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Film director Franco Zeffirelli said yesterday he would resign as a senator and leave Italy if Umberto Bossi was elected mayor…

Film director Franco Zeffirelli said yesterday he would resign as a senator and leave Italy if Umberto Bossi was elected mayor of Venice. If a secessionist from the Northern League "is elected mayor in Venice, I will leave Italy," he told the right-wing newspaper Il Tempo.

Zeffirelli is a member of Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing Forza Italia, which is considering joining forces with Bossi's Northern League. "Bossi is an uncultured, irresponsible idiot, a worm that should be stepped on. In any other country, he would already have been thrown in prison," Zeffirelli said.

Diana, Princess of Wales, has attempted to quash any suggestion she could be about to remarry. "I haven't taken such a long time to get out of one bad marriage to get into another one," she reportedly said. The comment, apparently made to the Spectator magazine and reported in today's Daily Mail, comes amid speculation about her relationship with Dodi Fayed.

Retired football star Eric Cantona is to play a brooding French nobleman in a British film about the live of the 16th-century English queen Elizabeth I, the Daily Telegraph says today. Cantona, who announced his retirement from Manchester United and football in May, is to have a supporting role in the new film produced by the company which made Four Weddings and a Funeral.

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The Spice Girls are to sell some of their famous outfits for charity. The five outfits, in the colours of the Channel 5 logo, were worn in the first footage to be aired on the channel, a music video in which the Spice Girls performed the Manfred Mann hit 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The costumes are each expected to fetch over £1,000 in the auction at London's Hard Rock Cafe on September 16th.