Long before she devoted much of her time to crisscrossing the world to feed individual grains of rice to famine-afflicted infants with a tweezer, and before she was occupied with the even more vital task of bringing to term the most genetically perfect child ever conceived, Angelina Jolie was an actress. Now that the Chosen One has been expelled from her blessed womb and can embark on her own global missions of mercy, Jolie is ready to once again ply her trade. Unsurprisingly, the role she's chosen for her return to the screen is a weightier one than last summer's fucking-and-fighting blockbuster with eventual impregnator/orphan molder Brad Pitt, which while a fine piece of work in the I-can't-decide-whether-to- rip-off-your-shirt-or-shoot-you-in-the-face genre, would hardly be an appropriate choice for the World's Most Socially Conscious Hollywood Citizen now. According to Variety, Jolie will play Mariane Pearl, the widow of kidnapped and cruelly executed journalist Daniel Pearl, and to keep her next career step in the family, partner Pitt's Plan B is producing. And in another family bonus, the project's likely location shoots in Pakistan should afford Jolie plenty of window-shopping time at the country's overflowing orphanages, where a suitable, race/gender/nationality-coordinated addition to her multicultural brood can easily be selected.

· Note to aspiring embezzlers: If you are going to download an image for a fake ID that you plan on using in the commission of a theft, make sure that image does not belong to one of the most famous men on the planet.
· Another headline that could be more clearly written: Nicolas Cage Gives $2M for Child Soldiers. Unfortunately, Cage is not purchasing himself a personal militia made up entirely of six-year-olds. Though he could totally afford that should he ever need to invade Angelina Jolie's compound.
· We are definitely not cool/hip enough to figure this out on our own, so if anyone out there can explain the deal with these heads that are being plastered up everywhere, we'd love hear about it.
· We link to this SoaP story only because it's funny that a family newspaper can't tell you straight out that the "expletive-laden line of dialogue for Jackson" is "I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane!" Oh, how we love to swear!

• There's been an arrest in the case of Brangelina's stolen baby shower photos; still no clue who unleashed those horrid Britney pics, though. [R&M]
• In other Brangelina legal news: a Jordanian man tries to embezzle $23,000 with a fake ID bearing Brad Pitt's picture. [Reuters]
• Josh Duhamel pounds on a bathroom door at Vegas nightclub Bella, the occupant of which was taking too long. The door opens, out comes Tommy Lee, and suddenly Duhamel is on the floor. Never mess with a man's toot time. [Page Six]
• Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's Tahitian honeymoon is crashed by Eva Longoria and Tony Parker, who are staying at the same resort, brining with them plenty of paparazzi. [IMDb]
• The ladies of The View are just a bunch of harpies. [NYDN]
• The Polish-American Congress brands Garry Trudeau a bigot because of a character named Kaminski in his Doonesbury cartoons. It would figure that a bunch of stupid polocks wouldn't get the joke. [Lowdown]
• The Glasgow Hilton refuses to give Paris Hilton a corporate discount. The Scotland tourism board couldn't have bought better publicity. [Page Six]
• A naked Pam Anderson just ain't what it used to be. [TMZ]

Sensing that her pretty-boy traveling companion and the father of her first biological child might not be getting enough credit for putting up with her "totally, like, annoying do-gooder stuff," globe-trotting, orphan-collecting philanthropist Angelina Jolie graciously allowed Brad Pitt to pretend that having their baby in Namibia was all his idea for Newsweek's 15 People Who Make America Great feature:

We recognize that you probably didn't have the patience to sit through two solid hours of Anderson Cooper chatting with Angelina Jolie about her many, many charitable works, so we've helpfully condensed the overlong interview down to the only part you care about: when she talks about her kids. Jolie somewhat shockingly reveals that the birth of Shiloh has factionalized her brood—Maddox has embraced his new sister, while jealous Zahara is still suspicious of the baby. This crucial admission reinforces that Jolie's use of strategic adoption is to correct the undue influence of the the newly-formed Cambodian-Biological bloc on intrafamilial policy, not color-balance her children for the purpose of more striking People cover shoots.

