HOUSTON — Inside one of Houston's best-kept secrets, soft music and hushed words are piped over the sound system, the sweet scent of flowers leaves a faint trail in the air — and the business of death is saluted. Welcome to the National Museum of Funeral History, a warehouse-like building in a working-class pocket north of Houston, where exhibits extol everything from the birth of embalming to the mourning rituals of the Victorian Era.

LONDON (AP) - A 1911 payroll sheet bearing the name 'E. Rigby' may fetch $750,000 for a charity that Paul McCartney befriended. Reporting from London -- Eleanor Rigby: fact or fiction? That question, which has bedeviled Beatles' fans for decades, may be answered in part by a 1911 hospital payroll sheet to be auctioned in London today. The document, sent by Paul McCartney in 1990 to the director of a music charity who had asked for funding, contains the signature of a scullery maid named "E. Rigby" who worked in a Liverpool hospital.

Three of Santiago Pérez's relatives lie in the cemetery of Santa Coloma de Gramenet, a city just outside Barcelona. Nonbeliever that he is, Pérez doesn't visit their graves often. But he was recently there for a funeral and found himself impressed with the latest addition: a glittering expanse of solar panels that now runs along the top of the grave walls into which Spaniards bury coffins and urns alike. "If you're one of those people who thinks all cemeteries should look like castles, draped in shadows, then maybe you won't like this one," the 46-year-old pet shop owner admits. "But I think it looks modern."