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British TV and radio host Nicholas Parsons says he has been covering up his real age for years. Why are some people reluctant to say how old they are, asks Kathryn Westcott. Parsons, who is coming up to his 90th birthday, says that he was worried that disclosing his real age would make him unemployable. Celebrities have been holding back the years since the dawn of celluloid. Joan Crawford, for one, was evasive about her date of birth. Depending on who you read, it was 1904, 1905 or 1906. Her gravestone says 1908. My own mother took a more devil-may-care approach. Parsons - approaching a big birthday In the days when the personal details on passports were filled in by a civil servant with a Biro, my mother would subsequently alter her DOB from 1931 to 1937 with a similar-coloured pen. It worked until the 1970s, when an official at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport spotted the deceit. A fine and threat of deportation knocked that on the head. Then she carried photographs of her thr...

A Cherokee girl has been returned to her adoptive parents, ending a bitter custody battle that raised questions of parental and Native American rights. Veronica, four, was handed over to the South Carolina couple by her birth father as his appeal bid failed. Oklahoma's Supreme Court bowed out of the case late on Monday, effectively validating her adoption. The Cherokee Nation, to which the girl's birth father belongs, had insisted she would stay with the tribe. Veronica was transferred on Monday night to Matt and Melanie Capobianco, who came to Oklahoma last month insisting they would not go back to their home in Charleston, South Carolina, without the girl. "She's safely in her parents' arms," said Jessica Munday, a spokeswoman for the Capobiancos. Veronica was given up for adoption by her non-Cherokee birth mother, Christina Maldonado, during pregnancy. Ms Maldonado had become estranged from the girl's biological father, Dusten Brown. Matt and Mel...