Clinton Celebrates 60 Again - to Raise $2.5m

The Royal York hotel in Toronto is used to catering to the whims of the rich. It offers a package for VIPs - very important pets - including a puppy welcome kit and canine room service.

So it won't be fazed when 600 guests drawn from what the organisers describe as the "big money sets" of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, together with visitors from across the US, begin to gather tonight. They have been drawn to the hotel's Canada room not only for the compering of Kevin Spacey or the jokes of Billy Crystal, and you don't pay up to $200,000 (£107,000) a table just for a dessert of cupcakes. The lure is Bill Clinton, and the event is the celebration of the former president's 60th birthday (it was on August 19, but nobody is quibbling).

The function will be a celebration of his status as celebrity philanthropist. Since leaving the White House in 2001 at the age of 55 he has turned his premature retirement into a global charitable business.

Tonight will raise $2.5m for the Clinton Foundation which campaigns, among other causes, for affordable Aids treatment in Africa. Next month he will hold a second "birthday party", a private Rolling Stones concert in New York that will raise a similar sum.

For the past week Clinton has been locked in a tussle with ABC TV over a docudrama focusing on his administration's failure to prevent the September 11 attacks. The most hotly contested scenes are in part two of the series, The Path to 9/11, which will go out on Monday, the fifth anniversary of the terror attacks.

The New York Daily News reported yesterday that ABC had been forced to retract some passages, notably one in which Clinton's national security adviser Sandy Berger hangs up on CIA operatives just as they prepare to kill Osama bin Laden.