The former TOWIE star left very little to the imagination in the all-in-one, which featured a spattering of gems over her cleavage and hips.

She is one of the more diminutive members of the Spice Girls standing at just 5ft 1in in her stockinged feet.

The 28-year-old actor and his wife Elsa Pataky ventured out for a walk today but rather than push a pram, the Australian star kept his baby daughter close to him by holding her in his arms.

The 31-year-old reality star has confirmed the rapper will be appearing on the new season of Keeping up with the Kardashians.

In full character as the Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen was seen brandishing a machine gun as he stood on the helm of a stunning boat as it pulled into the dock outside the lavish Eden Roc hotel.

Elizabeth Hurley is not a woman who takes heed when she is told what to do.

The 29-year-old star arrived at a Marie Curie fundraiser last night wearing what looked like a stunning bridal gown.

Less than three weeks after Simon Cowell’s secret relationship with Dannii Minogue was revealed, he has asked her to take her old job back as an X Factor judge.

When Rafe Spall won the leading man role opposite Bridesmaids star Rose Byrne he wanted to look the part - getting a new trim look so 'audiences would believe' his co-star would fancy him.

Business Insider put together a list of facts about how Americans are ridiculously overworked and it's kind of depressing. It offers reasons the problem exists, but not much on how to fix. If you're working too much, here are a few solutions to common symptoms of the problem. More »

Millennial Branding and Experience Inc. surveyed 225 employers to find out what's most important to them when they hire students or others for entry-level jobs. "Soft skills" like communication and teamwork were ranked even higher than education, and almost all employers said students should have at least one internship before they graduate. More »

Dear Lifehacker, More »

Your education doesn't have to stop once you get out of school—being free of the classroom just means you have more control over what you learn and when you learn it. We've put together a curriculum of some of the best free online classes available on the web this summer for our second term of Lifehacker U, our regularly-updating guide to improving your life with free, online college-level classes. Let's get started. More »

It doesn't matter how clean you think you are, your stuff is bound to get a little stinky once and a while. That means your clothes, shoes, carpets, couches, and who knows what else. So, what's the best way to handle the stench? Let's take a look. More »

A good carabiner or s-biner makes a great keychain—it can clip to your belt or your bag so you never lose it, and you can keep more than one ring of keys on it if you have to. Plus, it hangs up nicely on hooks or magnetic holders with no fuss. Evem so, Instructables user elplatt lost a keyfob from one because the carabiner latch came open one day. Committed to never let that happen again, he grabbed some heat shrink tubing, a heat gun, and went to work. More »

If the life of a power user teaches you anything, it's that some of the best apps and tools don't always stand the test of time. Let's pour one out for some of those dearly departed. More »

We've shown you four different ways to tie a tie, but if you're really looking to step up your game, this method delivers a sharp-looking tie with serious speed. More »

Amazon is often our go-to place for buying things online, but the best deals aren't always obvious. There are several ways you can save quite a bit of money when shopping on Amazon, but only if you utilize the right programs and strategies. Here's how. More »

By Abigail Caplovitz Field, a freelance writer and attorney. Cross posted from Reality Check Jamie Dimon, John Stumpf, and to a lesser extent, Vikram Pandit and Bryan Moynihan, are running massive hedge funds. They're placing enormous, incredibly risky bets.

As regular readers no doubt recall, Eric Schneiderman abandoned the dissident state attorney general effort to get a better mortgage settlement, assuring the Administration a win on this sellout to the banks. The bright shiny prize Schneiderman got in return for his betrayal was serving as one of five co-chairmen on a Federal mortgage task force, which appears to have gotten close to nada in resources beyond the staff in various Federal agencies who were already working on mortgage investigations. And given that were are now close to a full five years past the origination of toxic subprime deals, those existing investigations don't exactly look to have been pursued with much in the way of vigor.

Paul Krugman's partisanship has become so shameless that we are giving him the inaugural Eric Schneiderman Decoy Award for his post "Things Fall Apart". The Schneiderman Decoy Award goes for exceptional achievement in turning one's good name over to particularly rancid Obama Administration initiatives.

Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground. Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale.

We've featured past Real News Network segments on the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. UNCTAD has increasingly become a forum for struggles between advanced economies and developing economies over what the rules of the road should be in trade. UNCTAD was early to call the benefits of financialization into question, and has also been taking issue with the comparatively small take countries in the "south" get from extended supply chain production. This, needless to say, is a vision that is a direct challenge to how multinational like to conduct their affairs, so it should be no surprise that the big, rich countries are trying to bring UNCTAD to heel.

Even with all the focus on JP Morgan's loss bomb in the past few days, some critical elements of the story have not gotten the scrutiny they deserve, and Amar Bhide fills those gaps.

