Page Six reports that Epstein's lawyers were "admonished" by a judge after she found that they used a deposition with one of the women as an opportunity to "had badgered the woman by repeatedly quizzing her about having three abortions" and "the type of sex she engages in." For eight hours. Classy! Also Epstein's private team of oppo researchers are busy digging dirt on all the dirty, bad women who he paid for sex, reportedly.

However! The opposing lawyer could theoretically subpoena all the famous people who rode on Epstein's sexxxy plane, like Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers. And Epstein has already settled with four women, according to P6. So we smell settlements, settlements, and more settlements to come! When will the system let Jeffrey Epstein's penis be free?

There's been a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, after all, as True/Slant's Kashmir Hill has written. Facebook altered its Privacy Policy to strip protections from data like friends lists and profile pictures. But it turns out you're not allowed to do that by fiat, you need to explicitly get permission from users, something Facebook's "transition tool" failed to do, even as it allowed users to keep other types of data private. Writes Hill, a sometime legal blogger:

In 2004, Gateway did something similar, changing its privacy policy to make it okay to sell information it had gathered for Hooked On Phonics users to third parties. It got into trouble for that. It had to revert to its old privacy policy, and pay a fine. (A little one, just $4,000.)

And then there are the private lawsuits. They're inevitable, right? Facebook is already on the hook for $9.5 million it agreed to pay to settle a class-action suit over its Beacon advertising system. The lawyer who prosecuted that case is busily milking this new legal field; he's now suing Netflix for upwards of $2.5 billion for allegedly violating its privacy policy.

Facebook's last payment of $9.5 million is not a huge dent in a company that will make more than $500 million this year. It looks like the next payout one should be bigger — or it's just a cost of doing business (as usual).

Ikimilusa Livingston—a black woman who is still a working General Assignment Post reporter (and has been for 13 years), who used to cover courts—has joined the suit filed last month by Austin Fenner, a veteran black Post reporter who was fired in November (after editor Sandra Guzman, who filed her own similar lawsuit). In his original suit, Fenner alleged "pervasive discrimination and harassment" at the Post, based on race.

The suit has now been updated to include Livingston's own complaints, which echo Fenner's. She says she was effectively banned from the newsroom (indeed, when we called her today the City Desk transferred us to her cell phone, apparently because she has no office phone):

Livingston says in her complaint that she was paid less than white colleagues with less experience, and denied stories she wanted to write. Like the others, she says that after she complained about the infamous Dead Chimpanzee cartoon, the company put her on its shit list and gave her poor performance reviews. Perhaps her juiciest allegation:Steve Dunleavy, recently retired legendary drunk Post columnist, was a huge racist:

She also says in her complaint that her white editors shot down her story ideas and passed off her work to white reporters. For example:

When we contacted Livingston today she referred us to Ken Thompson, her lawyer. "Not one white reporter has been banned from the newsroom," Thompson told us, pointing out that both Fenner and Livingston say they have—since December of 2008, in Livingston's case. "You have to conclude it was based on her race."

Thompson said it was rare for someone to file a suit like Livingston's while still employed at the place she's suing, but that she was seeking to improve working conditions for reporters of the future. Fenner and Livingston are seeking economic damages related to lower wages due to discrimination (and, for Fenner, unemployment); compensatory damages for their emotional distress; and punitive damages, to punish News Corp and the Post.

The company is due to file its own response to Guzman's lawsuit this month, and to Fenner and Livingston's suit in January, according to Thompson.

The Post hates lawyers, because it's getting sued a lot by its own reporters, and because, as a story last month bemoaning the state's "Suer System" put it, "New York's court system is among the most lawsuit-friendly in the country — socking citizens with millions of dollars in wacky jury awards, higher taxes and increased costs of insurance and health care...."

They oughtta know! All they need to do is ask their own television columnist, Stasi, who is suing the city for $2 million over her run-in with a broken barricade at 49th St. and Second Ave. almost four years ago. Stasi's heel caught a wooden plank from the barricade that was lying in the crosswalk and she went flying into the street, suffering a cut lip and severed tendons in her wrists. A tipster recently pointed us to the $2 million lawsuit she filed against the city over the incident, claiming mental anguish and lost wages.

The case, which hasn't been previously reported, was filed in 2006, and is due for a jury trial at some point in the next six months. To judge by the complaint, which you can read in full here, Stasi's injuries were pretty bad:

We called Stasi for details, and she insisted that her case was the real deal—no "wacky jury awards" here. "I'm not trying to get away with anything," she told Gawker. "You can ask my doctor. I looked like I'd gone 16 rounds with Mike Tyson. I went to a hand surgeon, but didn't want to risk surgery because God forbid, I'm a writer. So I had to wear braces on my arms for a year. They still swell up sometimes."

