Madonna has been maximizing her time spent in L.A. by making multiple trips to the Kabbalah Centre, family in tow, for various Purim celebrations and lectures about the latest hi-tech advancements in evil-eye-warding fabrics. But paparazzi captured the singer driving off from once such visits with recently absconded Malawian demi-orphan David Banda seated in her lap, and not safely secured in a rear-facing car seat, putting her in the same, baby-endangering league as Britney Spears:

The cover of the new Us Weekly might be a little misleading on the matter of the Vietnamese baby about to join the celebrated, racially and genetically balanced family of Hollywood orphan-hoarders Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: the baby isn't yet en route to their New Orleans mansion in a satin-lined toddler-crate in the cargo hold of a Federal Express jet, as there's the small matter of the Vietnamese International Infant Export Agency adoption process to be dispensed with.

Possessing love reserves far too great to squander merely on her current family configuration of "2 miraculous, multicultural orphans/1 amorphous vanilla blob/1 eager-to-please, diaper-changing studmuffin," actress, humanitarian, and adoption addict Angelina Jolie has taken the necessary legal steps to finally fill the Vietnamese-baby-shaped hole in her heart:

· Premiere offers a gallery of "The 20 Worst Post-Oscar Career Choices." Study this carefully, young Jennifer, lest you go the way of the Fricker.
· Olbermannwatch.com, the Keith Olbermann-bashing blog, has shuttered its windows, realizing they were just helping raise the Countdown host's profile. Perhaps it's time for them to escalate the battle to Phase 2: Distributing this picture of him to everyone in their address book.
· Yay! Thanks, French Ambassador Gerard Errera!
· Chris Rock would like everyone to know that everything on the home front is hunky dory, thank you very much. Always a bad sign.
· Homophobic dirtbag radio host Michael Savage (whose family owns Rockstar energy drink, FYI; adjust your caffeinated-battery-acid consumption habits accordingly) won't be seen around the CAA Death Star after all, as the recent signee to the agency is dumped after word got around about his "I don't like a woman married to a woman. It makes me want to puke" comments re: Melissa Etheridge.
· Famous person sires two babies! Simultaneously! It's a holy sign!

Marcia Cross, heavy with double child, has been ordered to bed rest by her doctor, but try explaining that to millions of rabid Desperate Housewives fans who could care less about healthy prenatal development if it gets in the way of tying up the "Kyle McLachlan's ex-wife is moving down the block and Bree still doesn't have any idea!" loose-ends Season 3 has presented for her anal-retentive homemaker character. For producers, there was only one solution—bringing the party to Cross:

While the birth father of Madonna's catalog-ordered Malawi orphan may have recently expressed frustration that, since parting with his son, he has received not so much as a postcard of Big Ben reading, "Dear Ex-Daddy: My new daddy Guy can play bagpipes and drives an Aston Martin! Love, David," he may be comforted by the findings of the Malawian child welfare ministry, whose initial assessment of Madonna during her 18-month trial period came back with a gold star:

As little David Banda continues to adapt to his charmed, new life at an English manor, where he's getting into all sorts of adorable trouble crawling into his mom's closets and delighting in her secret stash of recreational riding crops and chainmail panties, Madonna's swelling heart is now set on giving David the sister he never had (not counting Lourdes, who has the disadvantage of being a less-desirable, biological child). But as with her first Malawian adoption, the follow-up tour is set to meet with much resistance and negative publicity, as 18-month-old Jessica has already been promised to an Australian missionary couple whose charity work in the impoverished African nation predates Madonna-come-lately's by seven years:

On last night's installment of ET, the show finally broadcast the magically exploitative centerpiece of their deal to help Anna Nicole Smith extract every last dollar and publicity opportunity from the recent, tabloid-ready birth-death cycle represented by the near-simultaneous arrival of her new daughter and loss of her son, airing video of Smith's recent C-section. Don't worry if you're still confused about the paternity of the child seen extracted from her womb in this (really graphic—please, don't watch it if you've just finished your breakfast burrito) clip—Smith and omnipresent life/business partner Howard K. Stern will be back on ET tonight to swear up and down that the adorable little moneymaker is the fruit of his loins, sworn statements to the contrary be damned.

