Appeal for Darfur aid

Washington – Mia Farrow, who recently returned from her second trip to Darfur, says more international aid is desperately needed in the western Sudan province.

The actress and U.N. Children’s Fund goodwill ambassador told ABC’s “This Week” that in Darfur alone, UNICEF has only 20 percent of what it needs to continue its work.

“And that’s really why I’m here, to tell people I’ve seen firsthand that UNICEF and other aid agencies are all that there is right now to sustain these lives, keeping people alive,” Farrow said on the show, which aired Sunday.

The conflict in Darfur has left more than 180,000 people dead, driven 2 million from their homes and undermined stability in neighboring Chad and Central African Republic.

“Tell your leadership, you know, OK, there may not be oil in Darfur, but there are human lives, 6 million human lives, and we care about them,” Farrow said. “We are a family. We are a human family. And when one member is suffering, we all suffer.”

Treasured experience

New York – Keira Knightley acknowledges she was a bit skeptical at first about appearing in a movie that shared a name with a Disney ride.

“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, you’re doing a pirate movie – something that hasn’t worked in about 50 years – and it’s based on an amusement park ride?!” the actress told the New York Daily News for a story published Sunday.

The 2003 film “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” went on to be a $650 million worldwide success, and co-star Johnny Depp earned an Oscar nomination for his role.

Knightley appears again in the sequel “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” opening Friday. A third “Pirates” installment is due out Memorial Day weekend next year.

Knightley says it wasn’t until she was at the premiere of the first “Pirates” movie with co-star Orlando Bloom that she knew the premise would work.

“Orlando and I were sitting next to each other at the premiere, which was the first time I’d seen it, and we’d had a big talk and decided that if it was awful, we’d still leave the theater all smiles,” she said. “Halfway through the film, I nudged him and said, ‘It’s quite good, isn’t it?’ and he was like ‘Yeah, it’s really good.’ We had no idea it would work.”

Tenor returns to Sarajevo

Madrid, Spain – Spanish tenor Jose Carreras will sing again in Sarajevo, 12 years after performing in a burned-out library to raise money for rebuilding the war-ravaged capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The singer said Saturday that he will perform July 10 with the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Spanish conductor David Jimenez as part of a music festival.

Carreras said he was excited to be returning to Bosnia, where in June 1994 he joined conductor Zubin Mehta and other stars in a charity performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass at the National Library, which had been burned to a hulk two years earlier by Serb shelling.

Carreras also said he and the other two members of the opera trio known as The Three Tenors – Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo – have received an offer from Russian promoters to perform in Moscow’s Red Square and are trying to see whether their work schedules will allow them to perform.