Pin-up girl Page in critical condition
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- Famed 1950s pin-up girl Bettie Page has been hospitalized in Los Angeles in critical condition with pneumonia, her agent says.
Page, 85, has been hospitalized for three weeks and is dangerously ill, long-time friend and business agent Mark Roesler told KNBC-TV in Los Angeles Saturday.
Page was one of six siblings in a Nashville, Tenn., family and was placed in an orphanage when she was 10, she says on her Web site. But she graduated near the top of her class in high school and studied to be a teacher at Peabody College of Education in Nashville.
But KNBC-TV said her road to fame began in 1950 when she met a police officer and amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs in San Francisco, who took photos of her and assembled her first pinup portfolio. She appeared in Playboy magazine, and by the mid-1950s her alluring image appeared on everything from playing cards to bedroom posters.
But she abruptly stopped modeling in 1957 and disappeared from the public eye, which assured her of a cult following in later years as a younger generation of fans speculated what had become of her, the station said.
'Freedom Train' author Sterling dies at 95
WELLFLEET, Mass., Dec. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. author Dorothy Sterling, who wrote some of the first non-fiction works about black history for young readers, has died at 95, her daughter says.
Among her 35 published works, Sterling is best known for "Freedom Train," a 1954 non-fiction book for children about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, The New York Times reported Saturday.
Her daughter, Anne Fausto-Sterling, confirmed Sterling died Monday at her home in Wellfleet, Mass.
Sterling was a New Yorker who found many of her subjects while thinking about questions posed by her two children about the natural world, the Times said. While looking around for biographical subject, she found inspiration in Tubman's work helping escaped slaves flee the U.S. South. The resulting book, "Freedom Train," influenced a generation that later led the civil rights movement.
"I had found a subject about which I cared deeply," she wrote for the reference work, "Something About the Author," the Times said. "At the age of 40, I had finally become a writer."
Internal Notes
Tanking NBC fires three program execs
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- The U.S. television network NBC, which has slipped to fourth place in the ratings, has fired three top programming executives, sources say.
Without naming sources, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday that NBC television studio President Katherine Pope, No. 2 programmer Teri Weinberg and alternative programming chief Craig Plestis have been fired after such new shows as "Knight Rider," "Lipstick Jungle" and "My Own Worst Enemy" all flopped.
The firings were the latest management upheavals for NBC, the once-proud home of such award-winning shows as "Seinfeld," "Friends," and "Frasier," which has lost another 14 percent of its viewing audience so far this year, the Times said.
The newspaper said NBC Universal Chief Executive Officer Jeff Zucker will move to end a chronic rivalry between the network's executive suite and its Burbank, Calif., studios by naming Angela Bromstad, who has been running a production unit for the company in London, to become the network's chief programming executive.
Satriani sues Coldplay for plagiarism
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 6 (UPI) -- U.S. rock guitarist Joe Satriani says the group Coldplay lifted parts of an instrumental he composed and used them in its hit song "Viva La Vida."
Satriani filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, saying the Coldplay song -- a key track on its latest album, "Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends" -- was substantially plagiarized from his 2004 instrumental "If I Could Fly," the Chicago Tribune reported Saturday.
The Coldplay song was nominated Wednesday for song and record of the year Grammys by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the newspaper said.
Satriani is a virtuoso rock 'n' roll guitarist who has been recording steadily since 1986. The suit seeks a jury trial and profits from Coldplay, which credited all four band members -- Chris Martin, Guy Berryman, Will Champion and Jonny Buckland -- as the authors of "Viva La Vida," the Tribune said.
