In brief: Cheryl Cole caps a stellar year with beauty awards

Cheryl Cole, who since becoming a judge on ITV's The X Factor has been elevated to the status of national living treasure, has crowned her year by topping two beauty polls. Heat magazine has placed the 24-year-old Girls Aloud singer at the top of its "fittest British female celebrity body" list and she has also won Superdrug's beauty icon of the year. As reported here, Cole was recently turned into a work of art, her crying face crafted on to a painting of Antony Gormley's ‘Angel of the North’ sculpture…………Steven Gerrard, the England midfielder and Liverpool football captain, has been charged with assault and affray after an incident in a bar in which a part-time DJ was allegedly glassed. The 28-year-old England star and two other men will appear in court on January 23 over the alleged incident, which took place in Southport, Merseyside, in the early hours of Monday morning, and is said to have stemmed from an argument over music........... British rock band Elbow's album, The Seldom Seen Kid, has been named the UK music critics' album of the year. The "poll of polls", conducted by retail chain HMV, took into account votes from media critics as well as the firm's staff and online customers. Portishead's ablum Third came second, followed by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend………….Harold Pinter, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright who died on Christmas Eve aged 78 after a long battle with cancer, will be buried on Wednesday in a small private funeral attended by family and close friends. The dramatist has been mourned as far afield as Cuba, where his photograph was shown with the slogan ‘Harold Pinter Amigo de Communista’ on state television............