LISA LEESON (27), wife of disgraced banker Nick, has started her new career as a stewardess with Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic Airways.
Her job will mean that, eventually, she will get free flights to the Far East so she can visit her husband, who is serving 6 1/2 years in a Singapore jail for his part in the collapse of Barings Bank.
Billionaire Bill Gates is to lend the only Leonardo da Vinci manuscript still in private hands for a world museum tour.
The 72 page manuscript, known as The Codex, in which the Renaissance genius predicted the inventions of the submarine and steam engine, will first go on display at New York's Museum of Natural History from next October.
The 490 year old document was bought by Gates at an auction for $30.8 million.
Roelof "Pik" Botha, once the longest serving foreign minister in the world and currently the outgoing South African minister of mineral and energy affairs, is to retire from politics at the end of June.
His spokesman said Botha (64) will also step down as leader of the National Party (NP) in the central province of Gauteng, when the NP leaves President Nelson Mandela's coalition government of national unity on June 30th.