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Did Anna Nicole buy her Bahamian citizenship?

Accusations are flying in the Bahamas that Anna Nicole Smith’s application for citizenship was moved to the top of a long list after her $10,000 check was delivered to the personal home of the  immigration minister.
/ Source: msnbc.com

Did Anna Nicole Smith's cash help her get citizenship in the Bahamas?

The “fast-tracking” of Smith’s residency in the island nation has caused a political uproar there, with accusations being hurled that Smith’s application for citizenship was moved to the top of a long list after her $10,000 check was delivered to the personal home of the Bahamas' immigration minister, Shane Gibson.

Photographer Larry Birkhead — who claims that he’s the father of Smith’s newly-born daughter — recently told MSNBC’s Rita Cosby that Smith fled to the Bahamas “to avoid any talks of custody and visitation.”

Calling the approval of Smith’s residency a “sordid affair,” the Bahaman Free National Movement alleges that Smith was given residency in a stunningly short three weeks. But Minister Gibson calls his critics “dishonest” and “disingenuous,” and insists that Smith’s residency took three months.

“Now granted this one was done very quickly,” he told The Bahama Journal. “We did our research. It’s not the first time.” He cited the case of a wealthy Czech financier from 1995, whose application was processed in just over two months. When asked if he had visited Smith in the hospital after the death of her son, Minister Gibson refused to comment.

Parody no laughing matter to execsBosses at Atlantic records put the kibosh on Weird Al Yankovic’s send-up of James Blunt’s runaway hit “You’re Beautiful.”

Yankovic says he actually got permission from Blunt to sing the parody “You’re Pitiful” — but the suits at Blunt’s label wouldn’t hear of it.

“It was originally supposed to be the lead single on [his new album] ‘Straight Outta Lynwood’,” Yankovic told Ain’tItCoolNews.com. “James had given it his blessing and we had a release date set, and then his label found out about it and told me that I couldn’t release the parody on my album under any circumstances. Now, I always respect the wishes of artists, but since it was just a bunch of suits — who were going against their own artist’s wishes, mind you — I had no problem offering the song as a free download on weirdal.com. It was a viral worldwide hit within a few days.”

Notes from all over
Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham
and her pal Katie Holmes have taken a gals-only shopping spree in Paris for Fashion Week, reports the London Mirror. ... “Too Good to Be True” — the sequel to Madonna’s best-selling kiddie book “The English Roses” — will be “an insightful tale about the joys and difficulties of experiencing one’s first crush,” according to the publisher. ... Clay Aiken might be singing the blues after he read Rolling Stone’s one-star review of his new album. “Like flunking out of a junior college, making an album this soul-suckingly awful must have taken some hard work,” the mag opines of Aiken’s “A Thousand Different Ways,” and then goes on to say it sounds like “the worst episode of ‘American Idol’ ever.”

Jeannette Walls Delivers the Scoop Mondays through Thursdays on MSNBC.com