Britney is Adnan's dream come true. He knows that if he has a child with Brit, he'll be made for life.

A "friend" of paparazzo Adnan Ghalib, who, according to Star, impregnated the pop star.

Social-media sites like Wikipedia and Digg are celebrated as shining examples of Web democracy, places built by millions of Web users who all act as writers, editors, and voters. In reality, a small number of people are running the show. … At both Digg and Wikipedia, small groups of users have outsized authority. In the case of Wikipedia, this authority is both organic and institutionalized. A small segment of highly active users author the majority of the site's content; there are also elected site administrators who have the power to protect pages, block the IP addresses of problem users, and otherwise regulate Wikipedia's operations. At Digg, active users have more of a de facto authority over the site's goings-on (though there are persistent rumors that the site has "secret moderators" who delete content). But officially speaking, while the site's algorithm seems to favor devoted users, no individual Digger has the power to unilaterally delete a post.

-Chris Wilson, "The Wisdom of the Chaperones," Slate

Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. What an exciting night. These past 3 and a half months have been very tough. The town was torn apart by a bitter writer’s strike but I’m happy to say that the fight is over, so tonight welcome to the make-up sex. Of course there is still obviously some collateral damage left over from the strike. Emotionally. Economically. Perhaps worst of all the canceling of the legendary Vanity Fair Oscar party. They said they did it out of quote respect for the writers and oh, you know another way they could show respect for the writers? Maybe one day invite some of them to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. They would enjoy it. Don’t worry, they won’t mingle, don’t worry.

They actually say that having the Oscars helped to end the strike. That the idea that getting the town back to work and having an Oscars was one of the impetus to get things done. Which I think is wonderful. So if we could, before spending the next 4 to 5 hours giving each other golden statues, let’s take a moment to congratulate ourselves.

-Jon Stewart, in his opening monologue for the Oscars last night.

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The host.

In science, the word evokes the image of a hapless life form, attached in perpetuity to a parasite, allowing the thing to grow large and healthy without measurable benefit to itself.

In religion, the word is used to describe the glorious armies of heaven, galloping across the skies to lift up humanity to a blessed and happier place.

In reality TV, the word means a little bit of both.

But not all hosts are made the same. Just as the ancient Greeks developed several schools of philosophy, the modern era has turned out many different theories of hosting — be it the "Friendly Ghost Host" method evinced by Ryan Seacrest or the more dynamic "Hosting as Performance Art" practiced by Hulk Hogan on "American Gladiators."

-Patrick Day and Deborah Netburn, "Friendly ghost or Pope?: Varieties of Reality TV Hosts," Los Angeles Times

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The blond starlet seems to be the toast of the Eastern European nation. Her latest film, Blonde Ambition, hit No. 1 in Ukraine, grossing $253,008 for the weekend of Feb. 14-17, Box Office Mojo reports.

It's a huge reversal of fortune for the film, which bombed back home. In December, Blonde Ambition had a run in eight Texas theaters, grossing just $1,771 in its opening weekend.

How to explain the comedy's success abroad? One word: escapism.

"The former Soviet nations have a sweet tooth for straight-up comedies," Conor Bresnan, editor in chief of Box Office Mojo International, tells PEOPLE. "When these comedies have big name celebrities like Jessica Simpson's, that's all that's needed to sell the movie. Russian and Ukrainian audiences have an even bigger urge for escapism than Americans. So, films like Blonde Ambition will gross more than No Country for Old Men.

-Brian Orloff, "Jessica Simpson Rules the Box Office – in Ukraine," People.com

Obama has now won nine contests in a row, in most every part of the country. … He is no longer a leap of faith but a real winner. And what once seemed a major threat to his chances–uncertainty about the role of his race–has faded away. …
Conversely, Hillary has been completely stripped of what was once her greatest asset: inevitability.

It’s hard to see what hope remains for her. … Now, Hillary’s last hope may be that voters in Ohio and Texas will be in a contrarian mood. Perhaps, after hearing for the next week that it is now Barack Obama who is inevitable, and Hillary who is doomed, they will feel the same sympathy that New Hampshire did, and hand the Clintons one last reprieve. For old time’s sake.

It’s a longshot, to be sure. It’s also a great irony: The woman once mocked for her inevitability may only have the specter of defeat left to save her.

-Michael Crowley, "The Collapse Of Hillary," TNR.com

In late July 2006, Mr. Castro, who is 81, handed over power temporarily to his brother, Raúl Castro, 76. …

Now, just days before the national assembly is to meet to select a new head of state, Mr. Castro resigned permanently in a letter to the nation. …

“I will not aspire to neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he wrote.

