Timberlake in love with Spears ‘from the start’

New York – Though Justin Timberlake says he no longer speaks with ex-girlfriend Britney Spears, he’s still rooting for her.

“I wish her well, and I want to see her win,” Timberlake tells GQ magazine in its August issue, on newsstands Tuesday.

“I don’t think you can ever count somebody like her out,” he says of Spears, who broke down in tears during a recent interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer. “Because she may appear one way, but she’s very clever.”

Timberlake, 25, fell for Spears, now 24 and pregnant with her second child with husband Kevin Federline, when they were preteens in “The Mickey Mouse Club.”

“I was in love with her from the start,” he tells the magazine. “I was infatuated with her from the moment I saw her.”

After a public romance, the couple broke up in 2002.

Today, he remembers the Spears Years as “so high school,” compared with his “adult” relationship with now-girlfriend Cameron Diaz, 33.

“For me, this time around, it’s been important to stay, at least as much as I can, out of the limelight,” he says. “And I think that’s made it more enriching.”

Tabloid to pay Kate Hudson for libelous statements

London – Kate Hudson has accepted libel damages from a supermarket tabloid that claimed she was dangerously thin.

The British edition of the National Enquirer has agreed to pay undisclosed damages and print an apology for an October 2005 article that claimed Hudson was “way too thin” and looked “like skin and bones,” Simon Smith, a lawyer for the 27-year-old actress, said Thursday.

The article – accompanied by a photo of a gaunt-looking Hudson – claimed her mother, Goldie Hawn, planned to confront her about her weight. Both Hudson and Hawn denied the claim.

Osment hospitalized after flipping Saturn

La Canada Flintridge, Calif. – Haley Joel Osment was hospitalized after he apparently lost control of his car while heading to his Los Angeles area home, authorities said.

Osment, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role as a boy who could see dead people in “The Sixth Sense,” was driving a 1995 Saturn about 1 a.m. Thursday when the car collided with a brick pillar and flipped, said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Greg Sisneros.

The 18-year-old actor was talking after the crash, Sisneros said. He had been alone in the car and was taken to a hospital in Pasadena.