People in the News

Heather Mills
NEW YORK—Heather Mills says her love don't cost a thing.

"All I did was to fall in love with someone madly, and I'm constantly being vilified in the press for it," Mills tells E! Entertainment Television's "E! News" in an interview Tuesday night.

The 39-year-old activist has frequently complained of being knocked down by the media since she and former Beatle Paul McCartney, 64, separated last May after four years of marriage. The couple, who have a 3-year-old daughter, Beatrice, began divorce proceedings in July.

"People label me a gold digger and, if I was, I would've been a very wealthy woman when I met Paul, and that wasn't the case at all," she says.

Mills is the first contestant with an artificial limb to compete on ABC's "Dancing With the Stars." She lost the leg in a motorcycle accident in 1993.

"Starting in a few weeks, I will start flying back and forth to England every week to be with my daughter as she goes back to school," says Mills, who is in Los Angeles for the dance competition.

"My husband and I share 50/50 custody because I've always felt the father is just as important as the mother," she adds.

While Mills remains on the show _ a celebrity is voted off each week _ she will fly home Tuesday and return to Los Angeles on Sunday evening _ "mostly practicing in the aisles on the plane," she jokes.

Keith Richards
LONDON—Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all.

In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002, at 84.

Richards, one of rock's legendary wild men, told the magazine that his survival was the result of luck, and advised young musicians against trying to emulate him.

"I did it because that was the way I did it. Now people think it's a way of life," he was quoted as saying.