Titanic survivor selling mementos to pay for care

Titanic survivor selling mementos to pay for care

LONDON — Millvina Dean was only 2 months old when she was wrapped in a sack and lowered into a lifeboat from the doomed Titanic. Now 96, the last survivor of the tragic sinking is selling mementos of the disaster to help pay her nursing home fees.

Rescued from the bitterly cold Atlantic on that April 1912 night, Dean, her 2-year-old brother and her mother were taken to New York with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Before returning home to England, they were given a small wicker suitcase of donated clothing, a gift from New Yorkers to help them rebuild their lives.

Now, Dean is selling the suitcase and other Titanic mementos to help pay her nursing home fees. They are expected to go for $5,200 at an auction of Titanic memorabilia Saturday in Devizes in western England.

Although Britain has a free health care system, private providers offer more comprehensive services for a fee.

The last American survivor of the disaster, Lillian Asplund, died in 2006 at age 99. Another British survivor, Barbara Joyce West Dainton, died last November at 96.

Temperatures in Arctic reported at record levels

WASHINGTON — Autumn temperatures in the Arctic are at record levels, the Arctic Ocean is getting warmer and less salty as sea ice melts, and reindeer herds appear to be declining, researchers reported Thursday.

“Obviously, the planet is interconnected, so what happens in the Arctic does matter” to the rest of the world, Jackie Richter-Menge of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., said in releasing the third annual Arctic Report Card.

The report, compiled by 46 scientists from 10 countries, looks at a variety of conditions in the Arctic.

The region has long been expected to be among the first areas to show impacts from global warming, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is largely a result of human activities adding carbon dioxide and other gases to the atmosphere.

“Changes in the Arctic show a domino effect from multiple causes more clearly than in other regions,” said James Overland, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. “It’s a sensitive system and often reflects changes in relatively fast and dramatic ways.”

For example, autumn air temperatures in the Arctic are at a record 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.

The report noted that 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Arctic, leading to a record loss of sea ice. This year’s sea ice melt was second only to 2007.

All 4 aboard helicopter killed in fiery crash

AURORA, Ill. — A medical helicopter carrying a 1-year-old patient crashed and burned in a suburban Chicago forest preserve overnight, killing all four aboard. The aircraft apparently clipped a radio tower, and authorities Thursday were investigating whether the tower’s lights had been on.

It was the sixth fatal crash involving medical helicopters this year, according to federal data, including one just last month in Maryland that also killed four.

The helicopter carrying 1-year-old Kirstian Blockinger of Leland was headed for Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago from Valley West Hospital in Sandwich when it went down minutes before midnight Wednesday, Aurora police spokesman Sgt. Rob Wallers said.

John Brannen with the National Transportation Safety Board said the helicopter apparently clipped the radio tower support wire before the crash. A snapped wire could be seen hanging from the 734-foot tower that stands across a busy road from the crash site.

EPA slashes amount of lead allowed in air 90%

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is slashing the amount of lead allowed in the nation’s air by 90 percent.

EPA officials, who were under a federal court order to set a new health standard for lead by midnight Wednesday, said the new limit would better protect health, especially children’s. Exposure to even low levels of lead early in life can affect learning, IQ and memory.

The new limit — 0.15 micrograms per cubic meter — is the first update to the lead standard since 1978, when it helped phase out leaded gasoline. It is 10 times lower than the current standard, which was 1.5 micrograms per cubic meter.

Pirates seize cargo ship despite military vessels

NAIROBI, Kenya — As U.S. warships watched a hijacked vessel laden with tanks and other gunboats patrolled the dangerous waters off Somalia, pirates seized another cargo vessel this week — and now hold about a dozen despite the international effort to protect a major shipping lane.

Military vessels from 10 nations are now converging on the world’s most dangerous waters, but analysts and a Somali government official say the campaign won’t halt piracy unless it also confronts the quagmire that is Somalia.

“World powers have neglected Somalia for years on end, and now its problems are touching the world, they have started on the wrong footing,” said Bile Mohamoud Qabowsade, adviser to the president of Puntland, the semiautonomous Somali region that is the pirates’ base.

Associated Press