With rumors circulating that Madonna and Guy Ritchie”s marriage is on the rocks, the couple are trying their level best to rekindle their romance.

The Queen of Pop is going all out to silence the skeptics by organizing a romantic, games night with her film director hubby. Guy has already scored triple points by filling the couple’s 8million pounds London townhouse with red roses.

Madge, meanwhile, has planned a candlelit dinner and told her staff to take the night off. “Madonna and Guy have both had hectic schedules of late so there’s no denying that they’ve spent a lot of time apart,” the Mirror quoted a source, as saying. “While Madonna’s been in LA promoting her new album, Hard Candy,Guy’s been stuck in London on post-production for his next movie, Rock N Rolla. But they’re now back together and relishing proper family time. Madonna has gone all-out to organize a special evening this week, culminating in a romantic dinner and a games night. And once the children are tucked up in bed, Madonna has planned a sexy surprise for Guy in the shape of a new satin Basque,” the source added.

Madonna’s US publicist denied the break-up rumors, saying: “I am delighted to confirm that Mr and Mrs Guy Ritchie remain happily married. All is well and wonderful in the Ritchie household.”

Float like a butterfly, sing like a bee… here’s Madonna proving she’s still The Greatest.

As the Material Girl approaches her 50th birthday this September she shows there’s still plenty of fight left in her.

Far from being on the ropes, she vowed to “kick all of their asses” as she promoted her new single with Justin Timberlake - who is young enough to be her son.

Wearing five-inch heels and boxing gloves, she said middle age was not going to slow her down.

“You’ve got a lot more experience and you tend to not make the same mistakes,” she tells Interview magazine. “It’s great to feel experienced. But I also work with people who are half my age, so I feel like I have to work even harder to keep up with everybody - but the fact of the matter is I can kick all of their asses.”

In a bizarre move, Madge has decided to release her single tomorrow as the theme tune to a shampoo ad, rather than in record shops or online.

The record - Four Minutes To Save The World - is about fighting poverty and disease.

And as boxer Muhammad Ali once said: “A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”

Well that’s certainly not something anyone could ever accuse Madonna of…

They’ve called her everything from a creative cretin to a media whore (if not a literal one). So there must be scores of folks who consider it the greatest desecration to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame yet that Monday its arbiters will usher into its heady ranks Miss “How-Dare-She” herself: Madonna.

On her first try yet.

Foes will insist that Madonna’s fast-track entry has only to do with sales. Or with notoriety. Or with corporate conflicts of interest (especially since the hall has nearly as many as a New Jersey politician).

They’ll say Madonna’s anointment has to do with anything but the one element that actually most helped grease her way in: the music.

The fantastic range of distractions that surround that music - some ridiculous, some delightful - have obscured this all along.

But if you push aside the headlines, the pictures, the fashion, the scandals and the gossip, and give a fair listen to the 11 full studio albums Madonna has produced in the last 25 years, you may be surprised by what you hear.

The catalogue speaks eloquently of her achievements - from watershed innovations to savvy tweaks of genre to the basic pursuit of a great hook and an irresistible groove. Sometimes Madonna’s greatest accomplishments have even come down to the thing she has been most loudly ridiculed for: her singing.

No, she’s not Aretha Franklin. She’s not even close to Cyndi Lauper, the singer who, it was predicted, would leave Madonna in the dust by the next album when they both began in 1983. But Madonna has a quality that makes her vocals a key part of her songs’ overall swirl of delight.

She has had this from the start, even when her voice was a mere yap of a thing. In her earliest single, the club-magnet “Everybody,” she had an insistence in her delivery - a kind of zeal - as well as an exuberance in her tone, that made up for any lack of cri de coeur.

The next single, “Burnin’ Up,” went further. Its tight riff was fired by a punky fervor. Better, the song’s blaring guitar work now serves as a swift rebuke to those who get too literal about the “rock” part of this Hall of Fame thing. But then, Madonna would hardly need to blare six-stringed instruments all day long - or renounce her dance music or theater roots - to prove she’s got what we like to call “the rock ‘n’ roll spirit.” She is, after all, from Detroit.

Her first two singles were just the proverbial peak of the iceberg. Her full debut (”Madonna”) crammed in so many winning songs, of such rhythmic thrust, you could fill a whole night at a dance club and please its most finicky denizens by playing nothing but its remixes. “Holiday,” also on that starry debut, remains one of this decade’s most electrifying dance hits, while the singles “Lucky Star” and “Borderline” gave Madonna a hold on pure pop.