We don't doubt that Stasi took a hard fall and was hurt. But whatever happened to her wrists, it wasn't so bad that she couldn't watch TV and write about it anymore. Her fall happened on December 18, 2005, and she had bylines in the Post on December 22, December 24, December 25, December 30—you get the idea. In the month after the fall that, according to her sworn complaint, left Stasi "severely injured and damaged, rendered sick, sore, lame and disabled," she wrote 14 stories.

"I wasn't disabled," Stasi told Gawker (!). "I didn't ask for disability. I worked from home. If you work at a newspaper, you can't just stop writing—someone else will come in to fill your seat." Well, what about those lost earnings she's suing for? "I lost about a month of the show I do for New York 1 until my face healed," she said, "and I had to stop writing my book for a couple months." Because after all that writing she did during the day for the Post, her wrists just couldn't take it any more at night.

When we expressed skepticism that Stasi's injuries and the loss of a month's worth of freelance income from New York 1 were worth $2 million, she laughed at the number. "As far as I know, there was never any figure attached to the suit. I'd be very, very happy to sue for $2 million. I'd go out and buy the whole city a Christmas present." Here is the relevant entry on the case's notice of issue, which indicates that a jury trial has been set and that Stasi is indeed seeking "$2,000,000." Get ready for your Christmas presents, New York.

Surprised by the number, Stasi sent us to her lawyer, Lawrence Wertheimer, who explained that $2 million was an arbitrary figure. "Those are pro forma numbers," he says. "Certainly, she's not looking for $2 million, and she's certainly not going to get $2 million. You basically get whatever the jury decides, and you have to enter a number, so what you do is, you go high." Again, don't worry about any "wacky jury awards" here. Wertheimer is decidedly Zen about the whole case. "It is what it is," he says. "If a jury gives her money, great. If it doesn't, then that's why we have a jury system." Might as well try it and see what happens, right?

If our skepticism as to the merits of Stasi's legal gambit strikes you as heartless, we plead guilty. But we learned from a master! Here's Stasi's take on a sexual harrassment lawsuit filed last year by four waitresses against the owners of Times Square's Hawaiian Tropic Zone restaurant:

[S]omehow, being harassed and groped at a restaurant billed as the "Hottest Place on Earth" came as a giant surprise to four employees who filed a sexual-misconduct suit against the restaurant for 600-million big ones on Wednesday. That's a lot of suntan lotion!

[snip]

I'm sorry, but if you apply for a job in a bar that doesn't require a shirt, you'd have to be brain-dead not to figure out that slobbering men would be as plentiful as draught beer. And apparently they were, according to the lawsuit.

[snip]

Another alleged victim said she wants revenge against the Riese Organization, which owns the joint.
"I want to see the entire organization completely closed."

Six-hundred million could about do it.

And here's Stasi "ranting" about the case—complete with a gratuitous "ka-ching" sound effect when she mentions the amount they're suing for—courtesy the Post's YouTube channel.

Brain-dead waitresses dare to protest being groped by customers? They were asking for it. Brain-dead reporter doesn't watch where she's walking? Two million could about do it.

Allegations from the trader, Andrew Tong (pictured), were recently unsealed; they may help shed light for the FBI's investigation, since Tong testified to manipulative trading amid a sexual harassment case. Sex allegations from the papers are more sensational than any trading scandal; Tong's most extreme allegations, honed in on by Business Insider, say he was forced by his boss Ping Jiang to perform oral sex (in once case as a condition of being allowed to trade); made to take female hormones and dress in feminine attire; and violated in various other ways:

As part of his "training program, Mr. Jiang set about to systematically bully and control Mr. Tong through obscene sexual ultimatums and physical brutality. By way of example, the following tortious and criminal acts were perpetrated by Mr. Jiang against Mr. Tong at SAC's very own offices: (a) in or about the beginning of February 2006, Mr. Jiang forced Mr. Tong to perform oral sodomy; (b) in or about the beginning of March 2006, Mr. Jiang committed assault and battery, as well as false imprisonment upon Mr. Tong by restraining him with ropes and forcibly introducing certain foreign objects into Mr. Tong's rectum; and (c) in or about mid-March 2006, Mr. Jiang again restrained Mr. Tong with ropes and forcibly urinated into his mouth.

Jiang allegedly thought a "soft feminine touch" made for better traders. Even by the dog eat dog standards of Wall Street, this is a sadistic obsession with power and domination . And a way twisted one at that; the "Swinging Dick" is supposed to be a metaphor in the financial world, not something you actually brandish, in the workplace.

