People: Suicide grunge star's note tells of 'lost passion'

IN AN emotional memorial service in Seattle, Courtney Love, widow of the rock singer Kurt Cobain, sobbed as she read her husband's suicide note to 3,000 grieving fans. Cobain, 27, lead singer of the innovative grunge- rock band Nirvana, was found dead in his Seattle home on Friday from a self-inflicted shot-gun wound to the head.

He wrote that he felt he could no longer go on with his music: 'I'm too much of an erratic, moody person and I don't have the passion anymore.' In an apparent reference to his long battle with heroin addiction, Cobain wrote that he needed 'to be slightly numb in order to regain the enthusiasm I once had as a child'.

EMILIE, the widow of Oskar Schindler, whose actions have been commemorated in Stephen Speilberg's award-winning film Schindler's List, was honoured in Los Angeles on Sunday for her part in saving hundreds of Jews from the Nazis in the Second World War.

At a ceremony at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's Museum of Tolerance, Mrs Schindler, 86, said: 'I did not expect any reward. I just did what (one does) when others are in trouble, when other people are murdered.'

During the war Mrs Schindler risked her life buying medicine and food on the black market for the Jews employed in her husband's factories. She now lives near Buenos Aires in Argentina, and will not talk of her former husband, from whom she separated after the war. 'I don't like to be in the public eye. I like to stay where I am like a turtle,' she said.

AUSTRALIAN veterans of the Vietnam war are outraged at the lack of recognition given them by their Prime Minister, Paul Keating. On the first visit by an Australian leader to Vietnam since the war, Mr Keating refused to pay tribute to the 500 Australian troops killed in the conflict. This was in contrast to the fulsome praise he gave in Thailand last week to soldiers who died building the Thai-Burma railway during the Second World War.

Mr Keating explained the distinction by saying that their fates 'are in a league of their own in terms of human brutality'. The Vietnam veterans were not impressed and called his ranking of their dead 'callous', 'insensitive' and 'terribly wrong'.

THE Italian media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, is better appreciated by some of his compatriots. A group of Italian monarchists think he should forget about being Prime Minister and be crowned king instead. The 30-strong group said in Milan they had asked Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party to set up its own 'support club' to propose him as the first Italian royal since the abolition of the monarchy in 1946.

(Photograph omitted)