Extra! Extra! In the spirit of that dead-tree medium I love so well, but by means of this here “new media” vehicle, I hereby offer the Hot News Flashes of the day:

1. Oprah is not gay. In this month’s O magazine, Oprah informs a breathless public that she and her best friend Gayle King are not gay. Got that? Not. Gay. Yes, they just did just complete a cross-country, girls-only road trip a la Thelma and Louise. No, they did not go in a pickup truck with a mattress in the back. Case closed.

2. The president said “shit.” With his mouth full of a freshly buttered roll. To an impossibly well-spoken Englishman. Two observations here: (a) Bush’s table manners are clearly no better than those of his puking-on-the-Japanese-prime-minister father, and (b) if any network TV station broadcasts the tape, they could be fined up to $325,000 for broadcasting the word “shit.” Really.

3. Just like Al Gore said, the world is melting. A hundred degrees along the East Coast today. Hot, hot, hot, and no relief in sight. Gore appears to be right about this global warming thing – yet when I watched the universally lauded “An Inconvenient Truth” this week, in which critics say he reveals a more relaxed, likeable side, I found him as annoying as ever. Please stop using little Al’s accident and your sister’s death as political props, big Al. Please.

4. Lance Armstrong was a doper. No, this wasn’t really in the news this week, but I’ve just finally become convinced that it’s true. For one thing, there are just too many small incriminating factors, such as allegations from both his former masseuse and former personal assistant that they saw evidence of doping. His winning times over his competitors were consistently huge. And his improvement over is own best time when he took up cycling again after cancer treatment was enormous. As inspiring as his return from cancer is, and as much good as he’s done with the Livestrong foundation, I think he found some sneaky way to dope without getting caught. Sorry.

5. Vladimir Putin revealed that he kissed a young boy’s stomach in part because he “felt an urge to squeeze him like a kitten.” This falls into the “too weird for any rational explanation” category. Putin, the tough-guy, former KGB, black-belt Russian dictator, pulled up a little boy’s shirt and kissed his bare stomach during a random meet-n-greet at the Kremlin. I’m not saying there’s anything sinister about it, because I suspect there wasn’t. But isn’t it kind of like that dream you have where you’re walking around the school halls naked by mistake – except that Putin somehow actually did this, right in front of cameras?

6. More evidence that the New York Times is — no, not a tool of the terrorists, but the best newspaper in the country. Let the conservatives howl, moan and bash; the Times has consistently excellent writing and reporting, as evidenced by this fantastic story from Sunday’s paper, as well as the accompanying multimedia presention on nytimes.com. Oh, to be the teenaged Florence in 1930’s New York!