THIS WEEK:

Bird is the word...paws up...let's get ramblin'...

• The plot thickened when news surfaced that Super Bowl bird-flipper M.I.A. has been estranged from her fiancé, heir to the Seagram’s fortune Benjamin Bronfman, and her two-year-old son Ikhyd for six months.

• Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley star in this new movie about the end of the world, a comedy version of Children of Men:

• Apple, which at different points in its history borrowed money from Intel and Bill Gates, is now worth more than Micorsoft and Google combined.

• Google hammered another nail in Flash’s coffin when it confirmed that it wouldn’t support the application on Android or Chrome.

• Lady Gaga’s Little Monsters are getting their own social network which looks like a Pinerest rip-off.

• Jay Z and Kanye West released the seizure-inducing video for Ni**as in Paris which achieves a pretty epic effect using high-speed cameras and one of the cornier video filters:

• West’s tour rider leaked, ridiculously requesting that “any drivers ferrying him are clad in 100 per cent cotton: No man-made fibers.”

• In case it wasn’t already obvious on which side the federal government’s bread is buttered, banks involved in the “robo-signing” foreclosure crisis negotiated a sweetheart deal where they’ll pay 1 million former homeowners a paltry $2000 each. Nice job government.

• In his bid to cave equally to all constituencies, Obama added another layer of complications to women’s reproductive rights.

• Our czars in Congress passed a bill that could place up to 30,000 drones in American skies by 2020.

• Young Adult director Jason Reitman is set to re-create Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs with an all-black cast.

• Natalie Portman is set to star in two films by Oscar-nominated Tree of Life director Terrence Malick. Both films will hopefully make more sense than Tree of Life.

• Wedding Crashers Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are reuniting for a film called Interns where they’ll play laid-off company men who compete against younger, smarter college graduates at a dotcom.

• The new Spider-Man trailer recasts the web-slinger as a darker, troubled-teen vigilante with a mean streak: