NY Lawyer With Sexxxy Side Business Suspended From Job

New York state Attorney General's Office lawyer Alisha Smith has been suspended without pay from her $78,825-per year post "pending an internal investigation," but probably because she's got a side job as Alisha Spark, heart-shaped pastied S&M performer extraordinaire. Or so the New York Post has learned!

It's not the pasties part of Smith's business that troubles her employer, say sources, but the potential profit-making aspect:

It is common in the S&M community for dominatrixes to receive payment for appearances at fetish parties, where they unleash tawdry torments on eager submissives.

Sources cited a standing executive order in the Attorney General's Office that requires employees to "obtain prior approval from the [Employment Conduct Committee] before engaging in any outside pursuit ... from which more than $1,000 will be received or is anticipated to be received."

So it seems that you can be a dominatrix-lawyer for the state of New York, as long as youvolunteer at the fetish parties. For all you budding lawyers out there, questions about this issue appear on the professional responsibility test.

One of the highlights of Smith's lawyering career is that she won a $5 billion securities fraud settlement from Bank of America three years ago. Do you think somebody on Wall Street wanted to get her into trouble for being too effective? Speculate in the comments.

Dinosaur Diversity: Feathers In Amber Reveal New Image Of What Dinosaurs Looked Like

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WASHINGTON -- In science fiction, amber preserved the DNA that allowed rebirth of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. In real life, amber preserved feathers that provide a new image of what dinosaurs looked like.

"Now, instead of scaly animals portrayed as usually drab creatures, we have solid evidence for a fluffy colored past," reports Mark A. Norell of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Examples of ancient feathers ranging from the simple to the complex are now being studied. They were preserved in amber found in western Canada, researchers led by Ryan C. McKellar of the University of Alberta report in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Amber, hardened tree resin, preserved a mixture of feathers from 70 million years ago. Other feathers contained in amber dating to 90 million years ago are less diverse.

Specimens include simple filament structures similar to the earliest feathers of non-flying dinosaurs – a form unknown in modern birds – and more complicated bird feathers "displaying pigmentation and adaptations for flight and diving," the researchers reported.

Indications of feathers have been found on much older fossils, and the new discoveries indicate feathers continued to develop into modern form before the extinction of dinosaurs, explained Norell, who was not part of the research team.

A separate report by Roy A. Wogelius of the University of Manchester, England, published online June 30 by Science, reports the finding of trace metals in feather fossils, suggesting their colors included black, brown and a reddish-brown.

"Despite many reports over the past decade of feathered dinosaurs and new birds from China, only now are we beginning to understand just how diverse feather types were" millions of years ago, Norell said.

Jennifer Aniston & Chaz Bono In High School Together (PHOTO)

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Who knew? Jennifer Aniston and Chaz Bono (then Chastity) went to high school together. Here they are in 1987 in the locker room at New York’s High School of Performing Arts. Now a contestant on 'Dancing With the Stars,' Chaz is battling intolerance with help from mom Cher.

See more photos of Chaz - from his past as a little girl growing up in the spotlight through his gender transition - at Snakkle.com.

Ron Suskind Book 'Confidence Men': Tim Geithner Ignored Obama Order On Banks

NEW YORK — A new book offering an insider's account of the White House's response to the financial crisis says that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Barack Obama calling for reconstruction of major banks.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind, the incident is just one of several in which Obama struggled with a divided group of advisers, some of whom he didn't initially consider for their high-profile roles. Suskind interviewed more than 200 people, including Obama, Geithner and other top officials for "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and The Education of A President," which will be released Sept. 20. The Associated Press purchased a copy on Thursday.

The book states Geithner and the Treasury Department ignored a March 2009 order to consider dissolving banking giant Citigroup while continuing stress tests on banks, which were burdened with toxic mortgage assets.

In the book, Obama does not deny Suskind's account, but does not reveal what he told Geithner when he found out. "Agitated may be too strong a word," Suskind quotes Obama as saying. Obama says later in the book that he was trying to be decisive but "the speed with which the bureaucracy could exercise my decision was slower than I wanted."

Geithner says in the book that he did not recall that Obama was mad at him about the Citigroup decision and rejected allegations contained in White House documents that his department had been slow to enact the president's plans.

"I don't slow walk the president on anything," Geithner told Suskind.

"The Citbank incident, and others like it, reflected a more pernicious and personal dilemma emerging from inside the administration: that the young president's authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers," Suskind writes.

Suskind states that Obama accepts the blame for mismanagement in his administration while noting that restructuring the financial system was complicated and could have resulted in deeper financial harm. One of the major complaints about Obama's administration is that it was too easy on major financial institutions, including Citi. The president had wanted Treasury officials to focus on a proposal to dissolve the bank, but no plan was ever created, the book states.

In a February 2011 interview with Suskind, Obama acknowledges another ongoing criticism – that he is too focused on policy and not on telling a larger story, one the public could relate to. Obama is quoted as saying he was elected in part because "he had connected our current predicaments with the broader arc of American history," but that such a "narrative thread" had been lost. Obama observes that he and fellow Democrats Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter "all have sort of the disease of being policy wonks."

Suskind's book supports other accounts of disagreement among advisers over how large a stimulus was necessary to revive the economy and how aggressively to deal with financial institutions that had become "too big to fail."

Larry Summers, the former White House economic adviser, is quoted as lamenting that he and others felt "home alone" and that mistakes made under Obama would not have happened under President Clinton, for whom Summers also served. Interviewed by Suskind, Summers initially denied making such comments, then acknowledged them, saying he was frustrated at having "five issues" of major importance to deal with at once and not "five times as many" officials to handle them.

The book says one of Obama's top advisers, former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, was not the president's first choice for the position. According to Suskind, Emanuel's name was not even on the initial short list, which included White House aide Pete Rouse.

An investigative reporter, Suskind won a Pulitzer Prize in 1995 while working for the Wall Street Journal.

His other books include "The Way of the World" (2008), which focused on national security, and "The Price of Loyalty" (2004). That best-seller was an account of the Bush administration and its first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, that includes what became a widely cited remark by then-Vice President Dick Cheney: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

Suskind's 1998 book, "A Hope Unseen," grew out of the series of articles that won him a Pulitzer for feature writing.

Other recent books about the Obama administration include Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars," which focused on foreign policy, and Jonathan Alter's "The Promise," which covered his first year in office.