The U.S. has resorted to guarding its own contracted ArmorGroup guards in Kabul, after photos surfaced that showed nude guards and supervisors engaging in frat-like initiation rituals. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has ordered an investigation into the guards' behavior, and the U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital has banned alcohol and assigned American personnel to watch over them in the meantime. There are about 450 contracted guards stationed at the Camp Sullivan compound in Kabul, where an independent watchdog group said a "Lord of the Flies" atmosphere prevails. "Hazing" rituals include wild drinking games, pouring beer down the naked back sides of recruits, and forcing recruits to eat chips from clenched rear-ends, The Telegraph reports. An ArmorGroup guard was accused of shooting dead two colleagues in a drunken fight last month.

Money can't necessarily buy power these days, but it definitely helps. The newest members of Congress are also some of the richest lawmakers on Capitol Hill. According to The Hill newspaper, about a tenth of its new list of the 50 wealthiest lawmakers were either voted in during the last election or appointed in 2009. Reps. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), as well as appointed Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Ted Kaufman (D-Del.), are among some of the newcomers with the deepest pockets. The richest lawmaker is Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who's worth at least $167.8 million, thanks to the fortune of his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry.

School districts in six states are refusing to show President Obama's upcoming back-to-school speech to students, set to air next Tuesday on C-SPAN, after schools were inundated with angry calls from parents. While the speech aims to encourage students to work hard and stay in school, critics accuse the White House of forcing a political agenda on children. "As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education—it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality," said Oklahoma State Sen. Steve Russell. The suggested lesson plan that accompanied the speech originally asked students to "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." Obama administration officials removed that exercise after critics complained. Schools aren't required to broadcast the speech, and districts in Texas, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Wisconsin have decided not to show it. Some Republicans, egged on by conservative pundits, are urging schools and parents to boycott the address on Tuesday. President George H.W. Bush made a similar address to students in 1991.

The U.S. Forest Service says that the 147,000-acre wildfire in California that has killed two firefighters was started by arson, the Los Angeles Times reports. Officials are searching for whoever started the fire that has destroyed more than five dozen homes. Firefighters made progress in fighting the largest fire in Los Angeles County history Wednesday night, but aggressive arms of the fire are still pushing to mountains above Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Monrovia. Even with the so-called Station fire is now 38 percent contained, crews are still battling to protect well-known campgrounds, trails, recreation areas, and the Stony Ridge Observatory in North L.A. They are also fighting the western leg of the fire, which has pushed toward Pacoima Canyon, prompting the evacuation of 11 homes. Wednesday night a firefighter on the front lines suffered a fractured femur. Meanwhile, one official said the blaze was human-caused, but officials aren't sure if it was arson or an accident.

Already described as a radical figure by many conservative commentators, President Barack Obama's green-jobs czar, Van Jones, signed a petition for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into how the Bush administration may have “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” The Washington Times reports. Jones released a statement saying the petition does not express his views, though he didn't explain why he signed it. The discovery will fuel criticism from pundits like Glenn Beck, who has already alleged Jones is a communist. The statement Jones signed asked 12 questions about supposed discrepancies in the handling of the 9/11 investigation. "Why did the Bush administration cover up the fact that the head of the Pakistani intelligence agency was in Washington the week of 9/11 and reportedly had $100,000 wired to Mohammed Atta, considered the ringleader of the hijackers?" one question read. Jones’ name appears alongside other prominent signatories, such as Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA).

Rulers of the universe are uniting in their efforts to take on Masters of the Universe. In advance of a meeting of G-20 finance ministers this weekend, leaders of the U.K., Germany, and France have devised a plan to curb bank bonuses and are putting pressure on the U.S. to join their front. In a letter, the heads of state laid out three broad principles regarding payment that they want to become binding rules for financial institutions at the larger G-20 summit in Pittsburgh this month. Bonuses should be “kept at an appropriate level in relation to the fixed remuneration and must depend on the performance of the bank, the business unit, and the individuals,” the letter reads. In addition, “guaranteed bonuses are to be avoided," companies should develop pay policies, and banks should be more transparent. The letter also spells out that businesses that don't comply should be sanctioned.

More than two months after the King of Pop suddenly died, his remains were finally laid to rest Thursday night. Braving 90-degree heat, black-garbed mourners—including Elizabeth Taylor and Barry Bonds—gathered to pay their last respects at a private funeral on the grounds of the star-studded Forest Lawn Glendale Cemetery outside Los Angeles. Jackson's body, encased in a golden casket, is being entombed in a towering marble mausoleum, where he'll spend eternity alongside celebrities like Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. The site will be off-limits to fans in an effort to keep it from being transformed into a shrine. In early July, Jackson's elaborate public memorial at the Staples Center was viewed by millions.