We've learned not to necessarily trust all of the celebrity-related news flowing out of the current It-birthing destination of Namibia, but we've never been able to resist the lure of a shadily sourced report from the depths of the internets, especially one that suggests that not everyone in the African nation was thrilled to play host to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie:

Perhaps finding the process of biological birth too frightening and physically taxing, Angelina Jolie has announced that the next addition to her multicultural brood will once again come via adoption. But while her earlier selections of Cambodian and Ethiopian refugees were clearly impulse buys made during her many missions of peace as a goodwill ambassador for the U.N., she and Brad Pitt will put greater care into their next choice:

· Because Warner Bros. knows that a new generation of moviegoers should get the chance to hear a newer, hipper marble-mouthed muscleman declare the purpose of his life is "to crush my enemies, see them driven before me, and to hear the lamentation of the women," they've charged Boaz Yakin with writing and directing a remake of Conan the Barbarian. We get the feeling Vin Diesel's phone is going ring any minute now. [Variety]
· Nielsen Media Research has pledged to start tracking programming viewership on cell phones, iPods, or whatever future platform people might use for their Deal or No Deal fix. [THR]
· Paramount and Steven Spielberg are developing a sci-fi movie for Spielberg to direct, concerning" a group of explorers who travel through a worm hole and into another dimension," a plot idea apparently not adequately addressed by scores of Star Trek episodes spanning several different series and four decades. [Variety]
· Pretty boy shingle fight! Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt's respective production entities leg-wrestle for the rights to the Max Brooks zombie book World War Z, but in the end, Pitt's team's superior lower-body strength triumphs. [THR]
· Comedy Central will finally air the "Lost Episodes" of Chappelle's Show as part of a new block of original programming on Sunday nights, perhaps signalling that they've finally given up all hope of getting Dave Chappelle to honor his contract. [Variety]

Over at TMZ.com, Harvey Levin, the Dominick Dunne of people who monitor the entrance and egress of various B-listers at Hollywood's nightclubs, taps into his network to find out about the paparazzi-deflecting countermeasures that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have set up at their Malibu home:

We knew there was a reason the African wildlife-modified manger scene in our front yard was shimmering extra luminously. In yet another World! Exclusive!, TMZ.com is reporting that the Chosen One is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, probably certainly among us already:

When word spread yesterday that Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and their little bundle of global-savior joy, Shiloh Nouvel, might soon be returning from Namibia to our local shores, we didn't spend much time asking why. There was far too much hosanna singing and "Welcome Home, Chosen One" giant-banner preparation to attend to for us to waste what precious time we had left wondering what might be hastening the trinity's return from their African love paradise. Not for the NY Times, however, who report that the "mystery disease" that popped up around the time of the birth and killed three is no longer a mystery: it's polio. And it's a full-fledged outbreak.

• Ted Turner sells his memoir for $4.5 million; David Carr sells his for $300k. [NYP]
• You shall bow before Katie and Anderson, because they are royalty. [National Journal]
• Brad is Esquire's October cover. Brad doesn't want to talk about whether he cheated on Jen. Did Esquire agree to restrictions? [WWD]

Feeling perhaps that $4.1 million was a tad high to pay for a few simple photographs of mother, father, and the Messianic product of a very non-immaculate conception, Angelina Jolie filled out her Chosen One media exclusive package by speaking approximately 4.1 million words on the subject to a reporter recently, as Keeper of the Sacred Seed, Brad Pitt, sat silently by her side. TMZ.com has video of the interview, which we imagine was immediately preceded by Jolie loudly inhaling air for 30 seconds. As for revelations, Jolie mentions she plans on celebrating (yes, celebrating. Got a problem with that?) World Refugee Day on June 20 right here in LA, exciting news for the local lame-limbed and frail. They need only figure out a way to avoid their security duty's sniper fire in order to get within the requisite 120-foot radius of the Chosen One's Malibu compound nursery, upon which they'll joyfully throw their crutches to the sand. (And unscrupulously choose later to hang onto their handicapped access parking tags.)