It has come to our attention that an article by Tom Ferguson, the political scientist who is generally recognized as the expert on the role of money in American politics, had an article posted on TPM's website on April 17, 2008, which appears to have been removed from the site.

New Fame Game: Leveraging Status to Invest in Hot Deals

The presumptive GOP nominee has diversified far past Bain Capital. From hedge funds to his kids' $100 million trust, Forbes reveals the most definitive valuation of the man who would be the richest president ever.

After spending nothing but time on Facebook, I've attracted over 100K followers. After spending $40 million per year on its Facebook presence, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, General Motors has attracted just 378K fans to its primary page. While it does have dozens of other car-related Facebook pages which have also attracted 'likes,' that's fairly depressing and is perhaps part of the reason that the company wants to cut back on its Facebook spending.

Jonathan Kirk Davis, Veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps

This evening, my colleagues and I published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that established that the FDA is approves drugs faster than its counterparts in Europe and Canada. Based on a careful review of applications for novel therapeutic agents approved from 2001 through 2010, we found that the FDA was almost two months faster than the European Medicines Agency and Health Canada. Moreover, the majority of the agents that we evaluated were approved first in the United States.

Investors are prone to making irrational decisions. The simple truth is that what feels good, or what satisfies an immediate impulse, is not always compatible with generating positive, long-term returns.

The art of negotiation.

Facebook -- expected to launch its IPO this week -- is speculated to have a valuation of $96 billion. With the company earning $200 million in their last quarter or $800 annualized, this means their valuation is more than 100 times their earnings. When Facebook acquired Instagram, the numbers raised some eyebrows -- but what many failed to notice was that most of the acquisition price that Facebook paid for Instagram was actually in Facebook stock. According to an S-1 filing, the company is paying $300 million in cash, and the rest in stock. Therefore, the real risk to Facebook is small, relative to the amount of users and the valuable photo platform gained.

Mario Lopez is best known for his character A.C. Slater on the classic hit TV show Saved By The Bell. He was in the third season of Dancing with the Stars and is a celebrity guest host for the syndicated entertainment news magazine show Extra. In addition, he is the host of Americas Best Dance Crew on MTV. He is the author of Mario Lopez Knockout Fitness, Extra Lean, and Extra Lean Family. In this interview, I ask Mario about how he first got involved in the entertainment industry, what some of his experiences have been, his obstacles and future projects he's involved in.

Hysteria is Jane Austen with a vibrator—a movie about the invention of the scandalous electro-mechanical device that changed women’s lives forever. Set in the Victorian era of scientific ignorance and cultural Puritanism, its style is still more Restoration comedy than Victorian decadence—postcolonial feminism with a temperament more Austen than Bronte. Nothing to snicker about here. Considering the subject, ripe with titillating possibilities, it’s surprisingly about as sexy as a week-old meat loaf. Tastefully directed by Tanya Wexler, it is a total joy from start to finish.

At the pinnacle of Victorian prudishness, when ignorance and disease were the order of the day, rusty surgical tools were prevalent and bleeding with leeches was a popular treatment for everything from gout to gonorrhea. Hysteria was the term used to diagnose nervous conditions in women suffering every sexual disorder from frigidity to an overstimulated uterus. This is the true story of Dr. Mortimer Granville (played by the charming Hugh Dancy), a progressive doctor devoted to advancing the suppressed sexual pleasure of women, enriched with witty dialogue, elegant production values and an intelligent screenplay that expands the historical canvas of life in London to include class prejudices as well as social hypocrisy. Disillusioned with the medieval practice of medicine in an England of chaos (this is also the year of Jack the Ripper and the Elephant Man), Dr. Granville was ready to denounce his Hippocratic Oath when he found employment as an assistant to Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), an elderly “specialist” experimenting with the treatment of housewives with sex problems and a foremost expert on the subject of “hysteria.” Eschewing warm baths and horseback riding in favor of vaginal massages, his business was already booming. But when the younger, more appealing Dr. Granville develops his own brand of manual finger manipulation, eager patients filled the waiting room with renewed reason to come out of their corsets. What nobody ever thought possible was the mysterious fact that all of these stressed-out women were experiencing something nobody had considered: They were just plain horny!

The result was heaven for the patients, but hell on the doctor’s hand. Suffering from severe cramps and nerve spasms that required the use of a cast, the good doctor turned to a goofy prissy-pot friend with a passion for gadgets named Edmund St. John-Smythe (a hilarious Rupert Everett) to invent a motor-driven stimulus that could be applied to a woman’s lower anatomy without overtaxing the wrist and fingers. The result was nothing short of a revolution. In the plot trajectory, Dr. Granville also attracted the attention of the elderly Dr. Dalrymple’s two daughters: placid, proper, obedient and favorite daughter Emily (Felicity Jones) and headstrong, outspoken Charlotte (a marvelous Maggie Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who disgraces her father by running a settlement house for the impoverished prostitutes of the East End slums. There is evidence galore that the vibrator contributed to the sexual independence of enlightened free-thinkers in the future of liberated women everywhere. Muffled praise of the vibrator eventually gave way to cries of “Heigh-ho, the dildo!”

