Students Fight Famine Fast Way

--Americans led by college students from Berkeley in California to Brown University in Rhode Island joined together to fast and raise funds to fight famine as the United States joined 150 other nations in observing World Food Day. All funds from the fifth World Food Day will go to USA for Africa to aid the 150 million people starving in Ethiopia, Sudan and two dozen other nations. “Students have to do more,” Brown freshman Amy Carter, daughter of former President Jimmy Carter, told a rally at Brown. Carter, who is leader of the National Student Campaign Against Hunger, told the rally: “We have to send a powerful message around the world. I’m involved in this because it involves the most basic of human rights--the right to live.” Carter helped unveil a 3 1/2-foot plaster foot that read, “Stamp Out Hunger” and was signed by students for delivery to the House of Representatives in Washington.

--Yoko Ono’s donation of marble slabs, pews and an iron chandelier make up one of the most unusual gifts the Salvation Army in Louisville, Ky., has received, but the organization says it is grateful. Pieces of a marble chapel, removed from St. Joseph Infirmary in 1980, when the hospital was demolished, were donated to the Louisville branch for whatever purpose it chose, said Maj. William Thomas. A rock group named Rising Sun bought the disassembled chapel and gave it to former Beatle John Lennon and his wife sometime before Lennon was shot fatally in December, 1980, auctioneer Stuart Levy said. “We assume she got tired of paying the storage,” Levy said.

--French poet and novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman admitted to the prestigious literary society Academie Francaise, is recovering from heart surgery, a spokesman said. Yourcenar, 82, has been hospitalized since Oct. 2, when she was admitted to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor for heart tests. Martin Bander, a spokesman for Massachusetts General Hospital, said she underwent coronary bypass surgery Oct. 9. “She’s recuperating quite well,” he said. She was admitted in 1980 to the all-male Academie Francaise, the 350-year-old guardian of the French language.

--Don Johnson, the co-star of “Miami Vice,” is a “pink pants’d bad boy” who typifies “postmodern macho,” says Glamour magazine, which named him its Man of the Year. The magazine describes Johnson as “a vital, primal male with predatory eyes, a warm, seductive smile and a stubborn ‘I’ll-do-whatever-I-damn-well-please’ three-day stubble.”