The good ole' days on Wall Street might soon be coming to a close: The Federal Reserve is preparing to restrict compensation practices at the biggest banks in America, with a mission of squelching pay practices that emphasize short-term performance over the long-term health of the financial institution. The Fed is not looking to cap the amount of pay an employee can receive. Instead, banks would have to explain pay practices that appear to reward only short-term gains to their regulator and adjust them if it's determined they create excessive risk.

President Carter may think Obama’s critics are influenced by racism, but the president begs to differ. Obama taped five interviews on Friday, which will run on five networks' Sunday-morning talk shows. USA Today snagged a sneak preview and reports that Obama used his interview with CNN’s John King to acknowledge but steer away from Carter’s conversation about race: “Are there people out there who don’t like me because of race? I’m sure there are,” Obama said, but noted, “That’s not the overriding issue here.” The people who are a problem, he said, are those “who are anti-government.” They’ve come out of the woodwork now because they’re “more fierce during times of transition of when presidents are trying to bring about big changes.” Obama reportedly struck similar chords in interviews with CBS’ Bob Schieffer, NBC’s David Gregory, and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. He’ll also appear on Spanish-language channel Univision on Sunday.

At least it’s not Levi Johnston: The Alaska Dispatch is reporting that one of the top two bidders in an eBay auction for dinner with Sarah Palin is Joe McGinniss, the journalist who profiled Palin for Portfolio magazine and is working on a book about her. "I think such a dinner would be the perfect way to kick off the reporting for my new book: Sarah Palin's Year of Living Dangerously. (To be published by Broadway/Random House in fall of 2011.),” says McGinniss, who’s last bid was $59,999.99. The auction ends Friday night.

Is Michelle Obama pulling a Hillary? The first lady stepped into the health-care debate on Friday with a speech that called the health-care status quo as “unacceptable.” But unlike Hillary, Michelle stayed away from the nitty-gritty policy details, focusing instead on a distinctly feminine—and maternal—take on health-care reform: Women are “crushed by the current structure of our health care” when they are tasked with managing their families’ health, prescriptions, follow-up care, and doctor appointments. “Mothers are the ones that do it. And many women find themselves doing the same thing for their spouses.” She pointed out that women are more likely to work only part-time or at a small business that can’t provide health coverage, leaving their insurance options disproportionately stifled.

At least there weren’t butt shots: A ProPublica report finds that Triple Canopy, the private security firm given a $1 billion government contract to replace Blackwater in Iraq, has been plagued by “questionable weapons deals, government bungling, and a criminal investigation that was ultimately closed without charges being filed.” The company traded booze for weapons and supplies with the U.S. military and bought weapons on the black market, leading some to worry that taxpayer dollars were finding their way into the hands of insurgents. “We’re spending a lot of money on these rifles,” said one former Triple Canopy manager. “We’re supporting people who are trying to kill Americans is the logical conclusion.”

Politically incorrect comedy impresario Sacha Baron Cohen will guest star on The Simpsons this season, playing a "pretty angry but funny" Israeli tour guide in an episode titled "The Greatest Story Every D'ohed," Hollywood Insider reports. When the Simpson's parish tours the Holy Land, Homer gets an acute case of "Jerusalem Syndrome," believing that he is the messiah. Executive producer Al Jean explained a scene between Baron Cohen's character and Marge Simpson: "He's trying to get Marge to give him good grades on the comment card, and she goes 'You people are pushy,' and he goes, 'What do you mean, you people? You try having Syria for a neighbor! What do you have—Canada?'" The episode is tentatively scheduled to air on March 28, Palm Sunday.

Don’t tell Dick Cheney, but it appears traditional law-enforcement measures may be working: ABC News is reporting that the man in Aurora, Colorado, under investigation for alleged ties to a New York bomb plot has admitted ties to al Qaeda and is negotiating to plead guilty to a terror charge. Najibullah Zazi has been under investigation for a year, ever since he was picked up for having “deeply troubling” conversations during a trip to Pakistan. He has allegedly received explosives training, and will plead guilty as part of a deal to cooperate with the government. His lawyer, however, is calling reports of the negotiations “completely unfounded.”

Vladimir Putin is happy. “I very much hope that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others,” the Russian prime minister said of President Obama's decision to not install interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev praised Obama's "responsible attitude," according to The Washington Post, and said that his country would work to help "to develop effective measures against the risks of missile proliferation, measures that take into account the interests and concerns of all sides and ensure equal security for all countries in European territory." NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen is urging Russia and the West to consider combining their missile defense systems to strengthen their hands against North Korea, Iran, and other potential nuclear threats. There still are concerns among Russian military figures, however, that even the reorganized missile defense system could pose a threat to Russia. 