Instead of provocative prurience, Hysteria brims over with humor and sweetness. Far from dogmatic, it is agreeable, lyrical, carefully scripted and acted with great feeling by an exemplary cast. The film is also an eye-opening footnote to history as it depicts a time so backward that women with libido challenges were declared insane and sent to asylums or punished by court-ordered hysterectomies. Don’t miss the closing credits, displaying a wonderful collection of museum-quality illustrations of changing styles and designs from the mid-19th century to the ugly plastic drug store models of today. The liberating vibrator may have started out in Victorian England, but eventually made it to the Sears Roebuck catalogue and, in the final and funniest scene in the picture, even Buckingham Palace. A clever, quick-witted, informed and terrific movie!

rreed@observer.com

HYSTERIA
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer
Directed by Tanya Wexler
Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy and Jonathan Pryce

Rhys Chatham, the legendary guitar player and former musical director at The Kitchen, will be performing at Postmasters Gallery with performance artist GH Hovagimyan at the gallery on June 24. The news comes from a Tweet by Magdalena Sawon, Postmasters owner and co-director.
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Who among us has not dreamed of one day owning a life-sized Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, like the one in the lobby of Jurassic Park that eventually gets destroyed when the real T-rex does battle with the raptors? Next to owning an actual dinosaur, a dinosaur skeleton is the next best thing, especially since it can't turn against you and eat all your loved ones.

Unfortunately, The Natural History Museum has a nasty habit of buying up all the dinosaur bones and keeping them out of the hands of private owners, so they can charge their exorbitant museum fees and not let you even touch the 70-year-old fossils. Lame.

But that will all change this Sunday, thanks to the best auction item in the history of New York: an 8-foot tall, 24-feet wide Tyrannosaurus bataar.

The 70-80% complete specimen will be sold to the highest bidder during the Natural History & Fine Minerals Signature Auction (facilitated by Heritage Auctions). The live auction will take place May 20th, 12 p.m. CT, at 548 W. 22nd St. It is the first Tyrannosaurus skeleton to be auctioned since 1997, when dino "Sue" sold for $8.7 million. You can currently place bids for the T-bataar online, where the reserve amount begins at $875,000.

The lot description is pretty amazing:

This is an incredible, complete skeleton, painstakingly excavated and prepared, and mounted in a dramatic, forward-leaning running pose. The quality of preservation is superb, with wonderful bone texture and delightfully mottled grayish bone color. In striking contrast are those deadly teeth, long and frightfully robust, in a warm woody brown color, the fearsome, bristling mouth and monstrous jaws leaving one in no doubt as to how the creature came to rule its food chain. Equally deadly and impressive are the large curving claws, with pronounced blood grooves. The body is 75% complete and the skull 80%, and it is mounted on a discreet gray-painted armature. Measuring 24 feet in length and standing 8 feet high, it is a stupendous, museum-quality specimen of one of the most emblematic dinosaurs ever to have stalked this Earth. Bone map and restoration details available upon request. Estimate: $950,000 - $1,500,000.

Equally dead and impressive, like Johnny Depp in Dark Shadows! We can feel our bidding finger itching.

If you can't afford the hefty price-tag, check out some of the Natural History's other lots, which include a Dodo bird skeleton cast (bidding currently at $4,250), a full-scale taxidermy tableau of a lion eating a warthog (reserve amount at $11,000), or a giant swordfish rostrum (current bid at $900).

After they came after our hummus, it was only a time before they came for our mobile app engineers.

Anti-Israeli groups set on depriving New York of two of its most important commodities have moved on from the dowdy old Park Slope Food Co-op to the shiny new Roosevelt Island tech campus. What do both have in common? A commitment to the environment and Israeli imports. Curbed has spotted a new group, New Yorkers Against Cornell-Technion, dead set on stopping the new tech campus, Mayor Bloomberg's biggest achievement since the smoking ban, because of the affiliations of Cornell's lesser-known (on these shores) partner.

According to the New Yorkers Against Cornell-Technion's website, Technion is complicit in every nefarious Israeli deed from the settlements to circumcision.

What the public was not told is that The Technion is complicit in Israel’s violations of international law and the rights of Palestinians, specifically by designing military weapons and developing technologies that are used to drive Palestinians off their land, repress demonstrations for their rights, and carry out attacks against people in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere.  For these reasons, The Technion is directly implicated in war crimes.

