Cheat Sheet

Evan Agostini / AP Photo

How big a Madonna fan are you? Enough to fork out upward of $40,000 for two tapes with steamy answering-machine messages she left a boy toy from 1992 to 1994? If so, keep your eye out for an upcoming rock' n' roll memorabilia auction that will feature the tapes, along with a "very personal and intimate video" from the Material Girl to the same gentleman, who at one point was also her bodyguard. Some blast-from-the-past personal faxes are up for grabs, too. The faxes sent to (you guessed it) the same ex feature such stimulating conversation as "my booty looked good [in a photo shoot] and you should see how good it looks in person." Apparently, a fling with a pop star is a good investment, too.

Will the new strategy in Afghanistan end up resulting in a breakthrough similar to the "Sunni awakening" that helped turn the tide in Iraq? British and U.S. forces are preparing to engage the "second tier" of the Taliban, seizing an opportunity created by a successful campaign to push back the Taliban in vital Afghan territories. Now, local Taliban leaders are isolated and likely willing to negotiate. The talks will help facilitate reconciliation between the Afghan government and the insurgents. The efforts at diplomacy, which appear to be spearheaded by British forces, are expected to be endorsed in a briefing paper prepared by U.S. General Stanley McChrystal. The Guardian reports that "talks with the Taliban" is proving to be a hard sell, as combat continues in the war-torn region.

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning was persona non grata in an already-reeling party; his fellow Republicans had made it clear they didn't think he was capable of winning re-election in 2010. Now, Bunning has fallen in line, and will not campaign next year due to a lack of campaign funds. He didn't go quietly, however, saying that Republicans "had 'done everything in their power' to force him out," Politico reports. The Kentucky senator had resisted calls for his withdrawal and butted heads with Mitch McConnell, also of Kentucky, over his political future. Bunning is said to be one of the most conservative members of the Senate, and is also a Hall of Fame pitcher.

John Bazemore / AP Photo

Let the Michael Vick circus begin anew. The disgraced quarterback is looking for a new team, and—if anyone takes him—will be allowed to participate in all training camp activities and preseason games. However, Vick will not be allowed to play in any regular season games until week six at the earliest. The former Atlanta Falcon recently completed a two-year sentence related to an illegal dog fighting ring, and was expected to get further punishment from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for repeatedly lying to him. It is likely that one team will take a gamble on the immensely talented Vick, despite the bad publicity from animal rights groups that will come along with him.

June saw the biggest increase in new-home purchases in eight years, climbing 11 percent. Following cautious but widespread speculation that the economy is finally showing signs of stability, the unexpected increase is a welcome indicator. Exceeding all forecasts made by economists surveyed for Bloomberg, home sales rose to a 384,000 annual pace, according to figures reported by the Commerce Department on Monday. Most economists are noting that this is a clear sign heralding the end of the worst economic slump since the Great Depression but only time will tell.

Jason Reed / Reuters

What if the president's faltering health care agenda is not the fault of mismanagement or a lack of will from voters, but the undemocratic and idiosyncratic U.S. Congress? Hendrik Hertzberg argues just that in this week's New Yorker: "The [legislative] process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down." Hertzberg says that our "ramshackle political mechanisms" are tripping up the needed introduction of a single-payer system. "Ultimately," Hertzberg writes, "real cost control will require a strong push away from fee-for-service medicine." The columnist doesn't see that change coming soon.

Barack Obama's emphasis on diplomacy over military bluster has been praised in many circles. But there is at least one place where dialogue is not favored: Israel. While in Jerusalem, Defense Secretary Robert Gates found himself having to clarify the U.S.' offer to negotiate with Iran, saying the deadline for diplomacy was not "open-ended," and that there would likely be further sanctions should the talks fail to occur. The defense minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, did not mince words when explaining that he disagreed with dialogue, adding that "all means" remain available should Iran be close to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Israel not surprisingly, is frustrated with the U.S. given the different messages coming from the major players at the White House. Vice President Joe Biden said the U.S. "cannot dictate" to Israel how it should defend itself, while Obama recently said, the U.S. is "absolutely not" giving its approval for a strike against Iran.

David J. Phillip / AP Photo

R. Allen Stanford isn’t adjusting well to life in prison. According to the New York Post, Stanford—the alleged mastermind behind a $7-billion Ponzi scheme—has complained in court papers that life in his jail cell in Texas is “oppressive.” Stanford says that the cell he is sharing with eight to 10 other inmates in Conroe, Texas, starts to boil when outside temperatures reach 100 degrees. "The cell has been without air conditioning for at least a week,” the papers say. “There are no windows for light or ventilation, and the conditions are intolerable." Stanford’s lawyers have requested that he be transferred to a prison in Houston.

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Kelly Clarkson’s album has "already gone" to the presses—and she’s none too happy about it. The Idol winner wrote the lyrics to her third single on the album, “Already Gone,” and paired them with music by Ryan Tedder. The only problem: unbeknownst to Clarkson, Tedder had already supplied the track to Beyoncé for her popular single, “Halo.” Realizing that Tedder had two-timed her, Clarkson frantically tried to recall the album—but it had already shipped. Clarkson said that she fought to stop the single’s release, but in the end, her label, RCA, went ahead with it anyway. “No one’s gonna be sittin’ at home, thinking ‘Man, Ryan Tedder gave Beyoncé and Kelly the same track to write to,” Clarkson said. “No, they’re just gonna be saying I ripped someone off.”

Ben Silverman, the co-chairman of NBC Universal Entertainment, will be leaving his post to start a company in partnership with Barry Diller's IAC, The New York Times reports. Silverman, a producer of The Office and The Biggest Loser, likened the new venture to a production company and ad agency hybrid. Jeff Gaspin, the head of NBCU's cable operations, will step up to fill Silverman's shoes. For his part, Silverman will stay on at NBC through September to facilitate the transition and to support the new fall lineup created under his supervision. "I am invested in what happens in the fall, and they are invested in my helping with the transition," he said in a statement. (IAC is the parent company of The Daily Beast.)

Josh Reynolds / AP Photo

The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. has been cited as many as an example of how backwards looking American police forces are with regards to racial profiling. But Robert Zimmerman at Anderson Cooper 360 takes a moment to note how much progress police forces have made on the issue in recent years: “This issue is being confronted through changes in law that make racial profiling illegal and give the Federal government enforcement powers to combat it. In the selection process for new recruits, police are required and trained to look for signs of bias and prejudice. Additionally, new policies and procedures are continually being developed to strengthen supervision, documentation and the investigation of citizen complaints of racial profiling. Many police cars also now have video equipment to monitor police and their interactions with citizens.” His conclusion? “The police profession has been addressing the issues of race and bias more openly than American society as a whole.”

Merce Cunningham, ubiquitously hailed as the greatest choreographer in the world, died Sunday night in Manhattan at the age of 90. In his younger days, the longtime New Yorker had himself been unparalleled as a dancer, and continued to perform with his company until 1989, when he was 70. But he is certainly most remembered for his long, influential career as a choreographer. Cunningham made us rethink dance again and again, bringing dance into full maturity as a major art-form. He was a lifelong collaborator and partner of John Cage, and was celebrated for having music and dance independently composed, emphasizing that dance was about movement, not music.

Prompted by an interview between Hank Aaron and reporters in which Aaron indicated he'd like to see Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame, MLB commissioner Bud Selig is reportedly considering lifting Rose's lifetime suspension from baseball. Rose was banned in 1989 for gambling on the sport. Hank Aaron has sway over Selig, as the two are close friends. Former teammates of Rose on the Hall of Fame's board of directors, Joe Morgan and Frank Robinson, have also indicated support for reinstating Rose.

Most of us have experienced tracking the progress of a delivery making its way through the postal system or FedEx. But these days, consumers are jumping at ways to track a lot more than just packages. Companies like Domino's Pizza and public services that track buses and stimulus spending are taking notice. Now it's as easy to track toddlers (via a site called Trixie Tracker) as it is to track a flight

The New Yorker selected professional obsessive Nicholson Baker—he of John Updike stalking, minimalist fiction, and presidential assassination fantasies—to test-drive the new Kindle 2 from Amazon. Baker launches a lengthy list of complaints: he doesn't like the background color, he finds the font "grim and Calvinist," he can't find anything by Saul Bellow or Graham Greene in the Amazon library, and he misses illustrations and quirky marginalia now gone in the digital version. Baker is particularly tough on the new Kindle DX ($498) designed for newspaper-reading. His verdict: "A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio." Baker's original hope, though, that "the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of" seems somewhat confirmed. By the piece's end, Baker finds himself somewhat charmed by this new device.

Salvatore Laporta / AP Photo

How does Silvio Berlusconi get the ladies in bed? The Times of London reports that Patrizia D'Addario, the prostitute at the center of the scandal, has said that the Italian Prime Minister offered her a seat in the European Parliament. Last week, D'Addario released tapes and transcripts that purportedly contained pillow talk between D'Addario and Berlusconi. She has previously said that she made two visits to Berlusconi's Sardinian villa last year in October and November. On the first occasion, the businessman who invited her to the villa paid her about $1,400, she said, but on the second occasion Berlusconi promised to help her resolve an issue with a building permit, but instead offered her the Parliament seat.

An arrest has been made in the death of Alexis Cohen, the American Idol contestant who was killed in a hit-and-run over the weekend. TMZ reports that Daniel Bark, 23, has been booked on charges of death by reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident. Cohen's car was found 350 yards away from her body. If convicted, Bark faces up to 15 years in prison.

Nasser Wajeeh / AP Photo

A Kuwaiti businessman who was under investigation for fraud by U.S. regulatory authorities was found dead Sunday in an apparent suicide. Hazem Al-Braikan, chief executive of Al-Raya Investment, partly owned by Citigroup Inc., was sued last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission and accused of improperly earning millions of dollars from trades of two American firms. "It's very sad news. This crisis has seen a lot of people in the Gulf and across the world fall from grace, and each person is different in terms of their ability to handle pressure," Mohammed Yasin, chief executive of Dubai-based investment bank Shuaa Securities, told Reuters. Although it is a major financial center, Kuwait remains the only Gulf Arab state without a stock-market regulator.

“The Great Recession, which rolled over our financial lives like one of P.J. Keating's giant pavers, is most likely over,” Dan Gross writes in Newsweek. That’s as relief, but here’s the bad news: “Now that it's over, we'll need a new kind of recovery.... The Fed literally can't cut interest rates further—the overnight interest rate it controls is at zero.” Summarizing Obama’s strategy, Gross writes, “It means eschewing the blunt economic instruments we've always used and focusing resources and rhetoric on strategic sectors: renewable energy/green technology, infrastructure, broadband, and health care. It means making investments to run vital systems more intelligently and efficiently, thus creating a new infrastructure on which the private sector can work its magic.”

Charles Dharapak / AP Photo

Ted Kennedy may have been sidelined by brain cancer over the past year, but the senator seems determined to have a hand in the creation of universal health care—the goal he has worked toward for 46 years. He wakes up in the morning in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings his wife has put together, the Los Angeles Times reports, and if there's a hearing going on at the Capitol, he watches it on his computer. He exerts whatever influence he can from his sickbed, advising his Washington aides via phone. "He has lived for this day, when America would finally extend this right to every citizen," his son Patrick, a Democratic congressman, said in a recent interview, with tears in his eyes. "There's no doubt if he could, he would be here in the thick of this." Kennedy's illness is bringing a sense of urgency to a usually slow-moving Congress, the paper reports, "with friends on both sides of the aisle mindful of passing a bill in time for him to see it signed."

Physical albums are going the way of the eight-track as music downloads have become popular. The problem, according to the Financial Times, is that consumers now tend to buy individual tracks and not high-margin albums, sales of which fell 14 percent in 2008 to 428.4 million units, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Apple is reportedly working with EMI, Sony Music, Warner Music, and Universal Music Group on a tablet-sized computer to change all that. The project, code named "Cocktail," would allow users to buy album packages containing interactive material including photos, lyric sheets, and liner notes. The new gadget would be "fabulous" for watching movies, according to one entertainment executive, and could provide an alternative to Amazon's Kindle.

The protests may have slowed down, but turmoil at the top of the Iranian hierarchy continues. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fired two members of his cabinet Sunday, another indicator that conservatives within Iran are at odds over how best to handle the wave of protests that followed the contested election. By Iranian law, a president who fires 11 members of his cabinet must face a vote of confidence before parliament. The two firings would put Ahmadinejad past the threshold. It is unclear whether both men were let go, or if one will return to avoid the vote of confidence. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton reiterated Sunday the White House’s position on the recent upheavals in Iran, saying that the country's future "is really for the people to decide."

No one wants to take a risk in a tough economy. The Wall Street Journal looked at loans from 15 large U.S. banks that collectively hold 47 percent of federally insured deposits—and that received $182.5 billion in bailout money from TARP—and found that the total amount of loans shrank by 2.8 percent in the second quarter. More discouragingly, more than half of the loans issued in April and May were refinanced mortgages and renewed credit to businesses, not new loans. In other words, banks aren't issuing new loans because they're trying to save money to protect themselves against rising loan losses, and companies and consumers are trimming spending in order to get through the recession. The two trends combined make it difficult for the U.S. economy to rebound; analysts predict loan portfolios won't start earning until the second half of 2010.