Ever hear of the Nicholas Roerich Museum? It's located on the Upper West Side. A tourist attraction it is not: The museum says it gets just 25 visitors a day. And yet "brazen art thieves" have hit the museum in two separate heists in recent weeks. Call us misguided, but "brazen" is storming into the Met with a dozen machine gun-toting friends and pulling a bunch of Van Goghs from the walls. This just suggests that New York City's art thieves have gotten lazy. Or maybe they've been busy transitioning to the booming business of bank robberies? [NYP]

Laura Ling and Euna Lee are safely back on American soil in Burbank, California. After the jump, Lee reunites with her daughter, and Ling talks about the emotional end of the Current TV journalists captivity in North Korea.

Barack Obama invited the entire Democratic Senate Caucus to his house for his birthday lunch, yesterday, in order to charm them into getting some fucking work done. And they had a wonderful time!

Sotheby's profit cratered last quarter, down 87% from the year before because for some reason people don't feel like spending millions of dollars on pretty pictures. Maybe a Cash For Classicism program would help?

New York Post sex machine columnist Andrea "Sexy Sexual Sexiness Sex" Peyser has a column today headlined "'Sex' Is Lousy." LOL! At night we dream she's speaking directly to us. But is she right, or just insufficiently horny? You decide!

The New York Times has finally picked someone to replace Frank Bruni as the newspaper's restaurant critic. Sam Sifton, the Times' culture editor and a former editor of the Dining section, will take over the job in October. In the meantime, he'll spend the next few months recuperating from the extensive plastic surgery that will be required to totally change his appearance, thus rendering the many photos of him on the Internet totally obsolete. [NYO]

Yesterday we told you that McKinsey-driven Conde Nast was firing all of its receptionists. A blow to the company's editorial glamor, yes. But the dragnet has also seized the New Yorker's whimsical, overqualified "jack of all trades!" [UPDATE: Maybe not!]

As if former Lehman chief Dick Fuld wasn't enough of a villain as it is given his role in the investment bank's collapse last fall, it turns out he was a tax cheat, too. The Times reports today that the Bloomberg administration is accusing Lehman of failing to pay the city some $627 million in taxes between 1996 and 2008.

Oh New York Post, is there any Bill Clinton story you can't work a Monica Lewinsky joke into? The banner headline over the former president's heroic rescue of Euna Lee and Laura Ling: "BILL CAN STILL GET THE WOMEN"

It's been a year and a half since John Schaefer was ousted as the chef at Irving Mill, the new American restaurant located near Union Square. (Schaefer was replaced by Ryan Skeen, the rising star who's since left Irving Mill himself and is now running things at Allen & Delancey.) But Schaefer's stint at Irving Mill is now the subject of a contentious, messy dispute between the former Gramercy Tavern executive chef and Irving Mill's owners, Suzanne, Mario, and Sergio Riva.

Today in hypocritical moralistic scolding: A troubled celeb couple that's getting back together, a "wacky" celeb whose parties feature alcohol(!) and noodz, a secret drinker musician named S****n S*****s, and a pop star joins the Mile High Club.

Model Agyness Deyn riding her bike in Brooklyn ... Kanye West walking in SoHo ... Sienna Miller getting in an SUV outside the Gramercy Park hotel ... Jennifer Aniston walking under an umbrella on the set of The Bounty downtown ... Rihanna shopping in SoHo, and later leaving a recording studio ... Jay-Z filming a commercial in DUMBO ... Vanessa Hudgens checking her phone, and later walking into a store ... Michelle Rodriguez shopping in the meatpacking district ... Marlon Wayans leaving the Gramercy Park hotel ... James Franco and Julia Roberts shooting scenes for Eat, Pray, Love in the Village ... Ray Liotta shopping with his girlfriend in SoHo ... Rachel Nichols leaving her hotel in Midtown ... and America Ferrera sitting down on the set of Ugly Betty in Gramercy Park.

