Fire broke out in the underground parking garage today at Place Vendôme, the famous Parisian square near the Ritz Hotel and Tuileries Gardens. According to Huffington Post and its French affiliate, "over 100 firemen and 25 trucks" are "on the scene."

The FBI has released some of its files on the late Christopher Hitchens, including records indicating that he was the subject of a counterintelligence investigation in the 1980s.

Spotted at a Famous Famiglia pizzeria in Midtown at 11PM last night: A goat eating pizza. Apparently it's the same Famous Famiglia where Sarah Palin and Donald Trump held their pizza summit. [@ReporterLeslie, DNAInfo]

I suppose it was inevitable. Jessica Simpson—like Demi Moore, Britney Spears, and every other female celebrity who has ever been pregnant—is on the cover of a magazine naked, pregnant, and posed with one hand on her boobs and the other on her belly. The pictures appeared online yesterday. Aren't we sick of this pose, yet?

A 6-year-old boy was walking down the street with his father and sister in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, when the father allegedly asked the boy to bite his penis. The boy refused. All three people were naked, the Shanghai Daily reports, and upon the boy's refusal to bite his father's penis, the father bit off his son's:

If today feels extra strange for you, hang in there, it's merely the earth being pummeled by a "wave of plasma and charged particles" you're feeling. Yes, this humble little planet of ours is in the midst of a solar storm-the biggest solar storm in five years actually- and it might be throwing your Mercury in retrograde.

The recently-opened Olive Garden in Grand Forks, N.D., is off to a great start, according to Marilyn Hagerty, longtime food critic for the Grand Forks Herald. The restaurant "is the largest and most beautiful" in town and has been patronized by visitors "from out of town as well as people who live here," Hagerty reports in yesterday's positive review.

Two gems from The New York Times' story about Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier on a "quixotic" mission to find out everything about Osama bin Laden's last days:

This teen sensation gets off wearing his famous girlfriend's lingerie under his jeans. This young star had two abortions last year. These three celebs bought their own engagements and these two actors are having problems with public drunkenness. That's probably worse than private transvestism.

The Humane Society estimates that three to four million cats and dogs are euthanized in animal shelters each year—about half of all the animals that enter shelters. Do you care? Well, pay up then.

Pat Robertson, Christian Broadcast Network star and host of "The 700 Club," to the New York Times: "I really believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol. I've never used marijuana and I don't intend to, but it's just one of those things that I think: this war on drugs just hasn't succeeded." Free the Virgin Mary Jane.

21-year-old Scout Willis is a senior at Brown University and, according to Ivy League gossip blog IvyGate, behind pseudonymous Twitter account @BougPunk where she describes her boozy exploits. Among them: Avoiding Terry Richardson sex acts, stealing from American Apparel, and sneaking into Chateau Marmont (Does the progeny of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore really have to "sneak in"?) and charging snacks to Lindsay Lohan's room.

Not long ago, getting into college involved nothing more than a fair-to-middling G.P.A., an essay about reading to the blind, and your parents' checkbook. Things are a bit more complicated now. College budgets are being slashed. Competition is intense. So intense that kids are starting the "college hunt" in ninth grade. Are you really prepared? You're about to be.

Cat-stroking xenophobe Andrea Peyser has a Google Alert that plays the entire score to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will every time it finds a story under "New York Times AND NYPD AND I Hate Terrorist Muslims." Ding ding ding! Today, like every day, is Andrea Peyser's lucky day.

In preparation for last night's Super Tuesday contests, Stephen Colbert had created the 'countdown to loving Mitt' based on the assumption that Romney would be the presumptive nominee after the votes were counted. Since that wasn't the case, on tonight's Colbert Report, Stephen was able to reset the clock but not before panicking in much the same way many Republican voters seem to be panicking.

Forensics experts have used plaster molds of sailors' skulls excavated from the wreckage of Civil War warship the U.S.S. Monitor to create facial reconstructions that could provide clues to the identities of two men who perished when the ship was lost at sea in December of 1862.

Jon Stewart was promised that Super Tuesday would bring an end to this incredibly long Republican primary season, but that didn't come pass. On tonight's Daily Show, Stewart took out his frustrations on the candidates as well as CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

A 24-year-old Michigan woman who won $1M in the state lottery last September still collects welfare from her home state.

Coca-Cola has hit back at claims from a consumer watchdog group that the food additive used to give its products their familiar brown color causes cancer.

Patricia and Joan Miller, identical twins who sang and danced their way through the 1950s for the likes of Bing Crosby, were found dead in their Lake Tahoe home last week, the Associated Press reported today.