Lindsay Lohan celebrated her sister’s birthday with “champagne” and fine food.

The actress’ little sister Aliana Lohan turned 18 today.

To honour Aliana’s official entry into adulthood, Lindsay hosted an intimate get-together with mother Dina, younger brothers Michael Jr and Cody, and friends at Beaumarchais restaurant in New York City Wednesday night.

Michael Jr was also celebrating his birthday and the group seemed to get along swimmingly.

“It’s clear Lindsay and Michael Jr are very close,” an eyewitness told Life & Style magazine. “They were talking a lot and Michael had his arm around her at one point. She seemed to be confiding in him.”

Partygoers ordered from a prix fixe menu that included truffle gnocchi and tuna tartare. Alcohol was flowing at the table.

“Lindsay ordered a bunch of glasses of champagne for the table and switched to drinking that,” the source explained.

Lindsay escaped for a cigarette break with her mom before dessert.

The star then snapped photographs with sister Aliana before asking the staff to prepare a cake and champagne sparklers for their table.

“The staff brought out cake and two brownie sundaes while everyone sang [Happy Birthday],” the witness went on. “Lindsay toasted with champagne.”

Although there has been controversy surrounding Aliana’s thin frame in recent months, witnesses assure that the model ate a hearty meal.

“[Aliana] had a lot of bread, a big salad and a bunch of her brownie sundae,” the source said.

Lindsay and Aliana’s father Michael Lohan was not in attendance.

Lindsay Lohan, who was scheduled to return from her hit-and-miss Hawaiian vacation today, missed her flight back to Los Angeles that would have had her back in town in time for a scheduled taping of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

But more importantly, Lohan’s due in court bright and early tomorrow. She doesn’t need a passport to get back to the mainland, so what can the problem be—and will it keep her from her date with Judge Stephanie Sautner?!

“Lindsay had a travel-related issue arise that took a few hours to sort out,” rep Steve Honig tells E! News. “It has been resolved and she will be back in Los Angeles in time for her court appearance.”

Phew!

A source also tells us that Lohan, after missing a morning flight, is booked on an afternoon flight and hopes to be back tonight.

The community-servicing actress is due in court Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. for another checkup as to how she’s been handling the terms of her probation.

Sautner ordered her to complete at least 12 days of work at the L.A. County morgue by her hearing date—and Lohan’s done that, so we’re not expecting too much tap-dancing on the part of Playboy’s latest cover girl.

Is Miley Cyrus becoming a little bit too much like Lindsay Lohan? Some people think that’s what’s happening–and fast, too. Does it have anything to do with that supposed ‘stoner’ joke she played on her birthday?

According to a report from Hollywood Life, a celebrity image expert doesn’t think it was a joke at all, and that one day soon fans will be reading about Cyrus getting caught with pot in her purse–or maybe even worse. The expert, Michael Sands, says the former Hannah Montana star is headed down a ‘dark, dangerous path.’

“Miley is fast becoming the Lindsay Lohan of her era,” Sands says.

He is also afraid that her recent ‘stoner’ comment is akin to an endorsement for smoking pot, and that parents of many of Miley Cyrus’s fans may not like that very much.

“Miley has an odd way of showing she is an adult. Many folks complained that her adult wardrobe change was over the top, but this takes the cake. She broadcast to the world she likes pot,” Sands says. “I think parents won’t let their kids buy Miley’s products because of this.”

Others, however, feel that because Miley has way more support–she has a strong family and a respectable boyfriend–that she likely won’t plummet to the depths where Lindsay Lohan has been. Still any kind of decline is bad, and many (most of all her family) would hate to even think of that as a possibility.

Do you think Miley Cyrus is heading down the same road that Lindsay Lohan has traveled/is traveling? Do you think her family–most especially dad Billy Ray Cyrus–will intervene?

No, Miley Cyrus’s actions haven’t all indicated wise decisions, but she really doesn’t seem like she’s en route to the very bottom of the celebrity drug abyss. Lindsay Lohan is already there, desperately trying to claw her way back up to the sunlight.

Will Miley Cyrus become the next Lindsay Lohan?

Lindsay Lohan’s bad luck with rehab may have just gotten a little bit worse.

Notorious bad girl Courtney Love, 47, tells the latest issue of Details that she has taken it upon herself to help LiLo sober up.

“I’ve taken up Lohan because nobody else will,” the Hole singer revealed. “[She's] further down the line than I was, because there was no [gossip websites like] TMZ then.”

Love may think she’s Lohan’s mentor, however a rep for the actress says that’s far from the truth.

