Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton are to take part in a tribute record to Princess Di- ana being organised by Richard Branson. They will be joined by Phil Collins, Annie Lennox and Peter Gabriel on the album, to be released at Christmas and to raise money for charities supported by the princess.
Brookside's Barry Grant is back and more evil than ever. Actor Paul Usher, who left the TV soap in February 1995 amid reports he was angry at attempts to soften Barry's character, said: "One of the reasons I agreed to come back is because Barry is back to the way I thought he should be developing. He is far more interesting to play as a bad boy."
The CIA built a model of one of Mao Zedong's ears to help the agency determine whether the late Chinese leader was alive or dead, the Washington Post reported yesterday. "As I understand it, in his later years, we didn't know if Mao was alive or dead," Kenny Lane, a former CIA employee, was quoted as saying. "Every once in a while his photo would show up in the newspaper, but the only thing you could see was his head. He was always in a river up to his neck," said Lane. "You can identify a person by their ear, so they had us build this 12inch ear to figure out whether it was him or a stand-in."