Court papers, via Reuters via Business Insider:

The case of Al-Qaisi v. The American Military Forces in Iraq is a terrible window into just a few of the millions of lives our stupid and cruel adventure has wrecked in that country. We came across the lawsuit, which Al-Qaisi filed in October in a federal court in Virginia, randomly while searching the electronic docket system for another case. It is a quixotic, conspiratorial, and hopeless narrative, filed without the aid of lawyers by a man whose mind appears to have been ruined by the violence unleashed by the Shiite thugs that we handed his country to after turning it into shit. But Al-Qaisi's Kafka-esque odyssey, told in a humane and engaging voice, also offers a memorable glimpse of the brutal nightmare we conjured in his homeland. We've outlined his tale below, but we strongly urge you to read the entire document for yourself.

Firas Al-Qaisi is 38 years old (that's a photocopy of an American-issued ID granting him access to a training facility for Iraqi forces). A lawyer by training, he was a proud collaborator with the Americans he thought were capable of returning the rule of law to his country. He ran the risk of retribution from religious fanatics in his Baghdad neighborhood for wearing a western suit to work each day. U.S. forces saved his life after he was abducted by a Shiite faction of Iraq's American-backed Interior Ministry in 2007, and he was evacuated to the U.S. along with his pregnant wife and brother on a flight ordered by none other than Gen. David Petraeus two years ago, because staying in Iraq meant certain death. He landed in Northern Virginia, homeless, unable to speak English, living on charity. A September 2007 U.S. News & World Report story on his successful effort to seek asylum confirms some of these details. Two years later, the passage of time seems to have embittered him. His ordeal, he now believes, was an American-hatched plan to have him killed.

When we called Al-Qaisi's home in Virginia, his wife answered the phone and expressed surprise that the complaint was publicly available. We wrote an e-mail to Al-Qaisi, who wrote back that he doesn't speak English well enough to communicate via e-mail and that he couldn't talk anyway: "I cannot give you answers for them since I submitted the case to the court and in the light of that, any answers in that concern should be given to the court only due to the fact that this matter is of a very sensitive nature. Till now I do not understand how you, as a reporter, could have access to this case which is still in its early stages."

'Sacrifices and favors'

Al-Qaisi was an Iraqi prosecutor before the war, and quickly aligned himself with the Americans after the invasion. In 2004, he served as an attorney representing Margaret Hassan, the Irish aide worker who was kidnapped and murdered by insurgents in 2004, and quickly became a sort of liaison between the U.S. Embassy and the Iraqi legal system. He also provided valuable intelligence on the activities of Al-Qaeda in his neighborhood.

In his court filing, Al-Qaisi included two affidavits from Americans he worked with in Baghdad to confirm his assistance to the cause in Iraq. Initially drafted in support of his asylum application, they were written by Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Warren Eric Barrus and State Department staffer Jennifer Fox. In 2005, according to Barrus' affidavit, Al-Qaisi was instrumental in helping U.S. forces locate and shut down a torture chamber, called "the Bunker," run by the Shiite "Wolf Brigade" faction of the country's Interior Ministry. After that, the men worked closely together. Al-Qaisi was, according to Barrus, a committed idealist.

Fox concurred in her affidavit, writing that Al-Qaisi's actions "rival that of any patriot" and that he had aided in counterterrorism operations.

'All of you are responsible for killing that soldier'

In March 2007, Al-Qaisi learned from one of his contacts that Al-Qaeda had planted three roadside bombs in front of a salt factory near Camp Falcon outside Baghdad. He traveled to the Green Zone—a journey that was itself extremely dangerous owing to what he calls the roaming Shiite "Groups of Death"—to meet with a military intelligence officer he knew as "Captain Jim" to warn him.

The intelligence was ignored, Al-Qaisi says, and a week later an American convoy hit a bomb in front of the salt factory, killing one soldier.

Al-Qaisi was enraged: He had risked his own life to help the Americans, and they failed to act on his intelligence, resulting in one of their own being killed needlessly. He went to the Green Zone again to vent.

He continued to help American military intelligence, arranging for a fake kidnapping of a local sheik he knew who wanted to provide information to American forces but couldn't risk being seen voluntarily talking to them or going to the Green Zone.

'This is the person. Arrest him now.'

On April 5, 2007, two months after the IED debacle, two bombs hit Al-Qaisi's house, striking through the window of his bedroom on the second floor. Two others hit the street in front of the home. He wasn't there at the time, but his mother and pregnant wife were both injured by broken glass from the explosions. His neighbors told him that the bombs appeared to be American, but Al-Qaisi wrote that he "put aside that possibility from my mind because I was an old and honest friend of them, and because they always needed me."

A month later, in May, Al-Qaisi was at home when joint U.S.-Iraqi forces quarantined his neighborhood for three days, searching local houses. An American officer entered Al-Qaisi's home to interrogate him accompanied by a lieutenant colonel from the Iraqi National Police. In the presence of the Iraqi officer, Al-Qaisi told the Americans that he worked with the U.S. embassy, and provided them with ID cards issued by American forces. The Americans left, but two weeks later the Iraqi officer returned.

Al-Qaisi had been abducted by the Wolf Brigade (he calls them "NPs," for members of the Iraqi National Police, in the complaint). In the country's tortured post-invasion ethnic and political maelstrom, they hated Al-Qaisi because he was a Sunni and because he collaborated with Americans in their efforts to kill Sunni insurgents. They also took Al-Qaisi's brother Hussein, who was a teenager at the time. The Iraqis loaded them into a truck with six other prisoners and took them to a base where other Wolf Brigade members were waiting.

'Tomorrow we will cut off your heads and throw your bodies in the street'

He passed out from the beating, and when he awoke, three American officers arrived at the station. Not to rescue him, but to process the prisoners. While Al-Qaisi was being fingerprinted and having his retina scanned by American officers, his Iraqi captors hissed death threats into his ear. He was too terrified to announce his status as a collaborator in front of the Iraqis, so the Americans took his information down, along with that of his fellow detainees, and left.

What followed was two weeks of torture and beatings, recalled in excruciating detail, at the hands of the Iraqis that our invasion empowered. He was beaten, burned, hung from the ceiling by his arms, dragged around the floor, subjected to extremes of heat and cold, denied food and water for days, and suffered from fever and chills. His shoulder and nose were broken. Aware that the Americans might try to seek Al-Qaisi's release once they realized who he was, his captors shuffled him from station to station in an effort to stay one step ahead of them.

Still, there were repeated run-ins with American troops who routinely visited Interior Ministry facilities where Al-Qaisi and others were being tortured. On more than one occasion, Al-Qaisi was literally in the same room with American officers empowered to help him, but they didn't know who he was and he didn't dare tell them in front of Iraqis. And all around them, men were being beaten and murdered.

Al-Qaisi's wife called the U.S. embassy on the day he was abducted and asked for help in seeking his release. It took the embassy four days to locate him, and when they did, they sent a military team to assess his condition. For reasons that aren't clear, they didn't rescue him immediately. They reported back that he had been "roughed up," according to the affidavit of State Department employee Jennifer Fox, who participated in the operation to rescue Al-Qaisi. Concerned that the visit from American soldiers had tipped off the Wolf Brigade that they wanted Al-Qaisi released, the embassy asked the Ministry of the Interior to see to it that he not be moved. They were told that the Interior Minister had called the detention facility to personally issue the order, but the next day, Al-Qaisi was shuffled to another facility, where he witnessed his captors beat a man to death.

On June 7, 2007—twelve days after his abduction—an embassy team finally tracked down Al-Qaisi and brought an Iraqi investigative judge to order his release. The Iraqis tried to delay and threatened to kill him even as Americans soldiers watched over him.

When he was finally released and brought to safety in the Green Zone, Al-Qaisi's American friends were waiting for him. Concerned about his foul smell and appearance after nearly two weeks of hell, he tried to keep them from hugging him, but they insisted. Everyone was immediately aware that Al-Qaisi could no longer safely live in his homeland, and when he was asked if he wanted to seek asylum, he answered, "Yes and now."

That night, Al-Qaisi couldn't sleep. He lists the reasons in his complaint.

Al-Qaisi, his wife, and his brother were moved to a safe house and kept under 24-hour-a-day armed guard until August 2007, when they were flown to the U.S. Because his wife was 8 months pregnant and unable to fly commercially, they were transported to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on a medical flight that was personally approved by Gen. David Petraeus. They lived initially in Alexandria, Va., with John Stinson, a retired Special Forces colonel whom Al-Qaisi knew, and now live in Falls Church.

A preposterous ending

Al-Qaisi's tale is heartbreaking enough without the sorry coda of his lawsuit. He has become convinced that the bombing of his home and his kidnapping were orchestrated in order to silence him about the failure of U.S. forces to heed his IED warning. Al-Qaisi claims that U.S. forces bombed his house in April 2007 in an attempt to kill him, and, when that failed, delivered him into the awaiting arms of the Wolf Brigade. The first visit to his home from the American officer, he says, was planned to out him as a collaborator to the Iraqi lieutenant colonel who later returned to abduct him. That claim is preposterous to our eyes: He provides some evidence that the bomb that hit his home was American, but none that it was deliberately targeted. And his assertion that the Americans handed him over to Shiite militias is undermined by the fact that it was Americans who rescued him from those same militias and brought him to the U.S. to protect him. But the details of his ordeal are compelling and horrifying nonetheless, especially when the accusations come from someone who suffered so awfully for the country that he's suing.

