Wingnuts

(Newser) - No bad-boy or bad-girl celeb's resume is complete without a trashed hotel room, and Budget Travel has checked into 10 wrecked rooms: London's Sanderson hotel: Amy Winehouse and her husband did $18,000 in damage and left behind blood-splattered walls. Flint, Mich., Holiday Inn: Keith Moon instigated $24,000 worth of havoc before slipping on marzipan and knocking out his front teeth. More »

(Newser) - Rolling Stone has picked its top 100 songs of 2007, and they span the genres from country to disco. The top 10: "Roc Boys"—Jay Z "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"—Randy Newman "Umbrella"—Rihanna "D.A.N.C.E"—Justice "Four Winds"—Bright Eyes More »

(Newser) - Hard-partying singer and recent Grammy nominee Amy Winehouse added posting bail to her storied list of accomplishments today and was back on the streets only hours after London police charged her with "perverting justice," Sky News reports. The 24-year-old was arrested "by appointment" and is to return to court in March, said a Scotland Yard spokeswoman. More »

(Newser) - Not everyone burns down the office in retaliation over a lost stapler, a la Office Space's Milton, but some pretty strange stuff goes on at work. The weirdest occurrences of 2007, according to CNN: Worker eats 32 vending-machine items to win bet with co-workers (and $300 for charity). Pepsi worker attacks Coke worker in scuffle over Wal-Mart shelf space. Man robs Domino's deliverywoman, then calls to apologize—and ask her out. More »

(Newser) - Amy Winehouse’s career, writes James Hannaham for Slate , is just the sort of brilliant train wreck you’d think would get cut short by tragic rock 'n' roll death: With her considerable talent and public penchant for self-destruction, Winehouse evokes other music casualties such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix or Ian Curtis. More »

(Newser) - Troubled singer Amy Winehouse's mother has written an open letter to her hot mess of a daughter begging her to come home and get well. The letter, which appears in the London tabloid News of the World , was written shortly after Winehouse was photographed recently wandering the streets before dawn in jeans and a bra, mumbling incoherently. More »

(Newser) - Kanye West and Amy Winehouse lead the field in Grammy Award nominations, announced today. West scored eight nods, but only Winehouse and the Foo Fighters landed in both the record-of-the-year and album-of-the-year categories, AP reports. It's been a tough go lately for West and Winehouse (six nominations): The rapper's mother died Nov. 10 after plastic surgery; Winehouse and her husband have had legal issues. More »

(Newser) - Walking disaster Amy Winehouse canceled all remaining tour dates for the rest of the year, for what her label is calling "health issues." The singer says she can't perform while husband Blake Fielder-Civil is in prison. "I can't give it my all without my Blake," she said. "I don't want to do the shows half-heartedly; I love singing." More »

(Newser) - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday offered to oversee the 2008 US presidential elections, saying he’s convinced that, given a free poll, Americans won’t re-elect George W. Bush. That Bush isn’t constitutionally allowed to run seemed lost on the Iranian president—as was the irony that his own government opposes independent observation of elections, the Guardian reports. More »

(Newser) - Ron Paul found himself on the respectable side of a brothel last week, when the Republican presidential hopeful earned the endorsement of the owner of Reno's Moonlite BunnyRanch. MSNBC anchor Tucker Carlson surprised Paul by engineering the nod, arriving in a limousine with Dennis Hof and two “celebrity prostitutes,” the Reno Gazette-Journal reports. More »

(Newser) - A British MP tendered his resignation to the Oxford Union yesterday in protest of the debating society’s invitation to Holocaust denier David Irving and anti-immigration leader Nick Griffin to speak tonight, reports the Telegraph . Julian Lewis, the Conservative Party’s shadow defense minister, said he was “ashamed” of the decision by the students, who voted 1,062 to 640 to hear the speakers. More »

(Newser) - Today's creationist geologists are not who the secular may think. Numerous and thriving, many hold advanced degrees from top universities, and are making evangelicals more open to scientific evidence. And they are experts for the nearly half of Americans who believe God created the Earth in the last 10,000 years, the New York Times reports. More »

(Newser) - Blake Fielder-Civil, husband of British singer Amy Winehouse, was arrested yesterday for allegedly trying to fix the results of a forthcoming assault trial. Fielder-Civil and an other man reportedly offered $400,000 to the victim, a bartender who alleges Fielder-Civil attacked him at a pub. The maximum penalty for perverting the course of justice is life imprisonment, the London Times reports. More »

(Newser) - Freshly minted Nobel laureate Doris Lessing said the 9/11 terrorist assault on the World Trade Center “wasn’t that terrible” in comparison to violence wreaked by the IRA in Britain. "Some Americans will think I'm crazy," she said in an interview in Spanish daily El Pais . "Many people died, two prominent buildings fell, but it was neither as terrible nor as extraordinary as they think. They're a very naive people, or they pretend to be."  More »

(Newser) - Amy Winehouse was busted with 7 grams of marijuana in her hotel room, but the Norwegian police didn't make the addled chanteuse go to rehab—they just held her overnight, fined her $714, and released her this morning, the BBC reports. "She's paid the fine, so this thing is over for us now," said the prosecutor. More »

(Newser) - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appeared today at Columbia University, where the school’s president called the Iranian president “a petty and cruel dictator” and excoriated him for his human rights rap sheet, Holocaust denial—which Lee Bollinger called "simply ridiculous"—and nuclear ambitions. The visitor smiled as Bollinger spoke, then called the speech “an insult to information,” the AP reports. More »

(Newser) - Britney Spears' meteoric rise, suspect marriages, bad parenting, outrageous public behavior, not to mention her spectacular VMA flub—it's better than watching a train wreck, but we've seen this implosion before. The LA Times studies the pop princess' antics and finds an eerie resemblance to the fall of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson. More »

(Newser) - The continuing drama surrounding "Rehab" singer Amy Winehouse took a bizarre new turn this morning when her in-laws, in an plea broadcast on the BBC, begged fans not to buy her records. Her husband's parents called for a boycott to force the couple into rehab, the Guardian reports. "One of them, if not both of them, eventually will die," they said. More »

(Newser) - Another overseas import has been held up due to a high level of suspicious substances -- Amy Winehouse has canceled her U.S. tour to address her "health problems." A publicist's statement made n