• Actress Cate Blanchett had her third son, Ignatius Martin, with husband Andrew Upton. Ignatius was born in Sydney. [People]

• It's been so long since actress Winona Ryder stole anything that she's not up on the latest anti-theft technology. A drug store employee said she tried to steal makeup, via her purse, and was caught by the stupid door alarm thing and made to give it back. Wait, people actually stop for those alarms? I am always just waved through. But then my photo isn't taped up in every retail establishment in Los Angeles. [Daily Mail]

• Singer Britney Spears reunited with desperate paparazzo Adnan Ghalib, who she had ditched after finding incriminating text chats with another girl on his iPhone. Just prior to taking Ghalib back, Spears was photographed bumping her head, hard. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as Spears surely likes to say.

• Jennifer Lopez turned to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes for advice on her baby twins, probably after being introduce by close Lopez buddy and crazy Scientologist Leah Remini. So singer Lopez now has a masseuse and trained color therapist specifically for the kids, six new bodyguards for $600,000 and closed-circuit cameras in every room. Also, for that extra touch of crazy, Lopez built a "sterile" baby wing uncontaminated by flowers or presents, filled with relaxing music and painted in "intelligence boosting" colors.

What better way to start the week than with another batshit episode contributing to the American Tragedy that is Britney Spears? According to the always-credible Fleet Street tabloid The Sun, Britney went into (sigh) one of her now-signature rampages after allegedly discovering roughly a dozen "flirty" text messages in current beau Adnan Ghalib's iPhone, a rampage that concluded with Britney tossing the pricy toy into her pool. Apparently, the famewhoriest paparazzo in the world has been photographed canoodling with a waitress, and The Package discovered their illicit texts (described as "pretty saucy stuff with sexual references — certainly not the sort you'd send to just a friend"). And yet, the best is yet to come: in response to his dearest's accusations, Adnan hand-wrote a child-like love letter to the maybe-bipolar "singer," complete with the nauseating phrase "milky bowl of soup." An image of the pathetic apology, complete with scrawled hearts and florist letterhead, after the jump.

• Apple's miraculous iPhone has exponentially increased the productivity of scuzzballs like sometime Britney Spears boyfriend Adnan Ghalib. Though paparazzo Ghalib has his hands full shopping for pregnancy tests with singer Spears, getting uppity with his former coworkers and maybe cutting exploitive photo deals, the iPhone allowed him to also have internet sexytime chats with other women. Britney found the messages and threw Ghalib's iPhone in a pool, then threw the pap out of her house. He wrote a stupid note offering her "milky soup."

One would think that, by now, there would be no more room on the OMG BRITNEY DID ANOTHER CRAZY THING belt. However, this week's Star cover story proves that there is still plenty of space on said belt for another notch or thirty. The rag claims that Britney is pregnant once again with none other than paparazzo-turned-paramour Adnan Ghalib's baby. Yawn! Their evidence? A few pictures of Britney's bloated belly and a sketchy (at best) quote from a member of Ghalib's press-hungry posse who exults that Adnan will "be made for life" if the story proves to be true. Don't hold your breath, homes; we've been down this path a handful of times over the last two months.

Britney Spears' new baby will no doubt be the first to auction its own "inside the uterus" exclusive photo deal if the tabloid Star is correct that her paparazzo boyfriend Adnan Ghalib is bragging about having knocked her up. First Ghalib supposedly married Spears in a secret Mexico ceremony, then Spears appeared in public with some kind of tummy bulge and now Adnan is said to be "made for life" due to the supposed pregnancy. The whole thing sounds insane, given that Spears was carrying a pack of cigarettes in the tummy bulge photo and that Ghalib has approximately 50 million reasons to prolong his relationship with Spears and avoid pissing her off by blabbing like this. "Insane," of course, means "entirely plausible" when you're talking about Britney Spears.

British tabloid the Mirror is running a picture from MrPaparazzi.com showing Britney Spears looking pregnant, or maybe just fat, or maybe her shirt just poofed out. Or maybe this is why she went shopping for a pregnancy test with photographer/beau Adnan Ghalib and maybe secretly married the crafty former paparazzo. This could also be why Spears' father has been granted such sweeping conservatorship powers over the crazy singer. Still, would anyone be letting her smoke if she truly was pregnant? And why is the American news media afraid to ask the hard questions about this photo?? Probably because they'd rather mint money with shameless coverage of the glitzy Democratic primary, that's why. In the meantime, decide for yourself by looking at this closeup of Brit-Brit's tum-tum:

• Britney Spears' stupid dad took away her stupid booze and set her bedtime at stupid 11 o'clock, but he can't make her keep on her underwear, ha ha! Despite having a Vagina Of Freedom, Spears doesn't get to see her sons, even though K-Fed thinks the toddlers would be a more mature influence on the troubled singer than alleged grown men Sam Lufti and Adnan Ghalib.

Now that he's been with Britney Spears for a while and maybe secretly married her, Adnan Ghalib seems none too happy with his former comrades in the unruly paparazzi mob following Spears. Yesterday in Los Angeles, he was involved in some sort of incident with a photographer, then met with the cops, then delivered a stern lecture to the assembled camera hounds, captured in the video after the jump. "It sucks being a public figure, doesn't it?" one of the paps said in response to Ghalib's scolding. But perhaps Ghlaib knows he's being an obvious hypocrite. If his goal is to get closer to Spears and her remaining piles of cash, there could hardly be a better way than by, in one fell swoop, creating a shared enemy and disproving the notion that's he's trying to become her photo pimp. Adnan's lecture:

Star magazine is positing that crazy, bewigged former (let's be honest) singer Britney Spears secretly married paparazzo main squeeze Adnan Ghalib when the two darted off to Mexico last month. But, Adnan is still technically married to his first wife, AzLynn Berry, so any marriage with Spears would be null and void. (But symbolically totally romantic). To that end, it's been rumored that Spears gave Ghalib $250,000 to give to Berry so she would hurry up already with the divorce proceedings. Gossip maven Ben Widdicombe calls this "the only logical reason" for Britney's sudden trip south of the border, which is sort of funny because at this point she could ride down the street on a flaming bicycle, followed by a small parade of koala bears and it wouldn't seem out of the ordinary. "Logical" is not a word that really ever factors into the Spears equation. [Daily News] After the jump, part one of an Entertainment Tonight interview with Ghalib.

• After an inept or simply evil psychiatrist unleashed Britney Spears on an unsuspecting world, she made her way through crowds of scummy paparazzi to her scummy paparazzi companion, on-again-off-again manipulator Adnan Ghalib, who promptly took her to lawyers who can claw her giant pile of money back from her parents and, presumably, just set it on fire and be done with things.

Just when you thought you were tired of reading about Britney Spears, the next issue of Rolling Stone promises a DOOZY of a cover story that's sure to be one of the most explosive reads of this young year. The story reportedly includes boob job confessions (!), shopping mall sobfests (!!) and cameos from Justin Timberlake so "vulgar" that the NY Daily News refused to put them in print (!!!). While vulgarity has become a staple in virtually every Britney story these days, this disturbing excerpt in which Britney's Amex Black card gets declined at the mall pretty much redefines the word:

Last night, a quasi-dramatic screaming match between Britney Spears and her manager Sam Lufti quickly turned from a typical Monday With Britney™ into a full-on Mariah-style breakdown. After a barefoot and bruised-cheeked Britney called current loudmouth boytoy paparazzo Adnan saying, "Baby, come get me," The Animal's estranged parents rushed onto the scene, as did the LAPD. When the frantic Adnan finally arrived, he was denied entrance to Brit's castle and then became engaged in one of the eeriest text message conversations we've ever seen (conveniently delivered via iPhone!):

In 1998, in The Truman Show, an insurance adjuster played by Jim Carrey discovered that his life was a television show; his every move monitored by cameras; every person in his life a performer, and his world a gigantic soundstage. The movie was a parable, inspired by reality television, but taking the early model of the mediated life to its outrageous conclusion. No longer so outrageous. Here, pictured, is a text message from Britney Spears' confidante, Sam Lufti, telling her exploitative paparazzo boyfriend to disappear. "If you continue to have any contact, you'll kill her." Of course, the exchange, just like the troubled popstar changing out of her dancing gear or weeping on her bed, was played out in front of the cameras. The Truman Show no longer works as satire; reality has caught up with the conceit. There is a difference, however. Truman Burbank was the dupe, unaware of his role in the show. By contrast, the central character in this tawdry soap, Britney Spears, is complicit. If anybody's the dupe, it's the audience, half-suspecting that, as in this picture, Adnan Ghalib is tilting his iPhone toward the camera, but preferring to believe that this is an authentic drama to which the viewer has sneaked access.

Adnan Ghalib, the paparazzo who sleeps with Britney Spears while snagging footage to sell to the tabloids, may be one of the sleaziest characters to emerge in the celebrity industry in recent years. But one has to admire the former Afghan refugee's desperate skill in walking the tightrope between his troubled popstar lover and the media that feeds on her. According to Showbiz Spy, the mercenary pap wants a $2m payoff for video of Spears at her most vulnerable, weeping, and speaking in the third person. "When Britney was a child, she had to work really hard. When she was 13 years old, she won all the beauty pageants," she mumbles to the camera. "Britney has an angel looking out for her, don't you, angel?" Of course, Ghalib's paparazzi rivals are delighted to expose his double-game, in the hope of breaking his access to the tabloid-selling popstar. Meanwhile, lawyers for Spears' former husband have been investigating a deal between pap agency X17 and another Britney confidante. (Tough game, celebrity journalism: these people make the warlords in Ghalib's native Afghanistan look like saints.) After the jump, a bonus, a scene from Sweet Smell of Success, the best ever cinematic treatment of the vicious world of celebrity gossip, in which Sidney Falco, the press agent played by Tony Curtis, is turned against his own client.

At this very moment, Britney Spears and Kevin Federline (and Steve Carell, but let's not needlessly complicate things) are back at the L.A. County Courthouse for yet another custody hearing to determine what contingencies are to be placed on access to her own children. (You'll recall visitation rights were revoked following her recent Van Halen 5150-hold hospitalization incident.) Wait! A shocking development has played out in the time it took to type that last sentence:

The internationally respected and always credible news source The Hindustan Times is reporting that the latest Britney Spears rumor is that she may soon fake her own death, embrace Islam, and move to Pakistan with her paparazzi lover Adnan Ghalib. Then, and only then, will the terrorists win.

We never thought such a natural pairing could possibly break apart but sadly, the relationship between Britney Spears and Adnan Ghalib has come to a close. Naturally, it involves a restraining order filed by the "pop star.". Sam Lufti, Brit's manager guy, showed the document to the photographers helping babysit Britt, the best way to keep something secret. We won't pose any theories as to why Lufti made this move because we don't care. Now, let the circus continue. [Page Six]