"Iran today is a revolution in search of its Yeltsin … Without leadership, demonstrators will take to the street only so many times." Charles Krauthammer says they need a Boris Yeltsin, an establishment figure with newly revolutionary credentials and legitimacy calling for the abolition of the old political order.

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Kudos to our great wOw queen Whoopi Goldberg who covered herself with glory playing an addiction recovery sponsor in Benjamin Bratt’s A&E drama "The Cleaner." She was described therein as being "like a Nubian queen living in a funky old beach bungalow." Bratt adds, "Talk about an iconic persona. I think over the years people have forgotten what an amazing actor she is!"

And remember, not too many months ago, Whoopi told me that she adores making movies and yearns for good great roles in the future. This is a woman who won the Academy Award for "Ghost." And she is also the woman who righted the boat of "The View" and has put that show on a more even keel.

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Gossip redux: Scientists at the University of Michigan are now saying that "social bonding" creates happier, healthier levels of progesterone.

So gossip is good for women. (It’s good for men, too, but naturally they’d go the selective route intimating that only females gossip.)

The university’s research journal says they are "the first to show gossiping and chatting" are good for you. The "first?!" Hmmm, I wrote an entire chapter about how gossip is good for people and this ran as the foreword to my memoir Natural Blonde, published in 2000.

In it I said gossip and talking among ourselves helps us to sort out what we know, what we believe and what we feel morally. Gossip is also one of the last of the egalitarian inexpensive ways to have fun. It doesn’t cost anything and anyone can do it. And also, it makes us feel slightly powerful because gossip and the exchange of news is more exciting, more interesting than just uttering platitudes and talking about the weather. So, I concluded that gossip is the tawdry jewel in the crown of free speech.

Maybe some of you have read the P.D. James novel A Taste for Death, wherein her hero, the detective Dalgliesh, says, "Gossip was like any other commodity in the marketplace. You received it only if you had something of value to give. And he liked the sense of power which gossip gave him. Perhaps it reduced the vast amorphous city to manageable proportions for him."

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Reading the international press: They say 183 of the Members of Parliament have been shamed into giving back around $800,000 for the outrageous expenses they have charged to the people of Great Britain. That’s about a third of the MPs who have done the right thing …

"Mary Poppins" has beaten "Harry Potter" to the title of best family film of all time in a survey done by the biscuit company Oreo. Other runners up were "The Wizard of Oz," "Bambi," "E.T.," "Star Wars" and "Grease." (But Harry had his inning; he won for the best scene in a movie, meaning his discovery of the secret platform at King’s Cross Station.)

The Vatican is now making money from King Henry VIII’s adultery with Anne Boleyn. The priceless document that led to his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his break with Rome has been reproduced in detail by the Vatican and is on sale 500 years after the original was shut away in the archives. The copies cost about $71,000 apiece. They will sell mainly to museums and libraries.