South African President Nelson Mandela, who turns 80 on Saturday amid private celebrations at his Johannesburg home, is hosting a charity-raising banquet on Sunday to officially celebrate his status as an octogenarian. 

Taking place at Gallagher Estates in Midrand, midway between the capital Pretoria and the economic powerhouse city of Johannesburg, the banquet's guest list has up until now been a closely-guarded secret. 

According to Soto Ndukwane, chief executive officer of the 80th Birthday Promotions Company, Kaunda will rub shoulders with Jermaine Jackson, brother of pop icon Michael. An appearance by the younger Jackson is expected but not yet confirmed. 

Also on the guest list are actor Danny Glover, Miss South Africa Kerishnie Naicker, prominent anti-apartheid lawyer George Bizos and Mandela's eye specialist, Dr Percy Amoils. 

Others who must still confirm their attendance are singer Stevie Wonder, supermodel Naomi Campbell, veteran Nigerian opposition leader Olesegun Obasanjo, King Letsie III of neighbouring Lesotho and former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere. 

The event is above all a charity-raiser: 50 10-seat tables have been sold for more than 10 thousand dollars each, the proceeds of which will go to the Nelson Mandela Millenium Fund for disbursment to Mandela's favourite charities on his 81st birthday. Another 150 tables have been assigned to specially-invited guests. 

Jermaine Jackson is expected to perform a song in honour of Mandela in a mostly local music line-up, according to Ndukwane. 

Topping the African menu are local specialties including biltong (dried meat), avocado and trout. For the main course, diners can sink their teeth into a chicken dish with Moroccan couscous, and for desert a mousse made from the berries of the indigenous amarula tree, followed by Ethiopian coffee and local rooibos (bush) tea. 

7 October 1997 
Fraternite Matin (Reuter's Press Digest of Ivory Coast) - Singer Nina Simone promises to bring $25,000 for sick children when she returns to Ivory Coast in December 1998 for a prestige music festival; she helped get the Afromusiques project off the ground this weekend, singing at a gala dinner. 

Nina Simone has been invited by the President of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in Africa for a ten days stay in his country. Nina has been nominated Ambassador of the Ivory Coast. 

18 December 1996 
Newsday (Liz Smith) - LOVED, LOVED Brantley Bardin's Q & A with the incredible Nina Simone in Details magazine for January. Simone starts off by dissing Billie Holliday: "What an insult [to be compared to her]. . . she was a drug addict. They only compared me to her because we were both black - they never compared me to Maria Callas, and I'm more of a diva like her than anybody else." That's just a taste - and not of honey, folks! She is a diva with vinegar-soaked attitude to spare. Don't mess with her. 

19 May 1996 
The life story of blues-jazz singer Nina Simone is going to film. Simone told Daily Variety that plans for a feature movie on her life are in the formative stages and could go before the cameras this fall. It's tentatively titled "Heaven Belongs to You" and is based on a portion of her 1990 autobiography "I Put a Spell on You." The movie will focus on the singer's affair with Earl Barrow, the late prime minister of the Barbados in the 1970s. The independent film is being produced by Simone's brother Sam Waymon ("Ganji and Hess," "Weeds"). 

2 October 2 1995 
Time Magazine vol. 146, n. 14 - Sentenced. Nina Simone, 62, singer; to a two-month suspended sentence and a $5,000 fine for causing and fleeing a 1993 auto accident that injured two young motorcyclists; in Aix-en-Provence, France. 

6 September 1995 
(Misc. World HQ) WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre's heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens "hard chilled" (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin' threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.) 

24 August 1995 
Paris (Reuter) - U.S. pop singer Nina Simone was given a suspended eight-month jail term in France after firing a scatter-gun at a pair of noisy teenagers playing next door to her southern French home, court officials said Thursday. 

Simone, who has lived in the southern French town of Bouc-Bel- Air near Aix-en-Provence for the past four years, was put on 18 months' probation and ordered to seek psychological counseling for the July 25 incident. 

She also was ordered to pay $4,600 in court costs and damages to the family of one of the boys, who was hit in the legs with 11 pieces of metal shot. 

The 55-year-old singer, whose latest hit was a re-release of " My Baby Just Cares for Me" in 1987, failed to show up for her trial Wednesday in a civil court in Aix-en-Provence. 

"She did not appear. I do not know if she is in France," a court official said, adding that Simone was not required to attend the proceeding but must appear in person if she chooses to appeal the judgment. 

A psychological evaluation ordered by the court found that she had been "incapable of evaluating the consequences of her act." Simone has been more popular in Europe than in her native country during a singing career that spanned three decades. 

25 July 1995 
Paris (Reuter) - American jazz singer Nina Simone was convicted Wednesday of shooting at a noisy teen-ager with buckshot while gardening at her villa in southern France. She was fined $4,600 and ordered to undergo counseling. Two teens were playing in a swimming pool at the villa next door to Simone's in Bouc-Bel-Air on July 25. According to the singer's account, she twice asked them to keep it down. When they failed to cooperate, she fired rounds of buckshot across the hedge. A 15-year-old boy was slightly wounded. Simone's lawyer said the singer was fragile and depressed.

9 March 1995 
San Francisco (Los Angeles Times) - A San Francisco court granted jazz legend Nina Simone ownership of 52 of her master recordings. Simone had sued New Jersey-based San Juan Music Group and its distributors because she had not been paid for the recordings' worldwide releases. 

5 June 1993 
Sheraton New Orleans Grand Ballroom (Billboard). It was a coup of sorts for the Crescent City's biggest music bash when pianist McCoy Tyner brought his celebrated big band ensemble to the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival on an oddly flavored April 28 triple bill with elusive R&B/jazz diva Nina Simone and underappreciated New Orleans clarinetist Alvin Batiste. 

The band, anchored by Tyner's regular trio playmates, Avery Sharpe on bass and Aaron Scott on drums, is a powerhouse group that includes luminary individualists trombonist Steve Turre and tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield. 

Former Coltrane sideman Tyner offered typically riveting solo work, moving quickly from spare statements to dense, impressionistic chording. 

Neo-symphonic splashes, brass-choir passages, and more than a few moments of improvisational sound and fury -- from the leader, Sharpe, Turre, and Stubblefield, in particular -- were in effect throughout a 60-minute set that left the standing-room-only audience applauding for more. 

The 60-year-old soul priestess Simone, whose first album in more than a decade, A Single Woman, will be released by Elektra this summer, wowed with gruff and sweet singing on her 1959 hit version of the Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy," Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry," Carole King's "You've Got A Friend," and two rambling tunes from the forthcoming release.