The complaint, which he wrote himself with the help of his wife, who taught English at an Iraqi university, doesn't remotely conform to American legal standards, and is more a confused howl of woe than a bona fide attempt to seek damages. It lacks evidence, is logically incoherent, and will not succeed. But it's a powerfully written document of just how sorry this pointless war really was, and is.

We asked the Department of Defense for a comment on Al-Qaisi's charges, and received no response. We also tried to contact Jennifer Fox, the State Department employee who supplied an affidavit for the Al-Qaisis' asylum petition, through the public affairs office of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, but got no response. We could not locate Warren Eric Barrus, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who also filed an affidavit. In fact, we couldn't independently verify any of the claims in Al-Qaisi's complaint, though a source who spent two years working with the U.S. military in Baghdad told us the details ring true.

Anyway, this is how stupid wars end these days. With pathetic and desperate lawsuits from the good men whose lives we destroyed. On to Afghanistan.

Austin Fenner, a 20-year veteran reporter, was fired on November 9th, the same day as Guzman. And—if Fenner's claims are true—for the same reason: complaining about the Post publishing that infamous cartoon depicting officers shooting a chimpanzee meant to be Barack Obama. (Was it worth it, New York Post?)

The Huffington Post reports Fenner filed a 27-page complaint in court today which specifically signals out metropolitan editor Michelle Gotthelf and assignment editor Daniel Greenfield as the racists-in-chief. The lawsuit outlines a number of claims that fall just short of the sheer crazy-terribleness of Guzman's, but it's still a model example of (alleged!) racism.

Here are the worst/best parts:

The main thrust of the complaint is that minority Post staffers are subjected to "pervasive discrimination and harassment... based on their race and/or color" at the hands of their nearly all-white colleagues.

This discrimination manifested itself most blatantly in Fenner's claim that, after he criticized the chimpanzee cartoon in the blog Journal-ism, Greenfield and Gotthelf told him he couldn't enter the "Whites Only" newsroom without their permission for the five months before he was ultimately fired:

During the cartoon row, Fenner claims he also witnessed racism directed at New York Governor David Patterson, when editors refused to interview him about the cartoon:

And after Fenner publicly complained about the chimpanzee cartoon he said editors started to get sweary—and not even in a creative, hard-boiled-newspaper-editor-type way:

All this led to that fateful Nov. 9 day, when Fenner was called from an assignment in Brooklyn, ordered to give his notes to a white reporter, and fired.

The Post told the Huffington Post that Fenner's claims were "totally false and the claims of discrimination completely baseless." OK, you convinced us! Forget paywalls: The Post should charging for seminars on how to deny accusations that your organization is a seething pit of racism.

Cityfile reports that the suit was settled for no money, and the site was taken down, and all that remains is for Drew Kerr to get his cheap ass insurance company to pay his legal bills in this very important case of the fundamental right to douchetaggery. "All's well that ends well," Kerr told us this morning.

As you can see, it is officially legal to call Ronn Torossian a "douche." It is also accurate, when you contrast Ronn's $20 million LOLsuit with Ronn's own tendency to have his firm buy up web domain names of competitors (and bloggers) and impersonate people in online comments in flagrant examples of sock puppetry and scrub the Ronn Torossian Wikipedia page on what must be a near-daily basis.

"Much a-douche about nothing."

[A commenter went to the trouble of scanning this item below, which "may be the single greatest item ever run by the New York Law Journal." Thank you, sir.]

You probably know Christina Ambers' feet from such ads as "Rescue Me," "Maybelline," and "Sally Hansen Hard as Nails Xtreme Wear." She is only considered the hottest foot model around these days, that's all. And her hands aren't too shabby either!

Anyhow she married the doorman at her building on E. 74 St., and now she's alleging in a $10 million lawsuit that the co-op board is trying to evict her because they simply can't stand the sight of the doorman, a poor, rubbing all up on the precious rich sexxxy feet of Ambers, a non-poor. Other residents in her building say the couple had a tumultuous relationship, made noise, and had the cops called to their apartment. The Post, predictably, ignores that angle in favor of class war without mercy, leading its story with "Stick to taking out the recyclables, Angel."

The most interesting part of this story, of course, is not actual facts. It's the question of whether the New York Post can stir up a decent amount of class-based outrage amongst its readers on behalf of a couple that is one-half Latino man from the Bronx. If Ambers had married, say, a poor but proud firefighter from Bay Ridge, this would be an easy layup. But can the Post's faux-populism overcome its real racism? We shall see.

There's always the sexxxy feet pics to fall back on!
[Pic: Christina Ambers' Flickr]

The suit was probably inevitable. As we first reported, the Sacramento-based firm of Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has been looking for victims of scammy ads in games like Mafia Wars and Farmville to potentially file a class action suit. Less than a week later, the firm's suit has hit federal district court in Northern California.

