President Obama showed his true colors in an interview on Today Wednesday morning, when host Savannah Guthrie asked if he had been aware that two normal, average American citizens named Beyoncé and Jay-Z were planning a visit to Cuba before the trip occurred.

Excuse me, miss: did you really engage in cultural exchange with the Cuban people? Florida Senator Marco Rubio is ringing the alarm over Beyoncé and Jay-Z's fifth-anniversary trip to Cuba last week, which he claims was "seized on for propaganda purposes" by the Castro regime. The brief vacation was apparently given the green light by the Treasury Department, which licenses trips to Cuba for "educational exchange activities that will result in meaningful interaction"; according to the New York Times, the crazy-in-love couple "visited the children's theater group La Colmenita, where Beyoncé danced with little girls dressed as bumblebees," and Beyoncé, apparently feelin' it, "half-danced" during a performance by the Cuban Contemporary Dance Company on Friday, which would seem to qualify (if she were a boy she might have, as her husband did, enjoy "a Cuban cigar on the balcony of their government-owned hotel, the Saratoga"). According to Academic Arrangements Abroad, which planned and arranged the trip, the officials that run this town (well really, who run the world of Cuba) had no foreknowledge of the vacation and "struggled to provide adequate security" (What? Who? we imagine them saying), but worked it out—and got Beyoncé bodies to protect her—in the end. "If interested in what life really like in #Cuba @S_C_," Rubio tweeted, "should have visited persecuted rapper #AngelYunierRemon #99problems&dictatorsareone." Listen, Marco: I know you have sweet dreams of showing Jay-Z and his naughty girl what you got, and I get that it's a hard knock life for politicians representing Cuban exiles—can't knock the hustle for Florida Senators—but surely you can work it out without resorting to bad puns based on Jay-Z and Beyoncé tracks? It's like you're making the songs cry. Move on to the next one. [Reuters | TPM | NYT]

Beyoncé is probably too busy being hated for travelling to Cuba with her husband (what's his name again?) to notice that her image, and the image of any other sex symbols, may be banned for good in Uganda.

Beyoncé released a new Pepsi commercial today in which she hallucinates she is visited by her past, then murders it.

Beyoncé is so cute when she gets angry: If the art accompanying her new song(s) "Bow Down / I Been On" is any indication, she looks like her prepubescent pageant-girl self Photoshopped onto a picture of her old living room/trophy display area. That's only the first indication the weirdness of the release, which came via Beyoncé's Tumblr yesterday. The song amassed over a million streams on Soundcloud in less than 24 hours, which must be some sort of record.

A group of apparently Russian hackers, working on the website "exposed.su," claims to have published the private personal information of—or "doxxed"—17 politicians and celebrities. Victims include Michelle Obama, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller, all of whom had credit reports posted to the website, as well as Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, whose social security numbers were published.

Alicia Keys says her son gave Blue Ivy her first kiss, even though Bey and Jay obviously seek a more powerful alliance.

I never realized how not pregnant Beyoncé might have been until the Saturday premiere of her HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream. Since announcing her pregnancy at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards (in August of that year), there have been naysayers, referred to with tongue in cheek as "Beyoncé birthers." There was that footage of her apparently pregnant belly folding in on itself when she made an appearance on Australian TV in the fall of 2011. Months later, Beyoncé addressed it with a pithy explanation: "It was a fabric that folded - does fabric not fold? Oh my gosh, so stupid."

Last night, two space aliens sat down on a couch and drooled at each other in a pantomime of human interaction on Oprah's Next Chapter. For an unilluminating hour Oprah Winfrey surrendered her usual alpha role probably because that was part of Beyoncé's intergalactic rider. With the big, timely but ultimately fluffy interviews, Oprah tends to endlessly ass kiss, but this was over the top even for her. She referred to Beyoncé as the "preeminent mistress of the universe"" praised Bey's small number of cell phones and unleashed a string of adjectives to praise Beyoncé's anti-exposé of an HBO documentary, Life Is But a Dream, which ran immediately after. In Oprah's estimation, the film is "familiar, unfamiliar, exciting, exhilarating, riveting and personal and intimate and empowering."

What is there to say about a night dedicated to music that is kind of, almost catchy enough to be OK? Not much. Just smile and bob, smile and bob.

Sweet Brown, the eminently quotable local news star, took her sweet time cashing in on her viral video fame, but now she's about to be everywhere.

Getting images removed from photo agencies' websites: so hot right now. On Monday, we discovered that photos of Kanye West in his much-maligned kilt at the 12-12-12 concert were removed from Getty's site and various others. Now, controversial shots of Beyoncé have gotten the same treatment.

When Beyoncé's publicist emailed Buzzfeed earlier this week to ask that they kindly remove "some unflattering photos" of her client that were included in a listicle of "The 33 Fiercest Moments From Beyoncé's Halftime Show," little did she know that the Internet doesn't quite work that way.

The musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes, is responsible for one of last year's most acclaimed indie albums, Visions. This morning, she posted an essay on her Tumblr regarding her pop-filled best-of 2012 music list. In it, she praised Beyoncé ("She is everything good"), "Gangam Style" mastermind Psy ("Psy is a genius and I don't think it's so terrible that he's been recognized for this") and Mariah Carey ("The first time I heard Mariah Carey it shattered the fabric of my existence and I started Grimes").

Yesterday, we discovered that Kanye West had apparently forced the photo wire service Getty to remove a series of photos of himself in a skirt. Today, Beyoncé's publicist is going around trying to get these unflattering photos of her famous client performing at the Super Bowl taken down.

When Michael Jackson died, people clamored to determine the rightful heir to the King of Pop. None of the contemporary young male singers batted around – Usher, Ne-Yo, certainly not Chris Brown (despite his mother's grandiose claims) — satisfactorily fit the bill. Talent abounds, but none of these guys quite has MJ's levels of musical virtuosity, fascinating eccentricity and the ability to package them in appropriately surreal performance. Granted, the search seemed doomed, as the entire angle of Michael Jackson's celebrity was that there was only one of him. But now it is clear that by turning to men (and men-children), we were looking in the wrong place: the heir to Michael Jackson's throne is none other than King B.

Shaq is many things. He's a legendary basketball player with a growing business empire and a one-time great film career. He was also a rapper. But did you know he's a Beyoncé fan? Neither did we until Super Bowl Sunday, when he let the whole world know.

From the second she appeared silhouetted in black against a field of smoke and ghosts to the moment she cut power to the New Orleans Superdome just to prove to Michelle that she could, it was clear that Beyoncé viewed the Super Bowl as a Beyoncé concert where a few fans had gathered in the parking lot to play a quick game of touch football.

Well, that was one way to quiet the lip-synching haters/give credence to rumors of Illuminati: Minutes after Beyoncé's inspired performance and just moments after a record-setting kickoff return from the Baltimore Ravens' Jacoby Jones, power went out in over half of the Superdome. CBS's James Brown said the outage was caused by a power surge. Another CBS reporter who spoke with NFL officials said the blackout was caused after an outside power source was lost. NFL and stadium officials reset the lights and, after a 35-minute delay, power was restored. So far, no official reason has been given but, for now, certain groups are denying responsibility:

And an angel of the Lord suddenly stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them; and they were terribly frightened. But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all the people; for I am Beyoncé and this is my Super Bowl halftime show."