Russian billionaires: they're powerful, they're flush with profits from semi-monopolized industrial concerns, and they're ready to party. So they think nothing of paying outrageous sums to international pop stars to come play private parties for them and their closest friends. The most recent example is poor drug-addled soul singer Amy Winehouse, who will be pocketing a cool $2 million to play a show for the girlfriend of billionaire politician and businessman Roman Abramovich. All $2 million of which will surely be spent to further Winehouse's ongoing demise. The point is, she's not the only superstar who's been seduced by a gig like this. Soon you won't be able to see anyone from Madonna to Rihanna without a plane ticket to Moscow and tight connections to the vestiges of the Kremlin's power structure. It's a trend!

• Russell Simmons lost $15,000 worth of jewelry last Saturday after an employee left a suitcase full of his bling in the hallway of a Bleecker Street apartment building for 30 minutes. The mogul's reps deny the jewels were even his—they say the stolen merch belonged to the employee—but either way, the NYPD is on the case. [Page Six]

Coming in at number two right after Lesbian Chic on the list of 2008's hottest celebrity trends is the slim fast phenomenon sweeping the pounds off Catherine Zeta-Jones' ass, Britney Spears' arms, and pretty much every inch of co-starvation partners Katie Holmes and Victoria Beckham. But of course, when Queen of Female Mind Control Oprah Winfrey puts in her two cents on the dieting front, every housewife and Oprah wannabe begins taking dutiful notes on how exactly she'll take a few pounds off this time around. And according to a piece in the NY Daily News, Detox is the word. From Gwyneth and Beyonce to Ralph Fiennes and Vince Vaughn, these four varieties of temporary "cleansing" yourself are the current diet du jour. And of course, the question is: does it work? And more importantly, is giving up our nightly vino and succumbing to regular colonics worth looking like a lollipop head? Which celebrities are using which method, and visual evidence of their results, if any, after the jump.

Time to mark your calendars: Lynne Spears, mother of Britney and Jamie Lynn, has an official September release date for her memoir about raising two of the world’s most tabloid-friendly children, Through The Storm: A Real Story About Family And Fame In A Tabloid World. In the book, Spears will supposedly take the Dina Lohan route and disguise motherly resentment as motherly love and “express her love for her children and tell their stories through a mother's eyes,” according to the publisher, who specializes in “inspirational books and Bibles.” But how rosy and cozy can the tome’s description of family life be with a title referring to said life as a “storm”? And given the nature of celebrity family members' tell-alls in the past, coupled with the assurance that this will not be “a parenting book,” we certainly hope Lynne follows in the footsteps of Nancy Aniston and Virgie Arthur by revealing a bit more dirt than the rote "Britney And Jamie Lynn Were Perfect Angels" tales (given the fact that they’re, um, not these days). We took a closer look at five of the most trash-talking tell-alls from stars’ estranged and/or envious relatives to whet our appetite in the meantime:

Because the music industry is an even worse place to invest your money than the newspaper industry at the moment, everyone is looking for the next big thing. The closest they've come is "360 deals," where artists get a huge check in return for a big cut of all their different revenue streams. First, Madonna signed a contract like this with Live Nation for $120 million. Then Jay-Z signed a contract with Live Nation for $150 million. Live Nation wants to sign 15 more artists to contracts like this. Then everybody else in music can quietly retire. Hope you like the Jonas Brothers a lot!

• Madonna's estranged brother Christopher Ciccone is writing a tell-all book about his sis, and it's supposed to be extremely graphic and "devastating." [Page Six]

Simon & Schuster is printing 350,000 copies of a book by Madonna's brother Christopher Ciccone, to be rushed onto store shelves next month before the singer's lawyers can sue to block publication. The book is said by the Post's sources to be "brutal" and "extremely graphic and devastating," which normally would sound like publisher hype, except in this case the tabloid seems to be in a catfight with Simon & Schuster over a spoiled exclusive so that seems doubtful. Once Madonna's rock of stability, Ciccone was estranged from the pop star around the time Madonna met husband Guy Richie, who doesn't like gays. Or maybe Ciccone just hates his sister so much that he wants people to think Richie hates gays, so Madonna's gay fans will jump ship (Richie has denied being homophobic). Whatever. The important thing is that the public will finally learn some intimate details about Madonna, poster child for discretion and underexposure. [Post]

• Is it really over between Madonna and Guy Ritchie? Madge has apparently hired England's toughest divorce lawyer, Nicholas Mostyn—the same guy who handled Paul McCartney's split with Heather Mills—so the answer looks like yes. [Holy Moly!]

Apparently Justin Timberlake and Madonna’s time spent collaborating in the studio was far from the sexy joy ride in needle park we originally envisioned. As Timberlake tells the altar-bound Ellen in this clip, the pair actually spent most of their time butting their beautiful heads over song lyrics. As surprised as we were to learn that either one of them actually writes their own lyrics in the first place, we were just as unsurprised by Timberlake’s continuous failed attempts to prove how funny he can be without cue cards. Sounding both desperate for a laugh and downright mean for daring to put down the vocally challenged but still iconic Madonna, we think the trouser snake should give up his comedy routine schtick for good.