He added: “It would betray my conscience to occupy a responsibility that requires mobility and the total commitment that I am not in the physical condition to offer.”

James C. McKinley, Jr., "Fidel Castro Resigns as Cuba’s President," New York Times

We've never been big fans of The Post and its yellow journalism. This particular incident has sent us over the edge. We thought about calling for a boycott of The Post, but that wouldn't do much good. What would we do? Keep not buying The Post? Plus, we're going to go out on a limb and guess that a fair number of the people who get their news from The Post think it's probably okay to out someone like that. So, instead we're calling for a boycott of sex with people who read The New York Post.

That's right. If you believe that what The Post did was wrong, and you're sleeping with someone who reads that paper, or considering sleeping with someone who reads that paper, don't do it. We're all for sex, but we're also all for people having the right to practice whatever sexual fetishes they want to do freely (as long as they're not hurting anyone else, which this man clearly was not) without having their names and faces splashed on the front page of a New York City tabloid.

-Emily Farris, "Scanner's Sex Boycott for New York Post Readers," Nerve.com

Mrs. Obama’s nickname inside the campaign is “the closer” because she is skilled at persuading undecided voters to sign pledge cards. But as a smooth orator, she is also known as a connector, volunteering her own life lessons from working-class roots and discussing her confrontation with a culture of low expectations. …

In a presidential campaign that has included discussions of race and gender, Mrs. Obama has a singular vantage point at the intersection of the two. As the advantage in some states has seesawed between Mr. Obama, of Illinois, and Mrs. Clinton, of New York, based in part on the votes of blacks and women, Mrs. Obama typically makes a plea for unity, even when race- or gender-based appeals might be expedient and easy.

-Susan Saulny, "Michelle Obama Takes to the Trail," New York Times

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Mr. Obama’s triumphs capped a week in which he went undefeated in states across the country, in many cases by big margins, over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

And his strength on Tuesday sliced across nearly every major demographic line, with one element standing out: in Virginia and Maryland, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls, he beat Mrs. Clinton among women.

The sheer consistency of Mr. Obama’s victories over the last few days certainly suggests that many Democratic voters have gotten past whatever reservations they might have had about his electability or his qualifications to be president. …

He now enjoys a big financial advantage. Her big lead in national polls is gone. By most counts, Mr. Obama can now claim more delegates pledged to him. He has won far more states than Mrs. Clinton, although she won some of the big prizes, like California and New Jersey.

-Adam Nagourney, "Obama Makes His Case as He Surges," New York Times

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I don't think she should have won. I think it sends a bad message to our young people who are trying to get into this business, the ones who are trying to do it right and really trying to keep themselves together. … We have to stop rewarding bad behavior. … I'm sorry. I think the girl is talented, gifted, but it's not right for her to be able to have her cake and eat it too. She needs to get herself together.

-Natalie Cole starting a fight with Amy Winehouse through People.com

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If Barack Obama and John McCain end up facing each other in the general election this year, one particular special interest group will find itself unexpectedly discomfited: the comedy writers of America. Politically, these men and women may well support one or the other of the two candidates enthusiastically. But professionally, they will find an Obama-McCain contest a burden, for the simple reason that it is surprisingly difficult to make fun of either candidate. The result might well be the least entertaining presidential election in recent history. But also, perhaps, from a civic point of view, the healthiest.

David A. Bell, "The Unfunny Election," The New Republic

Romney had his best political moment of the race while expiring. Republicans are expected to fall in line, and that's what Romney did. "If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win," he said to cries of "no" from some in the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference. "And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror."

His remarks, which would have made Joe McCarthy proud, touched all of the right's political buttons, in a way Romney rarely managed during the race. In addition to proving himself to be a stalwart Party man, willing to sacrifice his personal ambitions for the cause, Romney on his way out showed a singular focus on the crucial issue of national security issues. He helped frame the general election in terms of Republicans who understand the threat from Islamic terrorists and Democrats who don't. It's rumored that he is thinking about running in the future; if so, maybe today marked that beginning as much as this ending.

-John Dickerson, "Mitt Out Of Luck," Slate

The models were also downsized. Where the masculine ideal of as recently as 2000 was a buff 6-footer with six-pack abs, the man of the moment is an urchin, a wraith or an underfed runt.

