Some choice quotes from the issue, out Wednesday:

Losing weight to play a terminally ill woman who falls for her doctor has been rough, because Kate can't have cocktails: "And I love my glass of wine. I love tequila. To be in New York for two weeks and not have one beverage! I'm not sure I've ever done that."

The interviewer asks her what she weighs, which is kind of rude, but Kate says: "I'm pretty solid, actually. I'm not, like, 110lbs. But I'm probably heading towards that." (The Elle writer notes that her arms are very toned and "Her jeans are tight and she looks amazing from behind.")

Moving from the body to her skin: It's her face and she'll freeze it if she wants to:

"I was in a press conference once, and someone says, 'So, I can tell you've never had Botox!' Is that a compliment? Or are you trying to say I'm starting to get wrinkles? I literally was like, 'What?' Everyone's so obsessed with who gets Botox, but it's great! Are you kidding? The fact that women can avoid going under the knife, and get a little Botox treat and not have to worry about it? I'm glad it's there for when it's time."

On boys:

"I sometimes feel like when you're talking to boys, they just hear certain keywords… But if you had a bubble above their head, they'd be thinking about game scores, masturbation and food."

And:

"I love boys… but I believe they're really simple. Every guy likes to say that they're complicated, but they're so easy to figure out. What did that Dr Laura say? Something like, 'All men want is sex and for you to make them a sandwich.' I thought that was really funny – and not entirely untrue."

On being a female:

"I love being a girl. I love clothes and I love the rituals of facials and body treatments, all the stuff girls get, make-up, scarves, hats. And we're like a tribe. That's just our nature. You get a group of women together and, somehow, we keep it together. I love that we can be that powerful, as a group. Men, you know, it's survival of the fittest."

Lastly, she says of bloggers talking shit:

"It's like having a girl talk badly about you in high school. It's so juvenile and base. Not liking an outfit, OK, I get that. OK, let's all laugh at somebody's outfit. OK, you don't like it; you can make a funny joke about it. And if you have a good sense of humor, you can take it. It's happened to me; I got panned at the Oscars one year. But a lot of my [Hollywood] peers are really beautiful people. Really, really nice. And everyone's doing the best they can. It's not a negative world; it's quite positive. And for people to want to switch it and make it negative, because it makes them feel better, that's really bizarre."

Elle UK [Official Site]

[Images by David Slijper courtesy of Elle Magazine.]

In an interview with Time, Thomas bashes bloggers, but as always, there is some truth in her harsh words:

Everyone with a laptop thinks they're a journalist. Everyone with a cellphone thinks they're a photographer. So our profession is sidelined in a way. There's no turning back. It's frightening because you can ruin lives and reputations willy-nilly without realizing it. No editors. No standards. No ethics. We're at the crossroads.

"Press at a crossroads" is sort of the theme of the whole interview. Although she is there to talk about her latest book, Listen Up, Mr. President, the most interesting parts come when she discusses the relationship between the President and the press. When asked about the differences between Obama and Bush, she says, "No President likes the press. They all hate us." The Obama Administration, she claims, is amazingly adept at the art of the spin. The so-called "managed news" is naturally not something Thomas will support.

There's very little you can do when they control the information. But I think every once in awhile the press knows enough to protest. It's not their information, it's ours. It belongs to the American people... I think it behooves all administrations to tell the truth as much as they can, to bring the people with them. You cannot have a democracy without informed people. It shouldn't be a shock when the public finally learns things.

Sing it, sister.

But her criticism of the current presidency does not stop there. At a recent interview at the Commonwealth Club, Thomas told reporter Phil Bronstein that Obama "lacks courage." "There was a gasp in the crowd," Bronstein writes. "I was the interviewer and it rocked me a little." For Bronstein, this one comment seems to reflect the growing tide of criticism that has been leveled against Obama from the left in the most concise way possible. This is classic Thomas, telling it like it is. Bronstein ends with a little advice for Obama:

So while he's dodging Glenn Beck broadsides and rope-a-doping formerly infatuated Democratic critics, Barack Obama needs to keep a much closer eye on the 89-year-old woman front row at his press conferences than he does on the genuflecting artist who built a giant Nobel Peace Prize sand sculpture of the President in India.