Could North Korea's recent diplomatic gestures be merely a distraction from larger, sinister goals? Defying international pressure to abandon its nuclear program, the communist country has allegedly entered the final stage of uranium enrichment—a step toward producing nuclear weapons—state media reported. "Uranium-enrichment tests have been successfully carried out and that process is in the concluding stage," South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted the North as saying. In a confusing twist, North Korea's KCNA news agency has also reported that Pyongyang is now ready "for both sanctions and dialogue.”

Feminist pornography might sound like an oxymoron, but a new movie funded by Swedish taxpayers hopes to fit that description. Dirty Diaries, which premiered in Stockholm last night, is a collection of 12 short pornographic films shot by feminist documentary director Mia Engberg. The $70,000 film was funded by Swedish taxpayers through the Swedish Film Institute. What makes Dirty Diaries feminist, according to Engberg, is that it displays women's sexuality in a natural way and shuns mainstream porn's sexist tendency to treat women as objects. Engberg said the film was “about showing sexuality through a female's perspective. It's not made to please a male audience and it's not made to make money.”

Another old white man for Fox’s roster: Don Imus has inked a deal with the Fox Business Network to simulcast his Imus in the Morning radio show starting October 5. The low-rated network hopes Imus will boost ratings. Though Imus does not normally cover financial news, Fox said his program “will incorporate additional business news into its format.”

Ted Kennedy may be gone, but his voice will be heard on September 14, when his 532-page memoir, True Compass, will be published posthumously. In it, the senator says he “made terrible decisions” on the night of the Chappaquiddick affair, and that the loss of Mary Jo Kopechne’s life was “inexcusable,” reports NYT blog The Caucus. Of the Warren Commission’s findings on JFK’s assassination, Teddy says he was “satisfied then, and satisfied now.” Kennedy also dives into politics, describing his 1980 relationship with Jimmy Carter as “unhealthy” due to the former president’s moderate position on health care, and being a “difficult man to convince—of anything.” He also describes Bill Clinton’s health-care defeat, writing that Clinton himself said he did not deserve to be president if he couldn’t get national health insurance through Congress.

Are iPhone users are ruining cell-phone reception for the rest of us? As smartphones become more popular, the problem could spread from AT&T, which carries the iPhone exclusively, to other networks. The New York Times reports that Apple's phone users guzzle network capacity at about 10 times the rate of the average smartphone user, because owners download applications, stream media, and browse the web at higher rates than most other users. AT&T is sinking $18 billion into network upgrades and expansions to relieve demand, but in the meantime overuse is resulting in dropped calls, delayed message delivery, plodding download speeds, and annoyed customers—particularly during peak hours in urban areas. Regular cell phone users shouldn't gloat yet either—as smartphones become more popular, the data bottleneck could get worse across multiple networks.

Iranian MPs have approved the first woman minister in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic, but the move is not necessarily as progressive as it looks. Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, who will become health minister in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's cabinet, is a hard-line conservative who in the past has proposed introducing segregated health care in Iran, with only women treating women and only men treating men. Two other women were nominated for Ahmadinejad's cabinet, but they were both blocked by MP's.

Anyone in need of a cute fix needs to look no further than the White House Flickr website, which has released a photo of Barack Obama's daughter Sasha,sneaking up on him from behind a couch as he obliviously works at his desk in the Oval Office. According to BBC News, the picture has drawn comparisons to a famous image of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing underneath his father's Oval Office desk, a photo credited with helping construct the "Camelot" image of the Kennedy White House. Sasha, 8 is the youngest child to live in the White House since the 1960s.

Sketch-comedy show Saturday Night Live will have two new faces when its 35th season premieres September 26. An anonymous source revealed that Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre alumni Jenny Slate and Nasim Pedrad have joined the cast. The UCB comedy theater has also spawned the careers of other current SNL cast members Casey Wilson and Bobby Moynihan and was founded by former SNL actress Amy Poehler. Slate previously appeared with Gabe Liedman in the comedy show Gabe & Jenny while Pedrad, a native of Tehran, had a one-woman show entitled, Me, Myself & Iran.

The health-care debate has turned into a real knuckle-biter: During a protest in Thousand Oaks near Los Angeles, one man bit off another's finger, the Los Angeles Times reports: A 65-year-old protester evidently punched a pro-reform man in the face, and the man retaliated by biting off the anti-reformist's finger. It is, perhaps, the most gruesome town-hall story so far, but is the media distorting the picture? “There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.” E.J. Dionne Jr. writes in Thursday’s column. “Much as the far left of the antiwar movement commanded wide coverage during the Vietnam years, so now are extremists on the right hogging the media stage—with the media's complicity.”

From the way she tells it, America has done Ashley Dupre a grave disservice. In the wake of the news that Eliot Spitzer is contemplating a return to politics, the escort-turned-R&B-singer who famously called him "Client No. 9" pointed out that "people are liars and hypocrites" for not giving her a second chance as well. On the hip-hop site Global Grind, Dupre points out that she's not the "woman who brought down the governor" because she didn't call the tabloids, "blow the whistle," or "save the dress." She didn't make any money off the scandal, she says, and she declined to pose for nude pictures "because I didn't want to perpetuate the problem or feed into the stereotype." Dupre also takes aim at book publishers for being "worse than the tabloids," explaining, "Sorry folks, my life wasn't like a Sex in the City episode," and admonishes the women who judged her to "get real and get over yourself."

What would Hippocrates say about torture? Doctors and psychologists who monitored the CIA's alleged "enhanced interrogation" techniques may have come close to or committed illegal human experimentation, according to a report by nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights. The PHR report, based on a 2004 CIA investigation into its own practices that was published two weeks ago under legal pressure, argues that doctors who actively monitored the CIA's techniques for effectiveness were using prisoners as human subjects without their consent, a practice "that approaches unlawful experimentation." Ever since 1947, the Nuremberg Code, developed after the prosecution of Nazi doctors, has prohibited experimentation on patients without consent.

He watched Star Wars eight times before Citizen Kane and his education came on the set of music videos. But today, Spike Jonze is on top of the movie-making game. It turns out this is a precarious position. Jonze is a holdover from an era, in the not too distant past, when major studios lavished attention on independent filmmaking, one that is now being undone by new economic and artistic realities. When Where The Wild Things Are opens on October 16, it will be Jonze’s most widely seen and most difficultly fought for movie yet. Universal didn’t want it. Warner Brothers almost didn’t accept it. In this Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Safi Knafo profiles Jonze and the troubles of his latest movie. He writes, “people who hate the movie will probably say that the story was poorly crafted, and people who like it will praise its childlike quality.”

With the health-care debate not quite in shambles, Obama's betting that his speech next week, slated to explicitly lay out his plan for overhauling the nation's health system, will be a game-changer. The Los Angeles Times reports that the president had initially laid out broad goals for health-care reform and left the specifics to Congress in order to keep the legislative wheels turning, but the strategy backfired, leaving supporters confused about where Obama stands and handing control of the debate to conservative critics. White House strategists say that next Wednesday's joint session speech will eliminate that confusion and shift the administration from defense to offense. The president will likely offer some compromises on cost containment, Medicare, and creation of a government insurance plan.

Retired pitcher Curt Schilling led the Boston Red Sox to two World Series titles—could he lead the GOP to a comeback in Massachusetts? In a phone interview with New England Cable News, Schilling, a Republican, said he has been “contacted” by people who want him to run for office, and discussed running for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat: “As of today, probably not,” but “I’m not going to speculate about it right now.” Schilling expressed disgust for wasteful government spending, calling Boston’s “Big Dig” highway project “the largest, most colossal waste of money in the history of the United States,” but noted that he might not be a good candidate: “I don’t have a really good filter… My first press conference could be my last.”

Dick Cheney’s back, and he’s got his political foes’ attention. Following a series of high-profile media appearances from the former veep, the Democratic National Committee has launched a series of televised attack adds blasting Cheney as “wrong then, wrong again.” The ad juxtaposes Cheney’s statements about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction and being “greeted as liberators” with recent ones, and says Cheney’s recent statements claiming that enhanced interrogations resulted in valuable intelligence are also false. On Fox News Sunday, Cheney said techniques like waterboarding were “absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives,” a claim that critics say CIA documents do not support.

Levi Johnston spilled some Palin family beans Wednesday morning, including that Sarah wanted to adopt his and Bristol’s baby. US magazine now discloses more dishes from his article for Vanity Fair. Apparently, during the election, “she would say things like ‘I brought everything to the table’ and ‘The majority of people were out there voting because of me,' ” Levi writes. “She definitely thought she was running for president.” Levi also writes that Todd and Sarah would argue about divorce, saying they “wouldn’t go anywhere together unless the cameras were out. In all the time Bristol and I were together, I’ve never seen them sleep in the same bedroom.” Finally, Levi writes, “She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat—I’ve never seen it.”

