30 Seconds to Court
Oct. 27 2008, Published 7:07 a.m. ET
OFF THE RECORD Leto • Jared Leto's blog war turns violent: Best Week Ever posts that blogger Scott Lapatine of Stereogum tried to interview tripod Jared Leto about his recently declared hatred of blogs. Leto's security guard snatched Lapatine's recorder and may have even broke his blog hand. Smells like ... lawsuit.
• OutFoxed: Voter approval for stem cell research jumped five percent following Parkinson's sufferer Michael J. Fox's moving ads supporting the research—and after pill-and-KFC addiction sufferer Rush Limbaugh's accusations (and subsequent apology) that Fox sexed up his shaking for dramatic effect.
• DoD needs a rule for this? The party's over for bottom-of-the-barrel U.S. contractors looking to make side bucks dealing in Middle Eastern mail-order brides and sex slaves. George W. Bush declared a "zero tolerance" policy on human trafficking in 2003, but the mandate didn't trickle down to the Defense Department's hired guns until today. It's especially bad news for groups representing Halliburton subsidiary KBR who argued against this rule in 2005, and for DynCorp, whose employees were linked to sex-slave trafficking in Bosnia in the '90s.
• Meanwhile: Rumsfeld tells critics demanding a U.S. pullout of Iraq to "back off."
• Law & Order ... & Fletch: In tomorrow's ripped-from-the-headlines episode of Law & Order, Chevy Chase plays a Jew-bashing, drunk-driving celebrity pulled over by the cops. "My character is clearly a bigot against the Jewish community. I've never said 'Jew' so much in my life, 'Jew cop,' 'Jew' this, 'Jew' that. That's the way it's come out, it's clearly related somewhat to the headlines," Chase says. In other words, he's Mel Gibson.
