People

BROWN ON THE RUN

It would appear that singer BOBBY BROWN fails to grasp some of the finer points of the legal system. When a judge forbids you to leave the state of Georgia, it is generally not a good idea to skip town. It is a still worse idea to perform on a nationally televised awards show being broadcast from Los Angeles. In November Brown, the husband of Whitney Houston, was ordered to stay in Georgia pending his trial for a 1996 drunken-driving charge in Atlanta. But last week he appeared onstage at the American Music Awards with rapper Ja Rule singing a duet of Thug Lovin'. The crowd loved it, but the judge proved a tougher critic. When Brown turned himself in at the end of the week, the judge sent him to jail for eight days.

HELLO! WE MUST BE SUING

If CATHERINE ZETA-JONES and MICHAEL DOUGLAS are going to have their picture taken by complete strangers, they would at least like to get some cash for their trouble. When the couple married in 2000, they sold the exclusive rights to photograph the affair to British magazine OK! for $1.6 million. OK! rival, the equally punctuation-happy Hello!, decided to run pictures anyway and hit newsstands three days before OK!. Now the couple are suing Hello! and will appear in a London court at the end of January. They are expected to describe how their privacy was violated, how the unauthorized photos cost them income from syndication rights and how their careers were damaged because the Hello! pictures were poorly shot. Hello! said it bought the pictures on the open market and did nothing wrong.

She Wears the Pants

Leaving the hospital after knee surgery, QUEEN ELIZABETH II was greeted by what the Times of London described as an "audible intake of breath" from onlookers. And who could blame them? The woman was wearing pants. In her 50 years on the throne, QE2 has clung to a conservative wardrobe of skirts and dresses. Her pantsuit prompted reams of commentary, from approval of her accessories (pearls, silk scarf) to interviews with Peter Enrione, the man who designed the ensemble. A scramble to uncover the last time the Queen appeared publicly in trousers turned up a photo from 1945, when the teenage princess inspected vehicles during World War II.

PLACE YOUR ORDERS NOW

A declaration of world peace could hardly have elicited such joyful hysteria as the news that the new Harry Potter book is finally on the way. Within 24 hours of J.K. ROWLING'S announcement that the fifth installment of the series will arrive in bookstores on June 21, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hit No. 1 on Amazon.com in the U.S. and Britain, and the stock of Scholastic, Potter's U.S. publisher, rose $2.99. Since the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was published in 2000, Potter fans have been frothing for Volume V. Such daunting pressure may be one reason Rowling has repeatedly pushed back the publication date (she also got married and is having a baby), though in the end, it did not impede her output. At a reported 768 pages, the next book will be the longest yet.