Heavyweight Democratic fundraiser Hassan Nemazee was arrested last week for defrauding Citigroup of $74 million—and now prosecutors say he cheated other banks out of more than $100 million more. Bloomberg reports that man who raised hundreds of thousands for Hillary Clinton and Obama, and is now out on a $25 million bail, is thought to have used his ill-gotten cash to acquire additional fraudulent loans, turning dirty money into more dirty money. Though prosecutors haven’t identified the two additional banks Nemazee is accused of defrauding, his attorney recently complained that Nemazee’s JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America accounts were frozen.

Farewell, free content? YouTube is in talks with Lions Gate, Sony, and Warner Bros. about allowing its users to stream movies on a rental basis—the video giant’s first steps toward charging for content instead of airing it free with ads. The Google subsidiary already has some movies available, but they’re not new releases. The new arrangement would let users rent movies on YouTube the same day they’re released on DVD; a spokesman says the site is always aiming to build on “its great relationships with movie studios and on the selection and types of videos we offer our community.” Prices for the new movie rentals will probably be $3.99, equal to what iTunes charges.

Karl Rove, the former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, took his boss’ successor to task in an op-ed published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal. Rove described Barack Obama as desperate and unpopular. His search for health-care reform has left the president between a rock and a hard place, Rove said, as Obama pushes against a public that isn't ready for major reform and liberal allies who will be unsatisfied without it. Rove’s forecast for Obama is dire: “Presidents always encounter rough patches. What is unusual is how soon Mr. Obama has hit his. He has used up almost all his goodwill in less than nine months, with the hardest work still ahead... A perfect political storm is amassing, and heading straight for Democrats.”

Numbers out from the U.S. Education Department show that students borrowed 25 percent more money in the 2008-2009 academic year than the year before for a total of $75.1 billion. This was the biggest increase in fifteen years. Cause number one for the spike? The sinking economy. Today, two-thirds of students nationwide borrow for college, carrying an average debt load of $23,186 by the time they graduate. The Wall Street Journal reports Thursday that young people with student debt tend to put off major life decisions like buying a first home, marrying, or having children. Any long-term policy changes will be tough to come by as colleges, foundations, private institutions, and the federal government wrestle over differing priorities.

The Obama administration is cracking down on health-care fraud, and federal prosecutors already have their first mounted head: Pfizer, which agreed to a record $2.3 billion settlement this week. The Washington Post reports that Pfizer’s Pharmacia & Upjohn subsidiary pleaded guilty to a felony charge for marketing anti-inflammatory drug Bextra for uses the FDA has not approved. Prosecutors also say the company gave doctor lavish trips, falsified records, and improperly financed articles promoting their pills. Pharmacia & Upjohn will pay $1.3 billion in fines and forfeits, the biggest criminal penalty in U.S. history, and Pfizer will pay an extra $1 billion to resolve civil cases connected to Bextra and three other medications. Explaining Pfizer’s steep penalty, one U.S. attorney called the company a “recidivist” lawbreaker.

News flash: This August, Chelsea Clinton failed to marry Marc Mezvinsky at the Martha's Vineyard homes of Ted Danson or Vernon Jordan while President Obama looked on. But major media outlets were not about to let "facts" and "denials" get in the way of a good story. The New York Times reports that the greatly exaggerated rumors of Chelsea's impending nuptials were so persistent that at one point the Clintons offered to "make it interesting" by offering to bet any journalist's source $1,000 that there would be no August wedding, a bet no one took. The Times traces the story back to The Boston Globe, which reported on August wedding rumors in May. Despite Clinton-camp denials, New York magazine, the New York Daily News, The Washington Post, and the New York Post were overcome with wedding hysteria and published stories. As the New York Post recently put it, the lack of wedding may indicate that Chelsea or Marc "just isn't ready yet," or as the Times wryly suggested, "maybe the wedding will be in September! Is the $1,000 still on the table?"

The federal government will need to hire 270,000 workers for “mission-critical” jobs over the next three years to replace retiring baby boomers, according to a study out Thursday. The government’s ambitions, which include trying to right the fallen financial sector and win two wars, among other major goals, have also increased the need for hiring. "It has to win the war for talent in order to win the multiple wars it's fighting for the American people," said the study’s author. Most in need of hiring? The medical and public-health sector.

The Empress of Soul will be part of the King of Pop’s funeral. A representative for Gladys Knight confirmed that the songstress, who knew Michael Jackson when he was a child and once shared a manager with him, will perform at Jacko’s funeral in Glendale, California, on Friday.