Sean Connery recovering after surgery for kidney tumor

London – Sean Connery has undergone surgery for a kidney tumor and is recovering at his home in the Bahamas, his spokesman said Sunday.

The 75-year-old Scottish actor underwent the operation a few weeks ago in New York, spokesman James Barron said.

“He’s very fit – he’s 100 percent plus,” Barron said of the former James Bond actor.

Connery told The Sunday Times that he “was sliced open in five places.”

Connery, an ardent Scottish nationalist, is scheduled to record a voiceover for a political program for the pro-independence Scottish National Party.

’50s pinup star getting hit on more now than in her prime

Los Angeles – Cult idol Bettie Page is getting more attention now than she did 50 years ago when she posed in thousands of seductive pinup photos that appeared in magazines.

Her Web site – http://www.BettiePage.com/ – has received 588 million hits in the last five years, according to her agents at CMG Worldwide.

“I’m more famous now than I was in the 1950s,” she said.

From 1949 to 1957, Page posed in seductive nurse, teacher, cowgirl and jungle costumes, her hair styled in kitschy bangs.

“Being in the nude isn’t a disgrace unless you’re being promiscuous about it,” the 82-year-old said, reflecting on her career. “After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!”

A film about her, “The Notorious Bettie Page,” is scheduled for release in April.

Star says she’s never lacked confidence, ‘trust in universe’

Aspen, Colo. – Goldie Hawn says she’s never doubted herself, even when she made an audience laugh during a production of Romeo and Juliet.

“I liked myself … and trusted in the universe,” she said after receiving the American Film Institute’s Star Award during the 12th U.S. Comedy Arts Festival.

“Comedy is like catching lightning in a bottle,” she said. “You’re trying to catch that moment and it’s all about timing.”

The 60-year-old is the cover girl for this month’s American Association of Retired People’s magazine.

Hawn also has a more serious side – she wrote a script for her next project, “Ashes to Ashes,” which focuses on an aging woman who is questioning her life choices.

Film director leads rally before presidential election

Warsaw, Poland – Oscar-winning Polish film director Andrzej Wajda rallied the crowd Sunday at a Warsaw rock concert, part of an event organized by Polish and Ukrainian artists in support of Belarus’s opposition a week ahead of a presidential election there.

“You are doing the right thing,” Wajda, 80, told some 5,000 youths at the concert where Polish and Ukrainian bands sang songs of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and from Poland’s Solidarity freedom movement of the 1980s.

In Sunday’s election, Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is seeking a third consecutive term but is challenged by three other candidates, including Alexander Milinkevich’s main pro-democratic opposition.

Poland, which shed communism in 1989 and is now a European Union member, supports Belarus’ pro-democracy forces, which draw some of their strength from the Polish minority there.

‘Incredible Hulk’ star sues brother over image rights

Newark, N.J. – As “The Incredible Hulk,” Lou Ferrigno probably would have ripped off his shirt in anger. Instead, he’s suing his brother over trademark rights to a fitness equipment store.

Ferrigno, who played the green-skinned monster in the 1978-82 TV series, is suing Andrew Ferrigno and his wife, Janie, and their business, Ferrigno Fitness of Greenwich Township, claiming they are unlawfully trading on his name and image.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Trenton, claims the New Jersey store has a green awning, portions of the interior are green, and one green wall is covered with photos of Ferrigno in bodybuilding poses, as well as in his trademark green makeup for his role as the Hulk.

Ferrigno was a bodybuilder before he starred on the TV show. Bill Bixby played mild-mannered scientist David Banner, who turned into the Hulk whenever he lost his temper.

“This is bullying,” said Scott Wilhelm, lawyer for the defendants. “Andrew and his wife have been running their business for over 20 years, and now, for the first time ever, Lou wants to shut them down.”

The lawsuit claims the “defendants deliberately chose a trade name incorporating the Ferrigno name in an effort to profit from the reputation and renown of Lou Ferrigno.”

The 53-year-old actor, who lives in Santa Monica, Calif., says in court papers that he has no interest or involvement in the store. His lawyer did not return a call seeking comment last week.

Auction featuring Beat works raises funds for Katrina victim

San Francisco – An auction of first-edition books, handwritten manuscripts and letters by Beat Generation writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski raised $225,000 to benefit a publisher left homeless by Hurricane Katrina.

New Orleans resident Edwin Blair, 69, said Thursday he agreed to auction the items he had been collecting for 40 years to help his friends, Gypsy Lou Webb and her husband, Jon, who published some of Bukowski’s earliest works.

One of the auction’s rarest items, an autographed 1960 first pressing of Bukowski’s “Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail,” sold for $9,775, the highest bid of the day.

Other items that drew aggressive bidding included a first-edition pressing of Ginsberg’s “Howl” inscribed by the author, which fetched $7,475; two typed letters from Bukowski that went for $4,025; and a 1945 photo of Hal Chase, Kerouac, Ginsberg and William Burroughs together at Columbia University that sold for $7,745.