Nowhere was this more clear than at the recent men’s wear shows in Milan and Paris, where even those inured to the new look were flabbergasted at the sheer quantity of guys who looked chicken-chested, hollow-cheeked and undernourished. Not altogether surprisingly, the trend has followed the fashion pack back to New York. …

“Skinny, skinny, skinny,” said Dave Fothergill, a director of the agency of the moment, Red Model Management. “Everybody’s shrinking themselves.”

-Guy Trebay, "The Vanish Point," The New York Times

Related: “Manorexia” Ain’t Pretty, Queerty

Who won Super Tuesday? It’s hard to say, but if you put a gun in my head, I’d say John McCain and (very slightly) Hillary Clinton, but the elections revealed weaknesses in McCain and in both of the leading Democratic candidates. McCain blunted Mitt Romney’s challenge, but he failed consistently to win over conservative voters. Hillary Clinton won the big states she had to win, and arrested Barack Obama’s momentum, but she is going to have problems with white male voters. Obama is having trouble with white working-class voters and Latinos. … My feeling is that it’s a standoff. Hillary has less of a handicap than Obama, but she is not his equal as a politician.

-John B. Judis, The Plank, TNR.com

Democrats allocate most of their delegates proportionately; candidates are awarded a cut of the delegate pie based on their percentage of the vote. It is possible to lose a state and still get a majority of the delegates, and it is likely that the losing candidate will still get a substantial share of the delegates. …

The Republicans’ delegate selection rules are different. In 8 of the 21 Republican contests, the winner gets the delegates — no dividing up the spoils. What that means is that it is going to be easy for a candidate to build up a big delegate lead on Tuesday night and, combined with winning some big states, credibly declare himself the party’s presumptive nominee. That is precisely what Mr. McCain is looking to do.

-Adam Nagourney, "As 24 States Vote, a Grab for Delegates, and an Edge," New York Times

How nice. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama met for their final debate before Super Tuesday and opened with sweet ovations to each other, their party, and the change that will come to politics when either of them is elected president. They kept it up for 90 minutes. When it appeared they might clash, they both backed away. They couldn't have been sweeter. Admit it. You switched over to Lost.

That's a shame, because it was a substantive debate, perhaps the most substantive so far. If you're too impatient to read the rest of this piece and want to know the winner, I can't help you. For the first half of the debate, Clinton was at her best talking about the details of health care and immigration. Clinton is her message—thorough, competent, and commanding. She even had a big one-liner the crowd loved. "It took one Clinton to clean up after a Bush," she said when asked about the potential Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton trade-off of the White House, "and it may take a Clinton to clean up after a second Bush."

Obama's message is inspiration, but he wasn't terribly inspirational for most of the early part of the debate. If a voter was looking to feel the Obama magic she'd been hearing about, she didn't get it.

-John Dickerson, "Kind Words, but No Winner," Slate

I don't actually say that there's no reason why anyone should feel threatened. Frankly, I think that's a little patronizing to the people running these companies.

There's a complex ecosystem that involves advertisers, people who own content and companies like Google that are there to try to connect content and advertisers and users. There's lots of reasons why they're worried.

I think another way to say it is that I don't think they should be concerned about Google being a competitor, or a source of headache. We're part of the Internet; we're part of the technological transformation that everyone's experiencing.

-David Eun, head of Google's content partnerships, I Want Media

And we're a big party. We're a big party and we're getting bigger.

I'm even in this party. This is a big party. We understand that America is not great because of our centralized government. America is great because of self-government. It's great because of you, the people, and we believe government works best when it empowers people to take responsibility for their own lives.

These are great ideas.

-Rudy Giuliani, using his rhetorical skills to explain why he won't be the Republican nominee for president.

Related: For Giuliani, a Dizzying Free-Fall

Our enemies in Iraq have been hit hard. They are not yet defeated, and we can still expect tough fighting ahead. Our objective in the coming year is to sustain and build on the gains we made in 2007, while transitioning to the next phase of our strategy. American troops are shifting from leading operations to partnering with Iraqi forces and, eventually, to a protective overwatch mission. As part of this transition, one Army brigade combat team and one Marine Expeditionary Unit have already come home and will not be replaced. In the coming months, four additional brigades and two Marine battalions will follow suit. Taken together, this means more than 20,000 of our troops are coming home.

Any further — any further drawdown of U.S. troops will be based on conditions in Iraq and the recommendations of our commanders. General Petraeus has warned that too fast a drawdown could result in, quote, “the disintegration of the Iraqi security forces, Al Qaeda-Iraq regaining lost ground, and a marked increase in violence.”

Members of Congress, having come so far and achieved so much, we must not allow this to happen.

-George W. Bush at his final State of the Union address last night.