Irving Kristol, a fixture in American political thinking for decades, has passed away at 89, according to The Weekly Standard, the magazine helmed by Kristol’s son, Bill. Born in Brooklyn, Kristol became a major critic of communism following World War II. Neoconservatism, the political philosophy that held sway during the George W. Bush administration, has often been traced back to Kristol’s pen. He edited Commentary, Encounter, and The National Interest, among other publications. Kristol once famously declared that a neoconservative was a “liberal who has been mugged by reality.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has never been known for his discretion, and his wife's childbirth ordeal is apparently not an exception: Newsom’s actress wife Jennifer Siebel went into labor Friday morning, and Newsom pinged his more than one million twitter followers with a note at 11:30AM PST: “Arrived at hospital – hours away from becoming a father.” At 12:30 PST he tweeted again: “Ok… I’m nervous—10 minutes and we begin.” Will the tech-savvy mayor tweet his baby girl’s first breath, too? Only time will tell...

Oprah has graced a new book with the ultimate accolade, a spot in her hyper-successful book club. The latest pick—Nigeria native and ordained Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan’s collection of short stories, Say You’re One of Them—is a departure from the book club’s usual fare and is the first set of short stories to be featured. All five stories are written from the perspective of an African child and deal with the difficulties of growing up in nations that are often in turmoil. “Each one of these five stories really just left me gasping,” Oprah said on Friday. Prior to being Oprah-fied, Akpan has been a critical if not commercial success. He was featured in The New Yorker’s 2005 debut fiction issue.

President Obama is turning to his lieutenants: First lady Michelle Obama discussed health care on Friday, calling her husband's plan "pretty reasonable," and Vice President Joe Biden will give his "first major health policy address" early next week to an insurance industry group. Biden will address senior citizens' concerns about changes to Medicare in a visit to a retirement home the following day. Biden is taking a higher-profile role in health care as the president turns his attention to foreign affairs. The veep may be most effective in pressing for the bill's passage among his former colleagues in the Senate, where he'll influence lawmakers less as a policy wonk and more as a peer.

Members of Barack Obama’s book club will soon have one more movie to help them cut corners—Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland is on its way to the big screen. The screenplay for the seminal post-9/11 New York novel, which chronicles the life of a Dutch stockbroker, is set to be written by Christopher Hampton, who adapted Ian McEwan’s Atonement for the film version. Netherland is a joint project between Focus Features, Oprah’s Harpo Productions, and the production company of director (and Kate Winslet hubby) Sam Mendes. The Academy award-winning English director of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road is tentatively set to direct the adaptation. Details on the cast and release date for the movie are currently under wraps.

The Yale lab tech accused of killing student Annie Le allegedly attempted to cover up the crime by trying to hide lab cleaning equipment that contained blood splatters and cleaning the area where Le had been before she was reported missing, law enforcement officials told the Hartford Courant. Investigators found a single bead from Le's necklace and blood droplets in the lab where she was last seen, leading to the theory that she fought for her life. Clark told police, though, that scratches and bruises on his arms and back were from a cat and playing softball. Tracking their ID swipe cards, investigators believe that 24-year-old Raymond Clark III was the last person to see Le alive. ABC News reports that before Le was reported missing, Clark allegedly sent her a text message that he wanted to talk to her about lab cleanliness. After interviewing around 150 people, collecting almost 300 pieces of evidence and reportedly finding his DNA on the crime scene, police arrested Clark Thursday morning at a Super 8 Motel in Cromwell, Conn. He was charged with Le’s murder and put on a $3 million bail.

Nearly 45,000 people die each year because they don't have health insurance that would give them access to good health care, according to Harvard researchers. That's one person every 12 minutes. Uninsured adults younger than 64 have a 40 percent higher risk of dying than those with coverage. A co-author of the study says that more Americans die because of inaction than drunk driving and murder combined, because the uninsured are more likely to die from complications from preventable diseases like diabetes and heart disease.

The streets are roiling once again in Tehran: Tens of thousands of Iranians turned out on Friday in competing pro and anti-government rallies. Leaders of the Iranian opposition, including Mir Hossein Mousavi, actually came under attack by hardliners. Mousavi had tried to join a march in the city when hardliners attacked him, forcing him to retreat into a car and drive away as his supporters fought off the assailants. The rallies were originally meant to mark “Quds day”—a day in which the government trumpets its opposition to Israel and its support for the Palestinians. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had banned anti-government demonstrations on Quds day, but opposition leaders turned out anyway—the first time they have done so since mid-July.

Like a scene out of Saturday Night Live: CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer showed up on Celebrity Jeopardy on Thursday night and finished Double Jeopardy $4,600 in the hole. (Because the show was for charity, he was given $1,000 to play with in Final Jeopardy.) He didn’t know where Jesus Christ was born, and thought that Julia Childs wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The night’s winner, Andy Richter, netted $68,000 for the St. Jude Children’s Hospital.

Talk about being on the frontline: Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa King has become the first woman to take charge of the Army's drill-sergeant school. The 48-year-old is the daughter of a sharecropper and she’s a 28-year veteran of the military. Evidently, her father's stern discipline toward his 12 children encouraged King to take responsibility for herself and her siblings early on. A mere 14 percent of the service's 550,000 soldiers are female; King's storied assault on the military glass ceiling has broken more than the drill-sergeant barrier—she is also the first female sergeant to oversee what the Associated Press called "the heart and soul of Army warfighters," the 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C.

Yet another reason for the Bank of America to regret its purchase of Merrill Lynch: The Charlotte Observer is reporting that both the FBI and the Department of Justice are conducting a criminal probe into the transaction. The investigation has been going on for six months, though the scope and potential outcome are unknown. Bank of America refused to confirm the newspaper report.

Days before a visit to New York to address the United Nations, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is doing his best to isolate his country even further. Using a speech on Quds day, an anti-Israel holiday, Ahmadinejad questioned the Holocaust and blamed Zionists for using it as a false pretext for founding Israel as well. "If the Holocaust you claim is correct, why do you reject any research about it?" he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "The Zionists are behind the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Sudan." He might have more immediate problems on his hand than paranoid visions of Zionist conspiracies, however: thousands of protesters out for anti-Israel demonstrations instead used the state-sanctioned gathering to start a rare opposition rally with chants of "Oh, Hossein, Mir Hossein," in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who Ahmadinejad defeated in an election marred by fraud accusations. Many wore green wristbands, the symbol of the opposition movement.

The left's protest tactics helped end the Vietnam War and segregation, and the right has finally caught on. Politico reports that conservatives are taking a page from the liberal playbook by organizing tea parties and other demonstrations where protesters show up with signs like the abortion-rights slogan "Keep your laws off my body." The Sept. 12 taxpayer "March on DC" even had a poster reminiscent of the labor, communist and black power movements that participants objected to until discovering that designers were aiming for that effect. Rules for Radicals, the 1971 book written by Chicago community organizer Saul Alinksy, has been in Amazon's top 100 sellers for the last month, bought by people who "also bought" tomes by Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck. The press secretary for FreedomWorks, which organized the Sept 12 march even said, "we're trying to borrow some from the Civil Rights movement," and owned that FreedomWorks is handing out copies of Alinsky's book in the office. What's unclear is how long it will take conservatives to break out the acid and start organizing jam-band concerts.

Kate Gosselin’s hair is on a roll. The newly single reality-TV star and mother of eight is filming her new TV pilot this weekend, Radar reports, and beauty tips are on the docket. Kate will team up with Paula Deen, the Food Network’s grand dame of Southern cooking, for a show based on the Web site Mom Logic, featuring parenting advice, health and beauty tips, and celebrity gossip. Gosselin’s recent turn on The View could be prophetic: The Mom Logic show may end up imitating The View’s use of multiple hosts, Radar reports, citing comedian Sandra Bernhard and Tammy Lynn Michaels (the wife of Melissa Etheridge) as under consideration.

John Thain has finally shown some regret—not for presiding over Merrill Lynch's historical losses last year, but for purchasing a $25,000 mahogany pedestal table instead of a cheaper version from Ikea. During a speech at the Wharton Business School, Thain said that his $1.2 million redecoration of an office, two conference rooms, and a reception area "was a mistake, and I'm sorry I did that,” according to Bloomberg. He added, “If I had that to do over again, I'd furnish it in Ikea." The infamous renovation included a $35,000 toilet. Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis fired Thain after the bank acquired Merrill under charges that Thain accelerated year-end bonuses to Merrill employees before the deal closed. Thain explained at Wharton: "When I got fired in January and they said, 'John Thain secretly accelerated these bonuses,' they were lying." N.Y. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is currently investigating Lewis' alleged role in failing to disclose Merrill's $15.3 billion loss and $3.6 billion in bonus before the sale was approved.