You can read the initial complaint in full here.

Neither gaming startup Zynga nor social network Facebook actually originates the advertisements in question; instead, other companies take out ads in Zynga's games, which run on Facebook's network, and the two companies make reportedly large sums of money from the offers. Some of the ads trick users into signing up for unauthorized cell phone charges or expensive mail-order products like educational CDs, typically by disguising them as "free" offers or "free trials," or as part of an "online quiz." TechCrunch has run an aggressive series of articles, cataloged at the bottom of this post.

Zynga reportedly takes in close to one-third of its revenue from "commercial offers" like those, and Facebook does well too, as KC&R lawyers point out in their complaint. An excerpt (click to enlarge):

Swift's attorneys also point to Zynga CEO Mark Pincus' damning video confession that "I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues" in their complaint, indicating it will be a significant piece of courtroom evidence, just as we predicted.

The prospect of being on the hook for massive damages has to make both Zynga and Facebook's investors sweat. Facebook is the darling of Silicon Valley, with VCs having valued it in the billions of dollars, while Zynga counts the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers among its major investors. Yet both companies have come to rely on greasy advertisers for much of their revenue; in addition to the game-ad scammers, Facebook is also sells ad to marketers who resort to tactics like using stolen pictures of apparent underaged girls to promote their products. If the company's are found to be liable of helping con customers by working with these sorts of slimeballs, it's hard to say where the payouts might end.

Below, an excerpt of the scams allegedly perpetrated on the lead plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift.

(Top pic: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, by Raphaël Labbé)

[Full court filing]

Radaronline reports that Kate is actually suing—presumably in a "brick and mortar" court of law, and not just in the confines of some New Age "visualization" exercise—to enforce the "contract" she and Jon drew up, in pencil, on some scrap of paper, wherein he agreed to maybe give her some percentage of some unknown money sometime, and she agreed not to talk to the media about, OMG, everything.

Anyhow this is exactly like when some crazy person tries to cash a check written on a box of noodles, or spend a $5 million bill they drew with a Sharpie.

[Pic via]

We've received this from four sources now, including from our dark overlord, who posted it to #tips.

To New York Post Staff:

Most of you have read the sensational allegations a former employee made in a complaint filed against our company and our executives. Her claims of being a victim of unlawful discrimination and retaliation are baseless.

In fact, the entire complaint is filled with distortions and misstatements and virtually every key factual assertion is untrue. We will defend this case vigorously and are confident that the legal process will reveal it to be totally meritless.

While we are in the midst of this litigation, we urge you to do your best to focus on your work and respectfully ask that you not discuss it with fellow employees or people outside the company. Thank you for your cooperation and if you should have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact Human Resources.

Richard Miniter, the editorial page editor of the Moonie Washington Times, is suing the paper for "being forced to attend a Unification Church mass wedding," and also because he says they made him work while he was sick, even though, according to TPM, "During a health scare earlier this year, Miniter was brought out of the newsroom on a stretcher." Who would have expected this at the Moonie Washington Times, of all places?


The (unprofitable) New York Daily News is investing $150 million in a new printing press . Buyers of print ads in the Daily News love it; everyone else thinks it is stupid.


Hey, Lou Dobbs is very interested in Bill O'Reilly's offer of a "semi-regular contributor" position on O'Reilly's show. Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs, together, on the same show. That would be something. Something evil.


Ah, here's a fourth item on this day of layoffs and only layoffs, as far as media "news" is concerned: Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni has named Hearst's Food Network Magazines as the Most Notable Launch of 2009. Americans can no longer tolerate any aspect of their daily reality that is unconnected to television. What an apocalyptic future we all face. Thanks, "Mr. Magazine."

Sacramento-based Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP is looking for people who faced "unauthorized charges imposed on Facebook and MySpace users who participate in social games like 'Farmville' and 'Mafia Wars.'" The firm, which said it has launched an investigation into such scams, specializes in class action suits, among other areas.

Mike Arrington's TechCrunch has posted a series of articles on the issue of sleazy revenue models for online games, exposing the practice of sneaking mobile data subscriptions and pricey "learning CD" packages past players trying to earn online "points." Mafia Wars and Farmville creator Zynga gets a third of its revenue from such "commercial offers," while Facebook in turn gets 10-20 percent of its money from Zynga, according to Arrington.

Zynga has yanked some of its ads; Facebook, in turn, has suspended one of Zynga's smaller games. But there's evidence this issue could have been addressed much sooner. TechCrunch found video (below) shot this past spring in which Zynga's CEO said he "did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away."

That sounded bad enough when it was reprinted on a tech blog; imagine how it's going to sound in court.

(Top pic: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus, possibly calling his lawyer, by Joi Ito.)