• Jennifer Aniston and boyfriend John Mayer got into a hotel pool in Miami, and there were pictures, and everyone found this very exciting for some reason. The Sun went above and beyond, as usual, with shots of the two parts of the actress' body any experienced reader of the British tabloid would expect it to focus on. (Photo from X17)

What's the word on the street these days? "Word on the street is that Brian Anthony is also fighting hard to open for Madonna on her upcoming "Hard Candy" tour." This Brian Anthony, who is some type of music maker, did a mashup of his music with Madonna's and put it on his Myspace page. Now, "The 'Worked Up!' mash-up is being passed around the Madonna camp and the buzz is BIG on it." How can we be so sure? Because we got the information firsthand, in a hilariously inept press release from Jim Strzalkowski, fantabulous PR man—and fan—to the D-list stars!

Casual nudity enthusiast Sienna Miller became an official card-carrying member of that elite group of celebrities who unleash their hate of paparazzi by way of physical assault. As the Daily Mail reports, Miller swung her pricey purse at one pap's face yesterday at LAX, possibly because he was a resident of Pittsburgh, or maybe she simply mistook him for Jude Law (as the pictures show, there is a resemblance to the nanny-loving baldie). But Sienna's moment of outrage prompted us to recall our all-time favorite When Celebrities Attack moments in time, from Woody Harrelson's caught-on-tape choke-hold to Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz's romantically executed freakout years ago. Our five top picks after the jump:

Madonna can pretty much do whatever she wants at this point and the world will shrug its shoulders, whether she's assaulting Justin Timberlake with needles or spreading her soon-to-be-50-year old legs on album covers. But the vocally-challenged icon has taken her recent trip down memory lane as a pansexual nympho to new heights by inviting a female fan on stage during her concert last night and pulling a repeat performance of Madonna And Britney Spit Swap. Why? As she put it, "Why do I have this relationship with France? I'm always drawn to working with French people - and frenching French people...Vive la France!" A closer look at the kiss step by step, plus suddenly gorgeous daughter Lourdes' reaction, after the jump.

Celebrities: a bunch of hypocrites! They all pay lip service to environmental issues like global warming. But most of them are heavy private jet users. They also engage in a smorgasboard of other environmental sins, from investing in oil companies (Madonna) to wasting water by demanding 120 bath towels at each appearance (Barbra Streisand) to various other transgressions you can read about here. But it's primarily the globetrotting use of gas-guzzling private planes that make their frequent entreaties to save the earth seem empty. So we're polling you, our readers, who have some of the most finely tuned hypocrisy detectors in the world: Which of these six "green" stars is the biggest environmental hypocrite? Cast your vote after the jump.

Clearly inspired by the much-vaunted free Madonna show at an "intimate" 2,000-capacity theater last night, the New York Times review got a little wild, describing her fans as "screamy" and quoting a 28-year-old about her look for the evening: "stewardess-Madonna-tricky-tranny." The show was only thirty minutes long; one Madonnagay told the Times that "Gays don't camp out [for tickets], but we'll camp out for this." (Only Madonna can overturn the gays' longtime anti-camping law.) When the aging pop star took the stage,"the room roared with 'Omigods.'" [NYT]

[Madonna, a 50 year old woman, and Justin Timberlake in concert at New York City's Roseland Ballroom last night; image via INF]

• Tyra Banks ended the Miley Cyrus controversy, issuing the following fatwa on The View: "She is a 15-year-old, and I just wish everybody would leave her alone!" Follow this edict or Tyra will claw your eyes out, then stab you, then set you on fire, all using only her tightly-controlled stare of rage. [Showbiz Spy]

A reader concisely reviews Madonna's new album: "If you haven't heard Madonna's new album (which dropped today) I cannot express to you how awful it is. It sounds like a tranny got to let loose with the help of her Casio. Usually there are a few decent tracks on her albums. The last one was bad, but had a few good ones. This is a new level of pitful [sic] for Madonna. This puts 'Swept Away' to shame."

Reading socialite Emily Brill's blog feels a lot like being her free therapist. One minute she declares her love for you, another she's lashing out. You listen to her narcissistic hyperbole, her daddy issues, her body issues. And, tonight, you watch a 40-minute music video set to the Madonna song "Ray of Light," with Brill belting out the lyrics herself, and read about how "This is a video about resurrection. Or maybe even feeling fully alive for the first time." The video, like Brill's other moments, is as hard to look away from as it is tedious, particularly if you've never been a media mogul's disaffected daughter. The actual moving pictures part runs roughly six minutes; the rest of the video is silence interspersed with Brill and Madonna singing, sort of a hidden track for the YouTube era, I guess. Watch it after the jump.

Until now, most onlookers have been noting just how much little Lourdes Ciccone Leon looks like her mother, the vitamin-injecting, leg-spreading Madonna. And while she does have her mom's naturally dark hair and piercing eyes, we think the 12-year old mini-Madge looks much more like another pillow-lipped celebrity you may have heard of. Particularly when we place Lourdes' current visage next to the star-in-question's glamour shots when she was just a teenager herself: