Photo by: David Silpa / UPI Photo / Landov; Gregg DeGuire / WireImage

Brad Pitt says he is still friends with ex-wife Jennifer Aniston – and handled their breakup the best way he knew how.

"Jen and I still maintain a deep friendship and have a lot of life together that isn’t erased in any way," the actor tells V magazine of the couple’s four-and-a-half year union, which ended in 2005.

"I don’t know how better to have handled [the split]. My view was, this was no one’s business in the end – at least in matters of the heart," he says. "The thing guiding me then was, you don’t know how many days you have, and you need life to be everything you need it to be."

Despite the intense attention to the couple, Pitt says he and Aniston did their best to ignore the frenzy. "The most important thing about that time was for Jen and me to figure out if – how do I put it? – if we didn’t want to go on without any outside influence. Is this where we got off? Have we taken this as far as we wanted to go?"

Adds Pitt, who now has four children with Angelina Jolie: "Those questions had to be answered before an attraction to Angie could be answered."

Of his relationship with Jolie, 32, Pitt, 43, recalls fondly their time together when he was in Canada filming The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which recently debuted at the Venice Film Festival.

"Angie was pregnant. It was a very nice time for us," he says. "We stayed out in the woods by a river. We were in a big log cabin. So personally, it was a magical time."

Jolie and Pitt with their family Photo by: Pacific Coast News

Despite increasingly shrill gossip that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are heading for a split, "The rumors are totally and completely false," a source close to the family tells PEOPLE in its new issue, on newsstands Friday.

"There are no problems whatsoever," the source adds. "Things are really good."

In fact, those who know the couple best say their only problem at the moment is the rumors themselves: that Jolie is fighting with Pitt, suffers from an eating disorder and is feuding with Pitt’s parents, Bill and Jane.

Pitt’s brother Doug, 40, who joined his parents and sister Julie at nephew Maddox’s sixth-birthday party in early August in Santa Barbara, Calif., dismisses the speculation with a chuckle – and Jolie, 32, has apparently done her best to brush off the more frivolous claims, including one that she angrily threw wine at Pitt, 43, while on vacation in France.

"Ridiculous," says a Jolie-Pitt source.

For more on Angelina and Brad, including photos and details about their life together, pick up the latest PEOPLE

Jolie and Pitt Photo by: Marcel Thomas / FilmMagic

You’ve heard about Angelina Jolie’s good deeds around the globe – now add "roadside assistance" to her list.

Celebrity photographer James Ambler (who works for Splash News and Pictures) was continuing his routine of following the A Mighty Heart star around New York on his bike, when he suddenly ran over a nail and popped a flat on his two-wheeler.

Next thing he knew, Jolie’s car stopped and the driver asked Ambler if he wanted a ride.

The stunned shutterbug – whom Jolie as well as her kids had already nicknamed "Lance," after cycling champ Lance Armstrong – then heard from Jolie herself, who said from the car, "Come on Lance, hop in."

(To see Ambler talking about his experience with Jolie, see his interview on Splash’s site.)

Inside the vehicle, Jolie told him she appreciated the space some of the photographers were giving her children, he said. Asked afterwards how much time he actually spent in the car with her, Ambler replied that he didn’t really know. "Time stood still," he said.

And as for how he’d describe his hostess on wheels: "Really down to earth, really lovely," says Ambler – who soon found himself in a brand new position: as the target of the paparazzi lenses, for having had a brush with fame.

Jolie and Pax Photo by: Lester Cohen / WireImage; STR / AFP / Getty

Angelina Jolie is bringing her new son home.

The actress left Vietnam Wednesday in a private jet with 3-year-old Pax Thien and is en route to the U.S., the Associated Press reports.

Jolie, 31, adopted the boy – her fourth child – from an orphanage Ho Chi Minh City last week, and later went to the capital city of Hanoi to pick up a visa allowing him to enter the United States.

Mother and son dodged hoards of paparazzi on their way to leaving the country via a Gulfstream jet from Noi Bai Airport, the AP reports.

With such intense interest in the adoption, Jolie told a local newspaper last week that she "would like to say I’m sorry for bringing this into Pax’s life."

Once in the U.S., Pax will join new siblings Maddox, 5 (who accompanied Jolie to Vietnam), Zahara, 2, and 10-month-old Shiloh, as well as Jolie’s partner, Brad Pitt.

Jolie and Pitt Photo by: Jennifer Mitchell / Splash News

For Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the holidays are a time for giving – on a global scale. They spent Christmas with refugees in Costa Rica and now they’re making good on their New Year’s resolution: to intensify their efforts to aid Cambodia.

Back in November, during a stealth family visit to the homeland of their son Maddox, 5, the couple pledged to expand the scope of the Maddox Jolie-Pitt Project (MJP), which Jolie launched more than four years ago as a conservation initiative.

They’ve donated millions of dollars and teamed up with Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and his antipoverty organization Millennium Promise on an economic-development program in northwestern Cambodia. Seventy MJP workers will work with Sachs’s group on activities – including rice planting, distribution of bed nets to fight malaria, school meal programs and providing medicines for clinics – to create Asia’s first Millennium Village.

"We have learned so much," Jolie, who was awarded honorary Cambodian citizenship in 2004, tells PEOPLE, "and I think we are on the right track."

During their stay in November, the family also traveled to the capital city of Phnom Penh to visit the Maddox Chivan Children’s Center, a facility to care for kids affected by tuberculosis and AIDS, which was opened this past February with substantial financial assistance from Jolie.

"They arrived and just couldn’t hold enough kids," says Anne Goldfeld, cofounder of the Cambodian Health Committee, which operates the center. "They were very natural, very real, very respectful and very interested. We wouldn’t have been able to do it without her."

In the coming year, Jolie and Pitt also hope to boost Cambodia’s economic development by encouraging tourism. "We hope people will travel to Cambodia," says Jolie. "The people there have overcome so much."

No matter what, Cambodia has a permanent place in their own hearts. "It was incredibly moving," says Pitt, "to visit my son’s country."

To find out more about efforts supported by Pitt and Jolie, go to millenniumpromise.org, cambodianhealthcommittee.org and tourismcambodia.com.