Probably good advice, but not as good as what Thomas herself had to say to any future president: "Do the right thing. There's no other place to go."

And finally, Thomas shares what it is like to write based on opinion rather than straight news (which sounds surprisingly similar to writing a blog): "Now I wake up every morning and ask, 'Who do I hate today?' That's how you write a column!"

Q&A: White House Legend Helen Thomas [Time]
Bronstein At Large: In Conversation With Helen Thomas At The Commonwealth Club [SFGate]
Helen Thomas: White House Watchdog Tells All [CommonwealthClub.org]

As mentioned previously, these unkind words were launched at model Liskula Cohen by class-act blog Skanks In NYC. The 36-year-old model, who has appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines, is suing Google, which hosts the blog, for defamation, in an attempt to force the blogger out of anonymity. In the lawsuit, Cohen states that the blog's slings and arrows paint her as a "promiscuous woman who is filthy, disgusting, foul and a whore," a rep that's not done much for her "desirability for endorsing products." While the uncharitable could perhaps suggest that this desirability was already somewhat in question — and, further, that said anonymous asshole is considerably more fixated on the model's activities than is the public; and, further still, that this is in fact the first we have really heard of her and this kind of publicity isn't really serving to distract from a site we'd otherwise be unfamiliar with — the real question, which Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory poses is, does she have a case?

Not exactly. As a lawyer tells her, for the case to hold water, the model would have to prove that Skank's assertions were not just their opinion, but rather, deliberately misleading: "a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to a person's reputation." In other words, well-nigh impossible to do. (Although it does seem like she could probably prove pretty conclusively that she's not the #1 skank in New York — surely there's gotta be some viable competition, both amongst celebrities and professional prostitutes, no?)

Of course, however much flack she'll take for the law-suit, her thin skin, the fact that she had an unpleasant bottle contretemps with a bouncer last year, and the possible publicity ploy — in short, however misguided it may be - we get why someone would want to do it: on a basic level, it seems wrong that a stranger (or, even worse, not) should be able to write vile things anonymously. Sticks and stones nothing, reading that has to be a punch to the gut for anyone not trained from childhood to weather gratuitous insults. And the internet is, as pundits are fond of saying, still the "wild west," legally speaking. There's certainly scope for precedent-setting and why not in this case, frivolous though it may seem? It would be nice if there was some resolution to this case beyond "Skanks in NYC" getting more hits, Cohen humiliating herself, and the rest of us just feeling really, really sad. Because we imagine the wild west being slightly more exciting than that - or at least involving more frontier justice.

Model Sues Over "Skank" Comment [Salon]

Earlier:Rag Trade: Model Sues Google After Random Blogger Calls Her "Old Hag"

Earlier: Dooce: Proof That Not All Our Pregnancies Need To End In Abortion?

• China is creating a female-run district where women make all the decisions and men have to wash the dishes. [Salon]
• Nestle to buy baby-food company Gerber for $5.5 billion, giving Nestle "the leadership position in baby food." We're sure the thousands of moms in Third World countries whose babies died as a result of Nestle's marketing of baby formula are happy to hear it! [NYTimes]
• The blessings and curses of being middle-aged suburban mom. [WashingtonPost]
• And...the blessings and curses of being a single woman. [USAToday]
• Liberal feminist bloggers not happy with liberal non-feminist bloggers. [Feministing]

The Brits are dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Now only the French remain, and we all know how hopeless they are. [The Times]

View Sienna Miller's breasts here, if you remotely care. NSFW, duh. [The Sun]

Naomi Campbell plagued by an imposter. Throws phone at her. [Daily Mirror]

A blogging mum has scored a book deal. We're setting up the remainder bins as we type. [The Times]

Boorish, crass, Nazi-impersonating Prince Harry is off to Iraq. Temporarily, alas. [The Guardian]