DIVORCED. Sting (real name Gordon Sumner), 32, spiky-haired lead singer for the rock group the Police; by Frances Tomelty, 36, English stage actress; after eight years of marriage (the last two living apart), two children; in London.

DIED. Tito Gobbi, 70, Italian baritone considered one of the finest singing actors of his generation, best known for such operatic roles as the sinister Scarpia in Tosca, lago in Otello, and the title character in Rigoletto; of cancer; in Rome.

DIED. Eleanor Gehrig, 79, widow of New York Yankee Star Lou Gehrig; in New York City. A high-spirited Chicago socialite, Eleanor Twitchell met the baseball slugger at Chicago's Comiskey Park and married him in 1933. Their life together, dramatized in the 1942 movie The Pride of the Yankees and the 1977 TV film A Love Affair, ended after eight years, with his death at 37 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

DIED. William Powell, 91, suave actor whose resonant voice and easygoing elegance made him the movies' pre-eminent American gentleman; in Palm Springs, Calif. His silky good looks and pencil-thin mustache first got him typed as a villain in silent films, but when sound arrived, Powell became an expert at sophisticated comedy, appearing in such films as My Man Godfrey, The Great Ziegfeld (both 1936) and most unforgettably the six Thin Man movies (1934-47), in which he and Co-Star Myrna Loy were Nick and Nora Charles, the models for dozens of witty Hollywood sleuths to follow. Powell aged gracefully onscreen, playing the irascible patriarch in the 1947 film Life With Father (for which he received one of his three Oscar nominations) and the ship's doctor in his final film, Mister Roberts (1955).

DIED. Martin Niemoeller, 92, German theologian, preacher and pacifist who spent seven years in Nazi concentration camps for his outspoken opposition to Adolf Hitler; in Wiesbaden, West Germany. A U-boat commander during World War I, he became a minister in the Lutheran Evangelical Church in 1924. Though an early Nazi supporter, Niemoeller led the clerical opposition after Hitler came to power in 1933, crying, "Not you, Herr Hitler, but God is my Fuehrer." Hitler responded by sending him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938 and later to Dachau. After the war's end, Niemoeller worked to rebuild the Protestant Church in Germany, and served as co-president of the World Council of Churches from 1961 to 1968. He continued to propound controversial views, arguing that Germans must bear collective guilt for World War II, defending pacifism resolutely and opposing many of the West's anti-Communist policies, including U.S. involvement in Viet Nam.