• Pro golfer Vijay Singh and his wife, Ardena Seth, are paying $5.675 million for a penthouse duplex at 55 West 59th Street. The 3,369-square-foot pad was listed in June for $6.9 million. [Real Deal]
• Joan Raines has closed on the sale of her late mother's townhouse at 5 East 78th Street, albeit for a lot less than the $23.5 million she'd been seeking last year. The 13,095-square-foot Barclay Mansion, which had been dropped down to $18.5 million before going into contract in June, sold for $15 million to a limited liability corporation registered to the same address as the Blue Note Jazz Club in the Village. [NYO]
• Apparel mogul Jason Rabin and his wife Nicole have cut the price of their duplex at 850 Park Avenue for the second time since putting it up for sale for $9.9 million in February. The 5,600-square-foot pad, which the couple bought last August, is listed for $7.9 million with Carrie Chiang. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
• Tunde Folawiyo, the son of a Nigerian tycoon, has paid a combined $10.1 million for three condos in the Centurion at 33 West 56th Street. [NYO]

Goldman Sachs has been accused in recent weeks of plotting to make a fortune from the collapse of the American economy and then plotting with Washington insiders to hand the banking industry a massive bailout. Are Goldman haters now plotting against the firm's CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, and his wife Laura? A day after it was reported the banking chief had instructed Goldman employees to play it cool comes this doozy about Laura Blankfein's alleged antics in the Hamptons last weekend:

The scariest woman in New York, Jocelyne Wildenstein, turns 69 today. Let's hope she doesn't mark the occasion by paying another visit to her plastic surgeon. Retired astronaut Neil Armstrong is turning 79 today. Retired basketball player Patrick Ewing turns 47. DJ Funkmaster Flex is 41. Actress Loni Anderson is turning 63. High-end Manhattan real estate broker Edward Lee Cave is 70. Adam Yauch, one of the founding members of The Beastie Boys, is turning 44. The Brady Bunch's Maureen McCormick is 53. And Dawn Richard of Danity Kane celebrates her 26th birthday today.

• Madonna is taking her kids on the best summer vacation ever later this month: She's thinking about taking them to visit Auschwitz, so "they can learn about mistakes made in the past." If that doesn't pan out, she could always just invite Sean Penn and Guy Ritchie over for a visit and teach them the same lesson, couldn't she? [YNET]
• Paula Abdul announced over Twitter last night that she's leaving American Idol. True? Was she just drinking again? We'll find out soon enough. [NYDN]
• Hopeless romantic Kelly Bensimon made a move on Gerard Butler the other night, but the actor didn't reciprocate. Try your best to empathize. [NYDN]
• Great news: Ratings for Jon & Kate Plus 8 have tanked since the show came back from hiatus. Say a little prayer that this continues. [Us]
• Nominations for the MTV Video Music Awards were announced yesterday; Beyoncé and Lady Gaga came out on top, each earning nine nods. [THR]

Gerard Butler rejects Kelly Bensimon, Adam Lambert's fans throw sex toys at him, Ashley Olsen is surprised she didn't end up like Britney, Ryan O'Neal gave his 11-year-old son cocaine, Joan Rivers hates Jon Gosselin and Madonna plagiarizes a poet.

Here's Jeremy Piven on the Tonight Show last night telling Conan about how Barack Obama gave him his phone numbers, all of his phone numbers, and Piven then failed to save them into his phone. Maybe it was the sushi.

Hey remember Jay Leno? He's back! Well, not totally back, but his new 10pm show starts in six weeks and NBC is about to barrage us all with non-stop Leno advertisements, so, he's back. Seriously, he's going to be everywhere!

Pity poor Gwyneth Paltrow. If being the wife of a rock star, a movie star and a writer of death-cult newsletters weren't hard enough, she's also forced to deal with the stupid "roaches" in the media at Manhattan charity galas.