“Courtney is not, nor has she ever been, Lindsay’s sobriety coach. This story is completely untrue,” Lohan’s rep told the Daily News.

Love, who herself went through a 12-step program in order to kick her drug habit, said back in 2008 that her own sobriety coach, Orlando Bloom, worked wonders.

“We chant every day,” she said then of being sober since 2005. “The 12-step program demands that you have a spiritual practice that you do daily.

“I don’t mind talking about it because it has changed my entire life, changed everything – restructured my body, restructured my physicality. Truly I can, not all the time, but I can take joy at really sh—y situations.”

In terms of helping Lohan, 25, who has recently been in and out of rehab five times, Love thinks the best solution would be a scare tactic.

And the best way to scare the “Mean Girls” star straight, she reasoned, would be by using herself as an example.

“I went up to Lindsay’s room one time and there was a show on called ’101 Celebrity Oops’ and I am like every other one, you know – boobs out, legs everywhere, throwing s–t at Madonna, you know, whatever. I’m like ‘Lindsay, look! Drugs are bad!’”

Love told The Fix earlier this year that her drug addiction was a direct result of Kurt Cobain’s issues with fame.

“Before I met Kurt, I was more or less clean, but then Kurt earned his first million and decided to become a junkie, and I decided to become a junkie along with him,” she said in May. “That’s the co-dependent side of me.”

Is Lindsay Lohan flashing those newly pearly whites, and possibly a little bit more, at the camera right this second?

The embattled starlet is taking part in a top-secret photo shoot today and tomorrow and E! News is hearing whispers that it’s for a spread in an upcoming issue of Playboy.

Hey, it worked for one of Lohan’s idols, Marilyn Monroe. But would she dare to go all-the-way bare?

Well, that would be something, wouldn’t it?

Lohan was spotted heading into a Beverly Hills mansion, purportedly the scene of the photo shoot, earlier today.

But at this point, her rep, Steve Honig, isn’t ready to admit that Lohan is playing ball for Playboy —but he’s not denying it either.

“I can neither confirm nor deny at this time,” Honig tells E! News. Lohan herself didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“We don’t comment on rumors about who may or may not be posing for the magazine…if anything changes, I’ll be sure to let you know,” added a rep for Playboy.

Meanwhile, a source close to Lohan is under the impression that the L.A. County morgue’s most famous volunteer is collecting a pretty fat paycheck for her posing services.

With movie bosses running scared and few offers on the table, it’s hardly surprising that 25-year-old Lindsay Lohan’s struggling to make ends meet.

So what better way to earn a few dollars than by writing a tell-all autobiography?

A close friend tells Now: ‘It’ll be a no-holds-barred account of her drink and drug scandals, her relationship with Sam Ronson, partying with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears – and her secret affairs with Hollywood hunks.’

Li-Lo’s book is set to lift the lid on what it’s like living in the spotlight from the age of three, when she was first signed to Ford Models.

Lindsay Lohan has to go to anti-shoplifting classes? What do they teach you, how to pay for stuff?
—Alice, via the inbox

Indeed, part of Lohan’s penance for that necklace-napping incident involves taking a class on how not to steal stuff. I was curious about what goes on in those gatherings, too…

… so I called Barbara Staib, director of the communications at the National Association of Shoplifting Prevention. Staib’s group offers programs for offenders, including court-ordered classes similar to the one Lohan may have to take. She says the program focuses on treatment, getting first-time offenders to realize why they steal and why they shouldn’t do it again.

“The classes we run are designed to help people if they are truly petty theft offenders, not professional shoplifters or people who shoplift to support a drug habit,” Staib tells me. “They’re shoplifting because of something going on with their lives, or something they perceive to be missing from their lives.”

In that sense, the classes are much like the programs offered to recovering alcoholics, gamblers, overeaters and the like.

The classes also make it clear how damaging shoplifting can be, and not just for the offenders who may have to go to jail or pay steep fines.

“In most cases, [offenders] view the stores as a big corporate entities with millions of billions of dollars,” Staib says. “But you’re also hurting individuals. People who work at these stores could lose their jobs because of your actions.”

As for Lohan, let’s remember that she lives in a rarified world. Celebrities routinely leave stores with merchandise with the understanding that their manager will soon call with a credit card number, or that the item will be put on a celebrity’s tab, or that the item is a gift, or a loan.

If that’s the source of Lohan’s theft, it would be addressed in a program like this, Staib says. “That’s a major sense of entitlement,” she notes. “She would have to figure out, why she thinks this way, why she thinks the rules don’t apply to her.”

As for cost, such programs, which usually involve a home study component and possibly one day-long class, usually set an offender back no more than $85. Let’s hope Lohan can still afford to spend that much.