Sandra Guzman was an editor at the Post charged with running, among other things, a section aimed at Latino readers. After the paper published a Sean Delonas cartoon depicting President Barack Obama as a chimpanzee being gunned down by white police officers, she complained internally about what she saw as the paper's persistent and overt racism under the leadership of Australian he-man Col Allan. Then she got fired.

Yesterday, she filed a complaint in federal court alleging systematic racism in the Post's hiring, firing, and editorial practices, and depicting Allan as a stupid, giggling frat-boy who likes to show his female employees pictures of naked men for kicks. The complaint has all sorts of damning allegations—you can read the whole thing here, but some of the good bits are below. Guzman has separately filed a complaint against the Post with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The lawsuit comes just one day after the paper fired reporter Austin Fenner, one of the few remaining African-American reporters on the paper's staff—we're told there are just three others, one of whom has been on an extended sick leave for most of the year. We're also told that the paper—a metro daily in New York City—has no African-American editors, and hasn't for nine years. UPDATE: A tipster points out Robert George, an editor on the Post's editorial page, is an African American. Our sources on the Post's demographics were thinking of the news and features pages.

SECOND UPDATE: According to two other tipsters, business editor Jay Sherman is an African American as well. For the record, we asked a rep for the Post about the paper's demographics, and got an e-mailed statement, printed below, in response.

We've contacted the Post to confirm that and for a response to Guzman's complaint, and we'll publish it when we get one.

Here are some of the allegations:

The Post, Guzman says, was a "hostile work environment" for women and non-white staffers, who are subject to "pervasive and systemic discrimination" and "harassment":

Allan's "inappropriate and sexist comments and conduct have been widely known throughout" the Post. For instance, he likes to show ladies what penises look like. He thinks it's funny!

He also, Guzman says, likes to rub his penis up against his female employees, whether they want him to or not:

Other editors at the paper, following Allan's classy lead, have taken to offering female staffers better jobs in exchange for blow jobs:

Allan's colleague Les Goodstein, a News Corp. senior vice president, thinks latin ladies are hot, and told Guzman so. He also liked to lick his lips while staring at other women's breasts in her presence:

The beef that precipitated Guzman's firing was over a drawing by Sean Delonas, a racist, gay-hating, and—worst of all—astoundingly humorless cartoonist. The Barack-Obama-Is-a-Dead-Chimp cartoon is not his first exceedingly tasteless offering, and at one point, Guzman says, Delonas had the bright idea of depicting Jews as sewer rats, a pitch that apparently got nixed:

Guzman's complaints about the cartoon fell on deaf ears, both because real men don't care about whiny P.C. minority-type people and because she just didn't get that the whole point of the New York Post is to "destroy Barack Obama." At least that's what she says the paper's Washington bureau chief told her:

Col Allan certainly didn't care about P.C. minority-type people: When some of them staged a protest outside his newspaper, he laughed at them because "most of them are minorities and the majority are uneducated." Unlike the Post's highly sophisticated, Sean Delonas-loving readership:

Allan felt the same way about the vanishingly small number of non-white employees he oversees. When one of them approached him to discuss his feelings about the cartoon, Allan simply walked away:

After Guzman made her feelings public in an e-mail stating that she had raised her objections to the cartoon to management—an e-mail that got picked up by the Huffington Post and other blogs—Allan, she says, launched a crusade against her. His animus, according to Guzman, overwhelmed his news judgment. In August, Guzman—who is a personal friend of Justice Sonia Sotomayor—was invited as a guest to a White House reception celebrating Sotomayor's confirmation. No other reporters were to be present. Guzman asked for permission to cover and report on the event, and Allan said no. Granted, her personal relationship and status as a guest would make such an assignment weird, but a) it could have been disclosed and presented as an insider account, and b) since when has the Post cared about conflicts of interest? Especially when they have a chance to get an exclusive about a highly newsworthy event? Of all the transgressions listed in Guzman's complaint, this is perhaps the most shocking—that Allan let his hatred of Obama, Sotomayor, and Guzman kill a potential scoop.

There's much more, so do read the complaint in its entirety. We're sure Rupert Murdoch will, using his sophisticated racism-detecting system to determine that Guzman is full of it. Because if Glenn Beck's not a racist, then Col Allan certainly isn't, right?

UPDATE: The Post has released a statement responding to the complaint.

This lawsuit has no merit and is based on charges that are groundless. As previously stated, Ms. Guzman's position was eliminated when the section she edited was discontinued due to a decline in advertising sales.

Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are dropping suits against eBay, to whom they sold Skype in 2005, and against a consortium of private finance companies trying to buy Skype from eBay. The founders had accused both groups of intellectual property theft. They're dropping those lawsuits in exchange for 14 percent of Skype.

But former Wall Street Journal reporter Kara Swisher reported last night on Dow Jones' All Things D website that the founders would get not 14 percent but up to 13 percent of the company — 10 percent outright and an option to buy another 3 percent. Sacrebleu! Rob Wauters of rival TechCrunch was quick to rub Swisher's face in the minor error, writing that the founders "are getting 14 percent of Skype back for rights to the... technology their company... controls... and not 10% like previously reported by other media" (emphasis from original). Meow!

The press release issued by Skype actually confirmed Swisher's reporting that the founders had to put in money to get some of their shares. Swisher later acknowledged that the figure was 14 percent, just one percent higher than she had written. But she also engaged in a lengthy Twitter fight with Wauters and his colleague Erick Schonfeld (see below) over their public nitpicking and fact-bending. Maybe everyone involved in this fracas needs to take the next couple of days off. Oh, look at the calendar!

(Top pic via)

The brilliant graphic illustration above is a very scientific illustration of just how to turn watchable televison programming into fast-food shilling drivel. Here's the technical explanation of just what's going on above:

In one embodiment, as shown in FIG. 1, a conventional advertisement 10 shown during televisin program's commercial break promotes a new product 12 of, for example, a fast-food establishment. The advertisement 10 is attempting to sell the particular product 12. A program-advancing element 16, such as the knife in this particular example, is introduced into the advertisement 10 to form a program-integrated advertisement 14. The program-advancing element relates to the television program and can be a program-promoting element, i.e., a viewer associates the knife with the program. Additionally, the two characters dealing with the knife in the program-integrated advertisement 14 may themseves be program-advancing elements, if they are characters in the program.

We came across this technological marvel via The Hollywood Reporter's legal blog, THR, esq which wrote about what must be one of the most amazing lawsuits of all time. This legalistic rabbit hole's silliness is so profound that it makes us think that it might be time to throw the entire judicial system out the window and muddle by on mob rule for a few decades.

THR writes:

Delaware-based ad agency Denizen is suing media agency Mindshare for stealing an idea to integrate a brand of Vaseline into a Lifetime miniseries called "Maneater."

In the complaint, Denizen says that TV networks face the problem of viewers not paying attention to ads in between segments of a show and claims to have "created the concept of 'program integrated advertisement' in order to entice viewers to pay attention to advertisements in various media, including, but not limited to, television, radio, and the Internet.

Denizen isn't actually suing for stealing the idea of product placement, but they are accusing Mindshare of making off with trade secrets about how to implement world class product placement that the Denizen folks supposedly let them in on during a meeting between the two companies.

But Denizen isn't just claiming spuriously, "yeah, we thought of that first"; they actually filed a patent on product placement, which they call "Program Integrated Commercials." Denizen's patent must rank as one of the most amazing legal documents ever produced, demonstrating the legal system's ability to absorb any level of ridiculousness and turn it into mind-numbing deadly serious jargon.

The patent starts out bemoaning the desperate state of advertising, noting the wreckage TiVo has wrecked and the failures of basically every attempt to get people excited about watching ads, what with these ungrateful viewers changing channels and fast forwarding and all.

The patent then claims, "The present invention comprises a method and system for incorporating thematic content from a particular television program into product or service advertisements (commercials) for a sponsor or the program or network."

Actually, when one gets into it the invention is far more sinister than merely sticking some products into a TV show wrapped around cockamamie plot points, but involves an attempt to take the characters out of the show and stick them into the actual ads based on cockamamie plot points, making the audience have to watch the ads themselves to be able to follow the plot of the show.

The verbal contortions in which the patent goes to explain this are fairly breathtaking. The following graph, for instance, attempts to codify this breakthrough in the science of forcing products into people's brains: "The program-advancing element is specific to a program or is associated with a program element such that it is capable of being recognized by a viewer. This includes, but is not limited to, character actions, setting descriptions, objects, sound recognition, and character dialogue, etc."

That's right, Denizen thunk that up! Take that Sterling Cooper!

You can browse this entire historic document by clicking one of the thumbnails below.

Here you see a photo of kreteks, the kind of cloves everyone smokes in the USA. See them? They are cigarettes. But Kretek International is now suing the FDA to get them branded "Cigars," because, the WSJ points out, "The wrapper is homogenized leaf, the tobacco air-cured, and the finished product comes in boxes of 12, not 20."

Try this: Take a dozen clove cigarettes and put them in a box. Now look at them again. Have they magically been transformed into cigars? No? Damn it. Well, don't get too upset, hippies. Consider it part of your government-mandated path towards becoming Marlboro addicts. Hey, your lungs will thank you.

Oh. No they won't. But you won't smell like cloves at least.

Well actually you'll smell worse. But you won't be such a hippie.
[Pic via]