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Entertainment Briefs: Wednesday, September 16, 2009

KIEV, Ukraine — Elton John will not be able to adopt a 14-month-old Ukrainian child because the pop star is too old and isn’t traditionally married, Ukraine’s minister for family affairs said Monday.

The pop singer toured a hospital for HIV-infected children in eastern Ukraine on Saturday as part of a charity project and said that he and his male partner, David Furnish, wanted to adopt an HIV-infected boy named Lev.

But Yuriy Pavlenko, the country’s Family, Youth and Sports Minister, said adoptive parents must be married, and Ukraine does not recognize homosexual unions as marriage.

John and Furnish, his longtime partner, tied the knot in 2005 in one of the first legalized civil unions in the United Kingdom.

Pavlenko also said John was too old. The singer is 62; Ukrainian law requires a parent to be no more than 45 years older than an adopted child.

The Associated Press

‘Basketball Diaries’ author dies

NEW YORK — Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker who wrote "The Basketball Diaries,” died Friday. He was 60. He died from a heart attack at his home in Manhattan, his ex-wife, Rosemary Carroll, told The New York Times.

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