Last Titanic Survivor Dies At 97

The last living survivor of the Titanic, ­Millvina Dean, has died at the age of 97 in Southampton after catching pneumonia.

As a two-month-old baby, Dean was the youngest passenger on board the giant liner when it sank on its maiden voyage with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

Her parents had decided to leave England for America, where her father had family in Kansas and hoped to open a tobacco shop.

The Deans had not chosen to be aboard the Titanic, but because of a coal strike they were transferred to the ship and boarded it as third-class passengers at Southampton.

Her father felt the crunch of the ship's collision with the iceberg on the night of 14 April 1912, and went up to investigate. He returned to their cabin telling his wife to dress the children and go up on deck.

Dean, her mother, and brother were placed in lifeboat 10 and were among the first off the liner out of the 706 passengers and crew who escaped.

Her father, however, remained aboard and was among those who drowned when the giant ship finally went down in the early hours of next day.

Dean, born on 2 February 1912, had been in hospital last week with pneumonia, having worked as a secretary until her retirement. Her death came just a month after Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, stars of the Hollywood blockbuster about the disaster, stepped in to help pay her nursing home fees. The pair joined with James Cameron, the director of the Oscar-winning film, to donate £20,000 to The Millvina Fund.

Dean lived at Ashurst in the New Forest, not far from where she set sail on the liner. In the last year she had to sell some of her family's possessions at auction to pay for her stay in the nursing home.

Items included a suitcase filled with clothes given to her family when they arrived in America, and compensation letters sent to her mother from the Titanic Relief Fund. The mementos sold at auction were returned to her by the buyer.

Dean had become the very last survivor of the Titanic when another woman who had been a baby on board, Barbara Dainton, from Cornwall, died in October 2007, at age 96. The last American survivor, ­Lillian Asplund, had died at age 99 in 2006.

Prince Harry Plays Polo

Prince Harry reminded New Yorkers on Saturday how much his mother had loved their city, then climbed onto a pony for a rousing game of polo to raise money for impoverished children in Africa.

On a brilliantly sunny day on Governors Island in New York Harbor, the 24-year-old prince drew a crowd that included stars like Madonna, actresses Kate Hudson and Chloe Sevigny, and rapper LL Cool J, but also lots of ordinary New Yorkers out for a rare sight: a polo game in the city.

The Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic was a fundraiser for Sentebale, the charity that Harry has set up with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho to help poor children and AIDS orphans in that small African nation surrounded by South Africa.

His team, named after the charity, proceeded to defeat the opposing Black Watch team 6-5. Harry assisted on the winning goal in the last seconds, drawing the biggest cheer of the afternoon. Both teams included prominent polo stars like Argentine Nacho Figueras, also a Ralph Lauren model, who played for Black Watch.

It was the second and final day of Harry's first official visit to the United States, which began with a sober visit Friday to the site of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. On Saturday morning, the prince toured Harlem's Children Zone, a community organization that offers families social and educational services. He and Prince Seeiso chatted with students working preparing for a Regents Exam.

Harry, the son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, is third in line to the British throne, after his father and older brother, William. He's been dubbed the "party prince," and his New York trip seemed designed partly to counter that image with a focus on his charity work.

The event was free to the public, but guests in the VIP tent on the opposite side of the field had paid from $50,000 a table down to $500 a head to picnic on the lawn. In true polo-watching fashion, there were more hats than at an Easter parade; for the women, they were topped by flowers, feathers and even butterflies climbing up a wire trellis.

Harry, though, was casual before the match in a navy blue blazer, open-collared shirt and white jeans, and loafers. And Madonna, accompanied by her sons, Rocco and David, was positively dressed down: She wore jeans and a denim jacket as she chatted with designer Marc Jacobs.

Another spectator who'd never seen a polo match was LL Cool J.

But his trip wasn't over after the match: Leaving Governor's Island, the prince took a Coast Guard cutter up the Hudson River to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on Manhattan's west side.

He spent about 30 minutes waving to visitors, inspecting the World War II aircraft carrier and checking out the cockpit of a retired British Airways Concorde jet. Museum president Bill White said the staff presented the prince with a section of the 1943 carrier's original wooden flight deck.

The prince's visit began Friday morning with a prayerful stop at ground zero. There, he spent about 15 minutes quietly speaking to a half-dozen relatives of 9/11 victims.

Harry then attached a wreath to a chain-link fence overlooking the Sept. 11 memorial under construction, bowing his head in silence for a few minutes. He also visited the firehouse across the street that houses Engine 10 and Ladder 10, which lost five members on Sept. 11, talking and laughing with firefighters there.

Later Friday, Harry formally named the British Memorial Garden in Hanover Square downtown to honor the 67 British victims of the terrorist attack. He also visited Manhattan's Veterans Affairs Medical Center, touring a clinic that treats veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and the prosthetics facilities.

Bing, Google, or Yahoo?

In the arena of world-class search, can Bing bring the hurt to Google and Yahoo? Microsoft's newest search engine comes packed with search tools such as an Explorer Pane for refining searches, Quick Previews for sneaking a peek at a site before visiting it, and Sentiment Extraction for making sense of product reviews.

Google and Yahoo, meanwhile, are no chumps. Google has outwitted its competitors by delivering solid search results and cool tools such as Street Views. Yahoo has done a masterful job of integrating search results with its rich network of Yahoo content. Search for the musician Sting within Yahoo, and presto--you're watching Yahoo music videos or listening to streaming audio of Sting singing "Desert Rose" from within your search results.

How do these services stack up against each other? Bing targets four categories of search: shopping, local, travel, and health. In a highly subjective comparison, I tested Bing, Google, and Yahoo in these areas and in others.

James A. Williams Sentenced To 35 Years In Prison

The man accused of killing Seattle Sierra Club worker Shannon Harps near her Capitol Hill home has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

James A. Williams, 50, pleaded guilty last week to first-degree murder in the New Year's Eve 2007 stabbing. After hearing from Harps' family and friends, King County Superior Court Judge Palmer Robinson on Thursday sentenced Williams to the lengthy prison term.

Williams, who has been held at Western State Hospital during much of the time since his arrest in January 2008, has a long history of schizophrenia and violent crime.

Harps, 31, was stabbed to death in the stairwell of her apartment building. Police later found Williams' DNA on a kitchen knife found nearby, and arrested him shortly thereafter.

Due to an earlier criminal conviction, Williams was living in a home for extremely mentally ill offenders when the attack occurred. A community corrections officer supervising him wrote that Williams "was barely able to hold himself together" the day Harps was stabbed to death.

The unprovoked attack prompted widespread concern around the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Police initially identified another suspect in the attack; later cleared, that man, William Ball II, was himself slain months later in an unrelated attack.

Responding to the plea last week, King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg said in a statement that Harps' slaying illustrated a need for better coordination between the mental health system and law enforcement.

"This is a good resolution to a tragic case which will result in, essentially, a life sentence for the defendant," Satterberg said previously. "This case highlighted a lot of work that still needs to be done in improving the overlap between the mental health system and the criminal justice system."

101 Swine Flu Deaths

CHICAGO (AP) — A second person in Illinois has died from complications of swine flu — pushing the world's death toll past 100.

Illinois officials said the latest victim was a woman from northwest suburban Cook County who had other medical problems that might have made her illness more severe. They did not give her age, and said no other information would be released.

The death reported Wednesday was the 15th in the U.S. and the 101st worldwide linked to the virus that has sickened more than 12,000 people. The deaths of two more New Yorkers were linked Tuesday to swine flu.

Elsewhere, 83 deaths in Mexico, two in Canada and one in Costa Rica have now been linked to swine flu.