alert, though he was on a stretcher and had an oxygen mask over his mouth. Marshall's health problems have stalled the juicy trial several times. He suffered a minor stroke last month, and two weeks ago suffered a concussion after a slip on his treadmill, the Daily News reports.

Berlin officially got a little bit more adorable today: the city's zoo has agreed to pay $600,000 for ownership of Knut, the 3-year-old polar bear who's been the center of a financial dispute since his birth. After Knut's mother rejected him in 2006, "Knutmania" ensued, prompting the zoo that owns Knut's father to fight for rights to the tyke. And who could blame them? Knut garnered a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Annie Liebovitz, a film, and stuffed likenesses galore, not to mention the fact that attendance at the Berlin Zoo has roughly doubled since Knut's debut. "It's nice that he can stay in his home city, because he's so well-known here," said zoo patron Caroline Schulz. "We came especially to see Knut."

Is the veil of secrecy finally being lifted on the fallen giant that is Christian Lacroix? After handing his company over to luxury-brand owners, taking his larger-than-life couture down several notches, and being declared virtually bankrupt, Lacroix opened up about his iconic brand's impending doom. "War has given me some new energy!" Lacroix told Vogue's Hamish Bowles of his embittered battle with the Falic Group, who has owned his label since 2005. Unfamiliar with the cost-benefit equation of haute couture, the Falic Group quickly ran out of money and eventually filed for the French equivalent of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. So what's left of the brand, whose latest 24-piece collection could be its last? It's a pared down, bare-bones version of the monolith that once was-the Falics may have to cut the Christian Lacroix staff by 90 percent-but the no-frills (well, fewer frills) "couture light" collection appears to be making Lacroix stronger. "It's been like a diet!" he said of the restrictions on cultivating the latest line. "Not how it was in our golden era of the eighties. But now we have finished everything; we are more ahead than ever before!"

Could Britney Spears have a Bat Mitzvah in her future? Perhaps, if she takes what may be her new religion seriously. Spears was photographed wearing a necklace with a Star of David on Monday, as she visited the Eiffel Tower with her sons. It’s not her first dabbling in Judaism: Spears was turned on to Kabbalah in 2003 by Madonna, and she wore the Star of David in 2007 when she dated Jewish model Isaac Cohen. She was seen in February wearing Christian jewelry, and dabbled in Hinduism as recently as 2006.

Turd Blossom is back on the hill: “Former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove was deposed Tuesday by attorneys for the House Judiciary Committee,” reports Politico. The meeting lasted all day, beginning at 10 a.m. and ending at 6:30 p.m. but there’s no word on what the next step will be or whether Rove will appear again. The committee originally subpoenaed Rove in 2007 as part of its probe into the U.S.-attorney-firing scandal, but he did not appear at the time because President Bush claimed executive privilege.

Media moguls are meeting this week in Sun Valley, Idaho. What should they do? Something. Anything, writes Peter Lauria in the New York Post. Sun Valley used to be the place where big deals went down, but that hasn’t happened since Michael Eisner’s Disney bought ABC in 1995. Now the moguls fly fish and wine and dine at the estimated cost of $10 million for the week. “A big transaction would also help restore the conference's luster as a dealmaking Mecca,” Lauria writes.

Enough is enough, according to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. On Tuesday the Nevada Democrat ordered Finance Chairman Max Baucus to stop chasing down Republican votes for a health care-reform bill, and to also stop proposing taxes on health benefits. Baucus’s plans, Reid said (according to Democratic sources who spoke with The Washington Post), would cost the bill 10 to 15 Democratic votes and would, at best, win only a few Republican votes. Baucus wants to implement bipartisan-supported health care reform with a price tag less than $1 trillion that is deficit-neutral; the U.S. Senate Committe on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is slated to complete its health-care-reform-legislation blueprint this week or next. The panel’s Democrats support the HELP bill unanimously, while no Republicans are willing to back it.

“Nearly a year after perhaps the most sensational corporate collapse in the history of finance ... AIG's losses and the trades that led to them still haven't been properly explained,” Michael Lewis writes in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. Investigating the collapse himself, Lewis argues that a power vacuum inside AIG Financial Products led to CEO Joe Cassano's reign of terror. According to Lewis, Cassano was "a man who didn’t fully understand all the calculations and whose judgment was clouded by his insecurity." One employee said Cassano changed the culture and raised the "fear level" to a fever pitch. Cassano valued loyalty above all else, discouraged dissent, and measured his own self-worth worth via his status in the financial world. Essentially, he created a culture of fear in which criticism and opposing viewpoints were discouraged, eliminating a necessary failsafe inside the company that led to AIG.'s most fatal and faulty credit-default swaps.

After a several-year hiatus, could Lance Armstrong win the Tour De France again? Armstrong is in second place after Stage 4—a mere two-hundredths of a second behind the race leader, Fabian Cancellara in the overall standings. Armstrong trailed by 40 seconds going into Stage 4. “This is a confession,” he said in the news conference afterward. “I expected it to be easier. I’m not going to be last, but it won’t be like 2004, 2005 or 2001.”

Just as Da Vinci Code protagonist Robert Langdon unravels each mystery bit by bit, so too is Doubleday slowly revealing tidbits from Dan Brown's new mystery, The Lost Symbol, due out Sept. 15. According to Publisher's Weekly, Brown's editor at Doubleday let slip a few details in addition to the book's jacket. The novel is "largely" set in a Washington, D.C. that "few will recognize" and hinges on—surprise!—"an unseen world of mysticism, secret societies, and hidden locations, with a sudden twist that long predates America."

Sarah Palin’s resignation may not have been as disastrous as it seems: A poll by USA Today finds that her popularity has actually risen among Republican voters, with two-thirds saying they want her as “a major national political figure” and seven out of 10 saying they'd be likely to vote for her for president in 2012. That may bode well for the Republican primary, but she has some work to do in the general election: Three-quarters of Democrats hoped she wouldn’t be “a major national political figure,” and, more troublingly, so did 55 percent of independents.

Get ready for the great stem cell debate to flare up once again: Researchers at the Newcastle University in England reported that for the first time, they have successfully extracted sperm cells from embryonic stem cells, Time magazine reports. While these cells aren’t suitable for implantation—which British law prohibits—they could be used as an important tool in researching male infertility. Normal sperm development, stem-cell bioethicist Insoo Hyun said, takes more than 15 years and isn’t easily observable—but the in vitro-derived sperm (which can only come from male embryos) would only take three months to mature. So, what’s next? Potentially, infertile men could grow sperm in a lab and regain the ability to father children. “We have the potential therapeutic use of a technology that pushes the boundaries of what people feel comfortable with ethically,” Hyun said.

Here’s a move that Dick Cheney could get behind: “The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission,” according to The Wall Street Journal. The Defense Department's chief lawyer, Jeh Johnson, argued before the U.S. Senate Committe on Armed Services that the release of detainees who had been found innocent was a policy decision that would be made based on whether or not officials thought they posed a future threat. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina approved, saying, “Some of them will be able to get out of jail because they've rehabilitated themselves and some of them may in fact die in jail.”