Rock `n' roll pioneer Carl Perkins, whose song Blue Suede Shoes and lightning-quick guitar-playing influenced Elvis Presley and the Beatles, has died. He was aged 65.
Perkins died in Nashville, Tennessee, from complications from three strokes he had suffered in November and December.
The tall, broad-shouldered Perkins won famed as a proponent of "rockabilly", a cross of rhythm-and-blues and country music that came out of Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, in the mid-1950s. He also wrote hits in rock `n' roll and country music. A near-fatal traffic accident in 1956, coupled with the rise of Presley, kept him from becoming a bigger star.
Perkins wrote and recorded the 1956 hit Blue Suede Shoes, which Presley made later. Perkins's version sold two million copies. After hearing a boy telling his date at a high school prom "Don't step on my blue suede shoes!" Perkins went home and wrote the song.
Perkins wrote Dixie Fried and Honey Don't, Matchbox and Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby, which the Beatles recorded.
A Paris court fined Brigitte Bardot (63) yesterday for inciting racial hatred in published comments on massacres of civilians in Algeria.
The court said Bardot, in criticism of the ritual slaughter of sheep for the Aid-al-Kebir Muslim festival, had incited racial hatred by blaming the whole Muslim community for Algeria's massacres. She was fined 20,000 francs (£2,200) and ordered to pay the cost of printing the verdict in two popular dailies as well as the far-right newspaper Present.
Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday Africa should be forgiven its debt to mark the millennium.
George Carey said the approaching 2,000th Christian anniversary should be treated as a decisive moment when something could be done for Africa. He called on creditor nations to "have the moral courage to take the chains off Africa by relieving her of her burden of unpayable debt".