Michael Jackson's estate has provided handsomely for his children. BBC News reports that Katherine Jackson, Michael's mother, will receive more than $1 million each year from the king of pop's estate to support herself and care for Prince Michael, Paris Michael Katherine, and Prince Michael II. Court papers revealed that Jackson's mother will receive $26,804 for herself and $60,000 for the children each month, plus $315,000 per year for domestic help and $160,000 per year for entertainment and other expenses. Katherine wanted to keep payment details private, but the presiding judge said he didn't think the total amount could remain sealed.

Warren Buffett knows how to pick stocks, but can he pick suits too? Now that he’s started to wear suits made by Dalian Dayang Trands, a Chinese firm, Chinese investors are flocking to the manufacturer. Shares in the firm, listed in Shanghai, jumped 229 percent in the past few days after Buffett disclosed he owns—and “loves”—nine Trands suits. But the question remains whether Buffett will personally invest. He visited the company two years ago.

It seems Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), the chair of the Senate's finance committee, is bringing lawmakers from both parties together on health-care reform but not in the way he hoped. Republican and Democratic lawmakers are both criticizing Baucus' proposed legislation for leaving middle class Americans on the hook for too many health-care costs in requiring them to buy pricey insurance. "It's very clear that the driving issue of this debate is affordability, particularly for middle-class folks. And the Democratic caucus is very much committed to getting this issue right, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told The Washington Post. Republican Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-ME), who could be a swing vote on health-care reform, is reportedly trying to come up with ways to increase government assistance to those facing the highest premium costs as well. Baucus says the concerns are "legitimate," but told the Post that his bill was nonetheless a major step forward. "Today, insurance policies are so expensive, people tend to forget that, hey, this is a big improvement over the status quo," he said.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck will never let this die: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi teared up at a press conference on Thursday as she said that the tone of the national debate reminds her of the political violence of San Francisco in the 1970s. When asked if she thought the debate over the federal government could lead to violence, Pelosi said, “I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance. … I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw… I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and… I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”

A (relatively) miniature Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton—with the classic outsize jaws, long legs, and teensy arms—has been discovered in China, and is providing scientists insight into the evolutionary line that produced the beast that would someday inspire a million Halloween costumes. This scaled-down Tyrannosaurus ancestor, called Raptorex kriegsteini, was nine feet long and weighed only about as much as a human: 150 lbs. (A whippet compared to its descendant, which was nearly 100 times heavier and five times longer.) The discovery disproves a long-held belief among paleontologists that T. rex's distinctive features developed as a consequence of its enormous size. Scientists now think of Raptorex’s traits as “a body blueprint for a predator—jaws on legs, as it were—that is one of the most successful of the Mesozoic…" And they were scalable as Tyrannosaurus grew: “When they did there was no turning back until the asteroid hit."

Eight months ago, Chinese factories were plagued with rioting laid-off workers—and now they can’t hire fast enough, reports The New York Times. Whereas American economists are fretting about a “jobless recovery,” Chinese factories are already complaining that they can’t hire fast enough to fill Christmas orders. Confidence is up and Shanghai’s real-estate market is booming; by most measures, China is back on top. How did they do it so much faster than the rest of the world? The Times argues that China’s tripartite strategy of “stimulus, liberal bank lending, and broad government support for exports” made for a speedy recovery. The state-controlled banks got through the financial crisis mostly unscathed, and were able to inject $1.2 trillion in extra lending quickly, when the economy most needed it. In the second quarter, China reported a 14.9 percent growth for its national economy, whereas the U.S. reported a 1 percent decline. Chinese and American economies are so often discussed in the same breath, the Times points out, that it’s easy to forget that the economies are not always in step.

The sci-fi vision of a moon colony just got a little bit closer to earth. The Los Angeles Times reports that NASA's lunar satellite—the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has just begun its four-year mission—has discovered large amounts of hydrogen in permanently shadowed south pole craters, which could mean water is buried underground. The form this hydrogen takes, whether it is water in the form of ice, is not yet known, although on the morning of October 9, a satellite that separated from the recon center just after launch will send a Centaur rocket crashing into the crater called Cabeus A, in hopes of sending up a cloud of dust and ice particles that the satellite and orbiter can sense. NASA launched the orbiter three months ago in order to produce a detailed map of the moon, with a special eye to finding water and thus potential sites for future human colonists.

Move over, Kate Moss: Sotomayor is on the case. Judge Sonia Sotomayor got her vogue on Thursday during a photo shoot for the cover of Latina magazine. The rookie Supreme Court Judge sported chic black robes and posed in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington D.C., WWD reports. Latina has recently shown its pride in the newest judge by selling T-shirts emblazoned with "Wise Latina" on its Web site.