LAW
• Ex-prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s new book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, which lays out a case that the president is “criminally responsible” for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq, has become a best seller with barely any publicity. [NYT]
• Ashley Alexandra Dupré dropped her $10 million lawsuit against Girls Gone Wild’s Joe Francis. [AP]
• Groups like New York’s Innocence Project, whose mission is to exonerate innocent criminals wrongly imprisoned, may find themselves the subject of a reality show. [USA Today]
FINANCE
• Hi there! Did you have a nice long weekend? Spend some of that stimulus check maybe? Too bad, because while you were away, the Fed revealed that taxpayers will pretty much be the ones who end up taking a hit on the securities they accepted as part of JP Morgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns. Nice [NYP]
• Ouch. Merrill Lynch may write down $6 billion in the second quarter, says a Citigroup analyst. [Reuters/NYT]
• Carl Ichahn dangles possibility of Microsoft interest, and leans heavy on the caps lock in his latest letter to Yahoo shareholders, in which he shouts that “IT IS TIME FOR A CHANGE.”PR Newswire via DealBook]
MEDIA
• NBC, with help from private equity backers like Blackstone and Bain Capital, bought the Weather Channel at a bargain-basement price of $3.5 billion. [NYT]
• WSJ editor Robert Thomson’s rendition of the Murdoch party line — “Journalists at The Wall Street Journal have the objective of being objective. At The New York Times, you have news with a skew. Or a skew with news.” — sends BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine into spasms. [BusinessWeek]
• Even in troubled times, ego propels billionaires to buy newspapers. [Crain’s]
REAL ESTATE
• And so it begins: the war of the Brooklyn boutique hotels. [Curbed]
• After a story about how all the parks in the city are filled with pimps, hos, and crack addicts, the Post tells us that the city is spending billions to make it all better. [NYP]
• Those people who live above you, their kids are making too much noise! [NYT]
