*Her autopsy began this morning at 9:20AM EST!

*Narcotics found in Anna’s hotel room. Suspicion that drugs killed Anna Nicole Smith was heightened today as investigators found illegal narcotics as well as prescription medications in Anna Nicole Smith’s room at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Fla., according to reports this morning.

WCBS-TV in New York reports that drugs were found in Smith’s hotel room, and a toxicology report that would determine whether those drugs caused her death has not yet been released. An autopsy is scheduled for this morning.

*Did Anna choke on her on vomit?  According to another report this morning, when an “employee” of Anna Nicole Smith found her in her hotel room, she appeared to have choked on her own vomit. The “credible source” cited by Access Hollywood says that when the employee encountered Smith in her room, she pulled back a sheet and discovered that the model-actress had choked. The same source, says Access, claims that Smith took a “children’s sedative” and that she “kept passing out” before her death.

*Smith’s Final Moments Sell for $500,000. The footage of Anna Nicole Smith’s last moments sold for more than $500,000, just hours after Smith’s death in Hollywood, Fla., according to Splash News & Picture Agency, as reported by FOX News. The two-minute video, according to sources, shows paramedics working on the unresponsive actress, and her body being wheeled out on a gurney. The paramedics, according to a producer who viewed it, appear to pull the gurney back out of the ambulance to administer CPR again. But, adds the producer, the body is not readily identifiable as Anna Nicole Smith.

The two-minute tape, shot from three different angles from a distance of about 50 feet, shows Smith’s sheet-covered body, with an oxygen mask over her face, being taken out of the Hard Rock Hotel by a gaggle of emergency responders, including paramedics and police. “You cannot see her face, you cannot see hair flowing out from underneath the mask,” Spinder said. “Again if someone didn’t tell me this was Anna Nicole Smith, I totally would not have known it. You can’t even tell it’s a woman.”The video shows footage of the ambulance driving away from the hotel under a police escort, then cuts to the ambulance at Memorial Regional Hospital just after 2 p.m. ET Thursday. “You do not see the ambulance pull into the hospital, and you do not see the body come out of the back of the ambulance,” Spinder said. “You just see the ambulance sitting there.“One would assume that the cameraman got there after the body had already been unloaded from the ambulance and was already in the hospital at that point,” he said.

*Anna’s mom said custody battle “Will get ugly.” The mother of the late Anna Nicole Smith predicted that the fight over her granddaughter Dannielynn would get “ugly,” and dismissed Anna Nicole’s rags-to-riches self-portrayal as mere myth-making.

In an interview on “Good Morning America,” a disconsolate, almost disgusted Virgie Arthur described Anna Nicole as “wild and crazy,” and reiterated that she’d warned her daughter to stop using drugs. She added that she “really sincerely” worries about five-month-old Dannielynn, and wants her to be with her father — whoever that might be. When asked about the pending paternity battle, Arthur agreed that it would get ugly.

Curiously, Arthur also took the opportunity to debunk the myth that Anna Nicole’s rise to fame was a classic rags-to-riches tale. “Why do you tell people stuff like that?” Arthur said she asked Anna Nicole. “I’ll do whatever it takes,” replied Anna Nicole. “If my name’s out there, I make money.”

MORE UPDATES AS I GET THEM…

UPDATE: I know that Rosie had NO idea that Anna Nicole was going to die…but you’ve gotta watch this clip of Rosie O’Donnell going OFF on Anna YESTERDAY. Just hours before Anna died. I bet Rosie feels about weeeeee big today.

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