The Spice Girls are to join tenor Luciano Pavarotti at a charity concert next month in Modena to raise money for children caught up in the Liberian civil war.
"The idea of singing a duet with the Spice Girls is intriguing," said Pavarotti. "Their music is choral, and it seems especially made to draw me in."
Thriller writer P.D. James has attacked the wave of grief that swept Britain after the death of Princess Diana.
In an interview with the French weekly L'Evenement du Jeudi, she said she found the hysteria "really very disturbing."
Comedian Bob Hope has cancelled his appearance at a 95th birthday celebration in Washington because of flu.
Hope, who celebrates his 95th birthday on May 29th, was knighted at the British embassy on Sunday.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu has finally, and to wild applause, received the freedom of Cape Town, the city where he preached for years against apartheid. Before the ceremony, several thousand people marched through the city centre to commemorate the march by 30,000 people in September 1989 that marked the beginning of the end of apartheid.
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been made an honorary citizen of his home town, Furth in southern Germany, from where his family fled in 1938 to avoid Nazi persecution.
One of Latin America's best known film-makers, the Cuban documentary director Santiago Alvarez, died yesterday in a Havana hospital, aged 79. One of his favourite phrases was: "Things are not how they happened, but as they are remembered."