Lindsay Lohan has her marching orders, but is she marching to the beat of her own drum?

The starlet was warned in July that it was time to start taking care of business regarding the terms of her probation, or else she would wind up behind bars. That would probably mean no products to promote, no celebrity weddings to attend and no nights out (eek!), so Lohan signed up for counseling and ratcheted up the community service.

Or did she?!

A report today stated that Lohan is still way behind when it comes to the 480 hours of community service she was ordered to perform, and that could mean trouble when she goes before a judge again next month.

We’ve seen pics of Lohan headed to a women’s shelter to do some good, but…that was awhile ago, and we’ve seen more pics of her not doing that since.

Smile for your booking photos, kids, because this rumor is…

So false!

“I’ve done tons of DWC community service,” Lohan told E! News. “You guys are way off par on your inadequate and negative assumptions.” (Hey, we were just checking on someone else’s negative assumptions!)

Lohan’s rep also assured us that all was on the up and up.

“Lindsay has been performing community service at the Downtown Women’s Center for months now,” the rep said. “There are dozens of paparazzi shots of her going in and out of the facility. How could anyone think she is not doing her community service?”

Well, great, but Lohan’s camp had best get her to the morgue on time, too.

In addition to 360 hours at the DWC, the actress must also work for 120 hours at the L.A. County Morgue—a frequently utilized deterrent when it comes to young folks on probation for drinking- and drug-related crimes.

Lohan’s latest sentence, which also included 35 days under house arrest, comes from repeatedly violating her probation stemming from dual DUI busts in 2007.

As of July 21, she had completed 33 hours of community service, which has to all be done by April 2012.

Her next progress report hearing is Oct. 19. Here’s hoping the judge makes some positive assumptions.

Lindsay Lohan has resorted to begging for jobs and obviously saw Ryan Seacrest as a good place to start. The disgraced starlet attended Kim Kardashian’s weddding, but spent more time pestering Ryan Seacrest for work than actually enjoying the party!

Lilo is reportedly looking to land a reality show so that she can be an A-list celeb like her friend, Kim Kardashian. Will that ever happen? For some reason, Lindsay Lohan’s life isn’t as appealing as Kim Kardshian’s!

“Lindsay was working just as hard as she was partying,” a source said. “She was pressing Ryan hard to dream up a reality show concept for her. Lindsay sees how Ryan turned Kim into an A-list star and she wants him to do the same thing for her.”

What did Ryan say to Lilo’s insistent begging? Nothing. He reportedly rolled his eyes every time she turned away and laughed behind her back. Even though Lindsay might have been a pain, that wasn’t too nice of Ryan!

Will Lindsay ever get her career back on track? It seems like she’s encountering one obstacle after an another lately!

It seems like hardly a day passes without Lindsay Lohan getting herself into some kind of mischief.

Yesterday was no exception as the Mean Girls actress had another brush with the law – this time being slapped with a parking ticket.

Lindsay left her monster Cadillac Escalade in front of a fire hydrant in Beverly Hills as she dashed to the Byron and Tracy hair salon – and the illegally parked vehicle was soon spotted by a traffic warden.

While the offence will cost Lohan a lot less that her string of drunk driving charges, she’ll have to pay around $70 for the careless act as it is a strict violation of the city’s traffic laws and considered to be a major safety hazard in case of an emergency.

Along with the parking ticket, the troubled actress should be worrying about her weight.

The bleach blonde 25-year-old had been looking healthier in recent months but has suddenly plummeted again, prompting concern that she may be obsessively dieting.

Lohan’s collarbones, ribs and shoulder blades were clearly visible under her super-short mini dress yesterday, that also revealed her skinny legs in platform wedges.

The actress has become known for her fluctuating weight, and this is not the first time the star has sparked concerns over her health.

After her weight plummeted in 2005 and she was admitted to hospital, Lindsay admitted she had become ‘too thin’.

In a 2006 interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Lindsay said she realised she was too skinny when she watched herself host U.S. comedy sketch show Saturday Night Live.
She told the publication: ‘My arms were disgusting. I had no arms.

‘My sister, she was scared. My brother called me, crying.

‘I was sick. Everyone was scared. And I was scared too.

‘I had people sit me down and say, “You’re going to die if you don’t take care of yourself.”‘

Lindsay’s Mean Girls co-star Tina Fey, a comedienne on Saturday Night Live, said: ‘(My co-star) Amy Poehler was good and tough on her saying, “You’re too skinny … I’m not going to ask you why, but you’re too skinny and I don’t like it.”‘