Furthermore, The Technion practices institutional discrimination against Palestinian students by severely restricting their freedom of speech and assembly, and rewarding Jewish students who, unlike Palestinians, perform compulsory military service in Israel.  This is in direct contrast to Cornell University’s founding values of universalism and inclusion embodied in the university’s motto “any person any study”.  Any collaboration with The Technion makes a university likewise complicit.

Emphasis theirs, and while there is no mention of circumcision, Alan Dershowitz would agree that that cannot be far off.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

We direct your attention to the New Yorker, where Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has told the magazine's classical music critic Alex Ross about her favorite records. Bow howdy is there some good music here (it's all opera, so stop reading if you don't care about that).

Some selections including Verdi's Otello, Dvořák's Rusalka, Eugene Onegin by Tchaikovsky and The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky.

Listen, this isn't exactly news, but it's not every day you hear someone say their favorite opera is Otello. Good enough for us! The full list is here.

 

The New York City corner bodegas that dot every other corner of our fair metropolis are, as it stands, de facto sex shops. There, among the groceries, one can find beer (for courage), a wide selection of three-pack condoms (for birth control and protection from sexually transmitted diseases), sexual lubricants (for sexual lubrication), all stripes of "supplements" promising to enhance one's sexual prowess (which suspiciously have yet to be banned by Chuck Schumer), cigarettes (post-coital smoking),feral cats (to scare unwanted sleepovers away), pornographic magazines (for people who...don't have the internet?), and water (for hydration!).

Now, in keeping with the times, they are apparently adding one more item to the cornucopia of sexually-enabling wares they already offer:

Fifty Shades of Grey.

Yes, the bestselling novel ostensibly with some kind of plot but most significantly with characters engaging in bestselling BDSM sex within its pages that have enraptured and titillated so many Americans horny suburbanites and overwrought newspaper columnists already is, at least in one bodega, as crucial to their supply as a box of Mallowmars in December.

Writer and founding editor of Jezebel.com Anna Holmes Tweeted out "There are now bodegas in NYC selling 'Fifty Shades of Grey'" with the following photographic evidence:

To be fair, the top books are Fifty Shades Freed, one of the titles in the Fifty Shades series. And it's only one bodega! That said, the bodega industry operates much like the collective consciousness, which is to say: Once an idea's out there, they're all on it. Like selling K-2, or whatever the latest fake synthetic drug is. Which also goes without mentioning they all use a bunch of the same suppliers.

Seeing a bodega stock a popular book isn't uncommon: When the last few Harry Potter books came out, not a few bodegas snatched some copies and marked them up in exchange for the convenience of having them around for their neighborhood regulars. But copies of Fifty Shades, while selling well, aren't inducing bookstore-raiding pandemonium. But it apparently has enough of a draw to appear on a bodega register. And if there's one constant among all of New York City's bodegas and the unique, unlikely items they sometimes sell, it's that someone will always buy it.*

Regardless, for whatever the milestone "A Book Carried by New York City Bodegas" is worth, Fifty Shades of Grey has finally reached it. Duly noted.

[*Exception: The cat. Nobody ever pays for boedga cats. If you've ever paid for a bodega cat, you have been despicably hosed.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek/

David Einhorn, everyone's favorite short seller (well, not everyone), said he was shorting Martin Marietta Materials at the Ira Sohn Conference today, and the producer of construction materials promptly dropped 8.3 percent. Over at the other end of the Nasdaq, Herbalife surged, presumably on news that Mr. Einhorn had not presented an argument for shorting the nutritional supplement maker.

Herbalife, you'll remember, is the company that lost nearly one quarter of its value two weeks ago after Mr. Einhorn asked executives some questions about the company's business model on an investors' conference call.

Seriously folks, this seems a bit ridiculous. The guy isn't always right. Steve Ballmer is still running Microsoft. The Wilpons are still ruining the Mets.

UPDATE: Herbalife had gained 17 percent when markets closed, which, you know, Mr. Einhorn never said he wasn't shorting the stock.

[Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images]

The wonderfully grimy Lower East Side bar White Slab Palace, a kind of art world hub and site of the short-lived exhibition space The Slab, will be replaced this weekend by a new restaurant called the Gray Lady, Bowery Boogie reports.
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Real estate investor David Werner is buying the upper portion of the Woolworth Building for a reported $70 million.

Mr. Werner, a Brooklyn-based buyer, has made several notable acquisitions in the recent past. Last November he entered into contract to purchase the prominent Long Island City skyscraper 1 Court Square, a 700,000-square-foot office tower largely occupied by Citibank, for a little under $500 million from SL Green.

Reached in his office, Mr. Werner said he couldn’t speak until the contract for the deal for Woolworth’s space closes in about 10 days.
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