What Day Is It?: Former British Prime...

What Day Is It?: Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher admits that she is adjusting badly to a less powerful lifestyle. “Home is where you come to when you have nothing better to do,” Thatcher told Vanity Fair magazine in the June issue. Since leaving office last November, Thatcher said she is so bored that sometimes she has to ask, “Which day is it?” An aide said Thatcher misses dealing with big problems: “She wants to make decisions. . . . Now she answers her own phone sometimes. What a comedown that is--like Napoleon having to saddle his own horse.”

* Command Performance: An orphaned girl persuaded Princess Diana to play the piano Thursday, the last day of the British royal couple’s four-day visit to Czechoslovakia. The princess’ visit to an experimental orphanage was routine until 7-year-old Alzbeta Stancikova told her, “We have played for you. Now it is your turn,” Diana delivered a version of “Greensleeves.”

* So sue me: Dr. Robert Gallo, entangled for six years in a dispute over who discovered the AIDS virus, Thursday dismissed a new finding that the virus was probably a French find. “The whole thing is utter nonsense,” Gallo said. He also predicted that he would be cleared by his employer, the National Institutes of Health, of all “substantive” charges that he claimed as his own a virus identified earlier by a French scientist.

* True Believer: Author Salman Rushdie Thursday hit back at two Islamic leaders who have ruled that his conversion to Islam cannot be accepted because he has not withdrawn “The Satanic Verses.” The novel’s publication prompted calls for his assassination for blaspheming the Muslim religion. In a letter to the London daily, the Independent, Rushdie wrote, “I am a Muslim. This is a matter of conscience, and it is not for any human being to question it.”