Although her publicist is still keeping busy making denials (I assume in an attempt to increase publicity surrounding the event), as E! Online says, “we’ll just have to settle for the word of the child’s father and a Malawi village chief and the director of the orphanage and an African judge and a pastor and the secretary for the Ministry for Gender and Child Welfare.”

The deputy registrar at a local courthouse tells Reuters that “Madonna and the husband filed their papers for an interim order this morning at Lilongwe High Court, and the judge gave the ruling at 2 p.m. this afternoon.”

The lucky little man is one-year-old David Banda, whose father placed him in an orphanage after his mother died days after his birth due to complications. “I am very happy,” says the father. “As you can see, there is poverty in my village. I know he will be very happy in America.” Although Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie, currently live in Britain (Duh, isn’t it obvious from her accent? Madonna was clearly not born and raised in Detroit), I suppose it’s still a small step up from a Malawi orphanage. Congratulations to The Ritchies, and to the luckiest adoptee since Baby Suri!

Despite her publicist’s insistence that she does not plan to adopt an AIDS-orphaned African child, Madonna continues her AIDS-orphaned African child sight-seeing tour in Malawi, which I’m told is kind of like an African safari, but, instead of admiring elephants and zebras and leaving them in peace in their natural habitat, you admire human children who have lost any remnant of hope for a life involving love and regular meals, briefly flash that hope in front of them, and then leave with it in a Hummer which, if sold only for parts, could feed and shelter each of them well into adolescence. It’s the next tourist hot spot! You heard it here first!

• Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston broke up over the phone.
• Madonna selects an African child to adopt with the same obsessive attention to detail and God complex that make her live performances such extraordinary spectacles.

• Mischa Barton and Nicole Richie are dunzo. Barton says Richie’s “fickle,” by which she of course means “starving.”

• Having properly atoned for a year of sins on Yom Kippur, Mel Gibson’s drinking again.
• Ashlee Simpson denies hooking up with Nick Carter while he was with Paris Hilton, using her own special brand of eloquence: “No! That is so random. When I heard that, I was dying laughing.”