Because the entire universe would be sucked into an infinitely dense black hole the size of a double-sized, special wedding issue of Us Weekly should a single utterance from the mouths of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie go unrecorded by a roomful of wire service and tabloid reporters, the AP notes that the world's most famous new parents briefly emerged from their Namibian hidey hole to let us know that they are deeply committed to maintaining young Shiloh's illegitimacy by forgoing a meaningless marriage ritual:

The LAT commemorates the momentous occasion of the internet-wide leaking of the first image of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt (and, perhaps, the first legal threats made on the baby's behalf) by assembling a timeline of important moments in the eleven-day-old infant's existence. All the crucial milestones are covered, including the fated infidelity that first brought Mommy and Daddy together, the sex act that would enable the commingling of Hollywood's finest specimens' perfect genetic material, and, most crucially, the Chosen One's first photo shoot:

Defamer has exclusively obtained via another website this EXCLUSIVE! reproduction of the cover of a publication that has paid an extravagant fee (People reportedly paid $4.1 million at auction for the American rights) to publish the first photographs of pre-sainted celebrity offspring Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt and the two people whose selfless combination of their genetic material has ushered in a new era of peace, harmony, and perpetual, joyous high-fiving into a turbulent, evil-plagued planet. Mere moments after staring upon the Chosen One's image, we felt as if we were bathed in the same golden light that surrounds the infant's still-frail form, and our usual feelings of crippling insecurity and anxiousness were quickly supplanted by a general sense of warmth and well-being. That's all the secondhand grace we can endure for now, but later we plan on exposing a troubling mole with irregular borders to the young Shiloh's placid image, hoping that the blemish will shrink into benign nothingness and save us the copay for a trip to the dermatologist.

Today brings sad news for fans of gambling, George Clooney in a tuxedo, and Old-Vegas-by-way- of-New-Hollywood-millions charm, as the Las Vegas Review Journal reports that Clooney-backed Las Ramblas resort project has been sold to a developer (for a massive profit, we might add), at least temporarily ending the actor's casino-owning dreams. Too bad. We were really excited to see how an actual architect might interpret rumored early design consultant Brad Pitt's cocktail napkin vision for the property.

By now you've probably figured out that we cropped the word "photos" from the end of the headline, but would anyone really be that surprised to learn that Hollywood's Most Socially Responsible Couple (or, more accurately, Hollywood's Most Socially Responsible Actress And The Dude Who Goes Along With Whatever She Says Because The Sex Is Still Mind-Blowing) decided to set an almost unattainable example of selflessness for their less generous peers by auctioning off young Shiloh to the highest bidder, then donating the proceeds to their favorite charity? Even with their biological daughter becoming the exclusive property of People, they'd still have their two previous adorable adoptees upon whom to lavish their love, and should they ever get the urge to wipe out illiteracy in Chad, they could have a new baby ready to go to market in about nine months.

· Rachel Weisz and Darren Aronofsky succumb to the celebrity childbirth pandemic, welcoming a baby boy into the world last night. It must be so nice for a famous person not to have to worry that people think she was faking her pregnancy or that the baby wasn't actually fathered by her fiancé.
· Meanwhile, Maddox Jolie has already started being cruel to his new little sister. For shame, Maddy. Mommy and Braddy don't love you any less just because you're adopted.
· The always-reliable British tabloid press claims that Brad Pitt has tired of lion-watching in Namibia: "They are cooped up in the hotel, the food isn't great and he doesn't like the heat. He seems thoroughly depressed and I think he misses Malibu."
· There is something in Star Jones' bathroom nearly as frightening as the actual, naked Star Jones running a bath.

· "Bombastic" Marvel Studios head Avi Arad, the man responsible for making sure that even the most obscure Marvel comic book character had a movie deal somewhere in Hollywood, is leaving the company for a production deal, a move suspiciously timed in the wake of his selling his shares in the company for a reported $60 million. [Variety]
· The Super Bowl nipple fine stands! The FCC decides that it was correct in penalizing CBS $550,000 for the indecent exposure of Janet Jackson's armor-plated areola. [THR]
· The actual news in this story isn't nearly as important as the side-by-side pictures of Topher Grace and Imagine superproducer Brian Grazer, which looks like a worst case scenario rendering of what Grace might look like in 25 years. [Variety]
· CBS supreme leader Les Moonves reassures his network affiliates that they're focused on their on-air programs, promising that their new, token foray into internet content delivery, Innertube, would feature nothing better than low-cost, grainy webcam video of Moonves attending to various personal hygiene tasks or the occasional trip to a Mystic Tanning center. [THR]
· Brad Pitt will hardly have time to enjoy his new baby, as he has to shoot Ocean's 13 this summer and fulfill various promotional duties for Babel and his Jesse James movie in October. You know, if Angie lets him. [Variety]