First they were five. Then Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell quit and they were four. Now reports that two more Baby Spices are on the way suggest that Girl Power may be on the way out.
The Spice Girls, Britain's biggest pop phenomenon since the Beatles, were nearing the end of a US tour yesterday and keeping mum about reports that two of them are pregnant.
But nods and winks back home about babies on the way for Posh Spice Victoria Adams and Scary Spice Mel Brown cast doubt on the long-term future of the feisty girl band which has sold some 30 million albums worldwide and topped the charts in more than 40 countries.
"The double pregnancy will give the band a good excuse to call it a day quietly without losing any face," said one music industry insider.
Their latest single, Viva Forever, went straight to number one in the British charts last month - their seventh number one. Posh, Scary, Sporty and Baby Spice have already recorded a Christmas single and their publicists say plans are going ahead to record a third album in the autumn to be released next year.
The group returns to Britain next month to play three more live concerts and record an album.
A British woman is claiming she is the long-lost half-sister of John Lennon, but says she never met the ex-Beatle.
Ingrid Pedersen (53) told the Sun she was given up for adoption by Lennon's mother as a baby. And although Lennon spent years searching for her in the 1960s, he was murdered in 1980 without having found her.
Lennon discovered in the mid-1960s that his mother had given birth to a baby girl and that she had been adopted at birth by a Norwegian sailor and his Liverpool-born wife.
But he never knew that his half-sister's name had been changed by her adoptive parents from Victoria Elizabeth to Ingrid.
Ms Pedersen says she has birth certificates and adoption papers to support her claim.
The Archbishop of Barcelona has proposed the beatification of the Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, whose distinctive modernist buildings are well-known landmarks in the Catalan capital.
"The decision to initiate the process of beatification of world-renowned Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi was made by the Archbishop of Barcelona and supported by the bishops of Catalonia," the archbishop, Cardinal Ricard-Maria Carles, said in his weekly letter.