It’s Over: The estranged wife of Salman...

It’s Over: The estranged wife of Salman Rushdie says the two are divorcing after two years under the strain of a death decree by Iran’s former Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Marianne Wiggins, an American novelist, says Rushdie has changed since going into hiding after his book “The Satanic Verses” was condemned as blasphemous to Islam. “He’s a complete stranger to me now,” she said in London.

* It’s On: Capt. Mark Phillips is not taking it lying down. The estranged husband of Britain’s Princess Anne will fight a paternity suit by New Zealander Heather Tonkin, who says he fathered her daughter. Phillips worried about “the distressing effect on my family” of the media attention. Phillips was paying her $13,300 a year to keep quiet about Felicity, 5, “to protect Mark’s name,” Tonkin told a London newspaper. She said she feared that if she spoke up, “my cash lifeline would be destroyed. It has been hard to contain such an enormous secret.” Phillips reportedly is trying to track down information about Tonkin’s ex-lovers.

* It’s OK: Britain’s most famous little patient and his working class parents have thanked America’s richest man, media mogul John Kluge, for arranging the brain surgery that may have saved the boy’s life. Craig Shergold, 11, had an apparently incurable brain tumor, but University of Virginia neurosurgeons removed the egg-sized growth--and it was benign. Craig’s mother, Marion, told Kluge Saturday in Charlottesville, Va.: “You are our guardian angel.”

* It’s Unfair: Miss Georgia USA said in Atlanta the state pageant director has gone too far. “I was told I needed to get a breast augmentation, have liposuction, get collagen injected into my lips,” Tamara Rhoads said Sunday. “I told him no.” “The allegations are false,” said director Jim Whitehead, who said Rhoads may be upset at not finishing in the finals.