TMZ.com has scored a major find in the Anna Nicole Smith three-ring tragedy circus: A sworn declaration by a woman named Laurie Payne, who befriended Smith in 2005 in the Florida Keys when they were introduced through a common acquaintance, Smith's friend-with-benefits G. Ben Thompson, a real estate developer from South Carolina. The declaration contains several bombshell revelations, among them that Larry Birkhead is indeed the father of Dannielynn, and that Payne had witnessed Smith take "a rather high dose" of Xanax, in addition to having herself "personally administered" Anna Nicole pills from a bottle unsubtly marked "Methadone" during the pregnancy. An e-mail allegedly sent from Smith to Payne also came attached to the declaration:

Realizing that perhaps a single emotional Oprah appearance that betrayed her stouthearted, fake-British composure was not quite enough to completely reverse the public's lingering impression that her recent African charity efforts amounted to nothing more than a calculated and self-serving toddler-snatching, Madonna has reemerged on the U.S. media circuit to plead her case. Talking to Meredith Vieira yesterday, the frequently becameltoed Queen of Pop explained that when she realized that the child who captured her heart on videotape and whom she began to brazenly adoption-stalk (or something to that effect) had a living parent, she first pledged her material support so that he may raise the child himself. He then proudly refused the offer, paving the way for a no-strings, guilt-free baby purchase:

While she hasn't yet gone so far as to take the enterprising step of leasing out her baby daughter as a human billboard, Anna Nicole Smith has proven to be a savvy businesswoman when it comes to bartering her family's most private moments of joy and sorrow for cold, hard cash. Larry Birkhead, the photographer who steadfastly insists that he, and not Smith's always lurking lawyer/fake-husband Howard K. Stern, is the child's real father, is now accusing Smith of knowingly tinkering with her baby to make her paternity story seem more plausible:

By now, it's likely you've come across the likes of Baby Jake, the telegenic toddler who has achieved a certain measure of notoriety due to his being relentlessly pimped out on BuyJake.com as a tiny, human billboard by what we'll assume is either an opportunistic parent, or the Gypsy carnie who won him in a high-stakes game of bocce ball. Now comes word of a huge development in the ongoing Baby Jake saga, as he tells us in his "Blog to Fame!" (pause to shudder at inevitable prospect of 2024 Entertainment Tonight segment entitled, "Baby Jake, All Grown-Up: The Road Back From Hell,") that noted baby welfare advocate Oprah Winfrey has made a sizable monetary offer to ensure Jake never has to again endure being painted to resemble a Jack in the Box Bacon 'n' Cheese Ciabatta Burger:

Whatever you thought of Madonna's appearance on Oprah yesterday, it seems to have subdued the outrage somewhat, filling in the comic frame images we've been seeing lately of the pop icon on her dark-baby shopping spree with at least a few dialogue bubbles indicating she hasn't completely lost her mind. We were too transfixed by her accent to really form an opinion on the matter—could that possibly be what humans will sound like in 500 years?—but others were far less indecisive. A Madonna-on-Oprah fallout round-up:
· Leading the "screw Madonna and Oprah and their army of motherfucking hair and makeup people and their misguided, self-serving Third World charity efforts"-cavalry is the NY Post's Andrea Peyser, who questions Oprah's softball-lobs (but that's what Oprah does!), as well as Madonna's sniveling condescension towards David's "simple man" father. Worth a read—if only for the anti-Oprah blasphemies. Heavens! [NY Post]
· The "simple man," meanwhile, is now claiming he's worried the controversy— including the last chapter where he expressed genuine surprise that goodbye meant forever— would cause the rich white lady with man-muscles to back out of the agreement. [ABCNews.com]
· Reuters managed to get a quote from the father as well, in which he stated his clear opposition to the consortium of 67 Malawian human rights groups seeking to legally block the adoption. And to this we say: There's 67 Malawian human rights groups? [Reuters]
· And finally, to end on a cheerier note, CityRag blog offers a quick, inexpensive and easy costume idea for Halloween: "Celebrity Baby Smuggler." [CityRag]

