Discovery

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The new year is likely to be memorable for all sorts of reasons, not all of them pretty, but it’s shaping up as a Golden Age for the merger of hotness with power politics. First we had the Sarkozy-Bruni romance, which reached some sort of climax with rumors that the couple were secretly married last week; also, Carla might be secretly pregnant. Now reports are emerging that Naomi Campbell might have found her own special political guy in the form of thuggish Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez.

Naomi interviewed Chávez for British GQ a couple of months ago, and Chávez started making a play for the sultry rageoholic right during the interview, tossing out sexy Latin come-ons like, “feel my muscles.” Supposedly the two have been dating ever since, and Campbell is quoted in a Venezuelan newspaper as saying, “He is not a gorilla, he is more a bull.” This seems unlikely to end well, at least for the people of Venezuela. For Naomi, it sounds like a definite win. If you have anger management issues and make a habit of assaulting the help and throwing cell phones at people, it’s probably a good idea to be dating the guy who controls the court system.