As Kevin Federline continues to spend most of his limited energies lately developing a niche acting career in which he improvises a few lines of dialogue before finding himself on the receiving end of a violent, audience-pleasing act, Britney Spears has been flying suspiciously below the radar. Unlike the arrival of the first, slippery little addition to their household, Sean Preston's younger sibling has yet to surface on the cover of a single celebrity glossy—surprisingly, not even in a telephoto shot of a sidewalk faceplant after the brave, little tyke pulled the short straw in a competition for mom's grip, losing to two Venti Frappucinos and a set of Mini Cooper car keys. There hasn't even been a consensus yet reached on the official official gender or name of the child, and the baby's parents seem perfectly happy to ensure that the youngest Federline remains swaddled in mystery:

One day we will all be able to look back with a smile on the maelstrom of controversy that surrounded little David Banda, Malawi's most adorable demi-orphan, and the strange, leather-bodiced witch-lady who swooped in suddenly to spirit him away. (Perhaps it will require the part-time children's author adapting the entire series of unfortunate events into yet another whimsically illustrated bedtime story.) But as in all classic fairy tales, things tend to get darkest right before the "happily ever after" part, so it's somewhat befitting that the child's very much alive and increasingly media-friendly father has distressingly announced that he had never intended to give his son up permanently. From the NY Post:

Fresh off her defensive insistence that adopting David Banda was perfectly legal and had nothing whatsoever to do with any large, money-crammed envelopes she shoved under the door of a government office's men's room, the New York Post reports that Madonna already has her eye on a matching accessory.

Cementing its status as the world's foremost authority on womb fruit, People magazine — through its extensive network of vagina cams and dogs trained to follow the smell of placenta — nabbed the celebrity birth-canal coup of the century. In an exclusive report on People.com, the magazine beat back the competition by reporting FIRST and FASTEST that actress Kelly Rutherford — who was in some other stuff since Melrose Place, but obviously none of it matters — has pushed out a baby boy. And, illustrating the continued need to treat the childbearing beat as more of a police blotter, the birth was not without a crime against nomenclature.

Far be it from Madonna to accept delivery of her new child in tight-lipped quietude. On her way to getting David Banda fitted for his very own red-string bracelet, the singer paused long enough to deliver a stiffly worded written statement, bursting with cautious legal flavor, in which she claims the adoption was many months in the making and insisting that she followed all the appropriate procedures in expanding her brood.

The one-year old boy Madonna has been trying to adopt from Malawi — despite laws that prohibit the nation's young from being clutched to the ample bosoms of foreign women with proven conic-bra proclivities — officially arrived today in England, where he will soon take up his role sitting quietly in a playpen while Madonna spends eight hours hotboxed in a yoga class. The pop star's newest youngling, David Banda (whose full name semi-aptly anagrams to "Diva, and bad"), apparently survived his baptism by paparazzi, which came after the eager photogs failed to be fooled by his lack of conspicuously oversized sunglasses.

We're not sure if it's her recent penchant for flaunting the quality of her bikini wax in unitards and fishnet tights, or the people of Malawi's collective disapproval of the way her name and Guy Ritchie's can't be adorably bastardized into a single noun. (Maguy? Gadonna? Madochie? No.) Either way, though, the denizens of the African nation still have their knickers in a toddler-sized wad over the Material Girl's so-far successful attempts to thwart local laws and adopt a one-year old — a fiery panty-fervor that's been exacerbated by news that Baby David's departure from Malawi coincided with a conveniently timed $3 million donation to help HIV-infected kids: