The last remaining survivor of the Titanic disaster is auctioning mementoes from the doomed liner to pay for her nursing home fees, a newspaper said Thursday.
Millvina Dean was only two months old when the Titanic struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage and sank in 1912, but now at the age of 96 she is struggling to make ends meet and hopes to make 3,000 pounds from the sale.

Personal items going under the hammer include a 100-year-old suitcase filled with clothes given to her family by the people of New York after they arrived there following the catastrophe.

Dean has lived in a nursing home for the last two years.

He said the Catholic Church had made it difficult to film Angels & Demons, the prequel to Dan Brown's best-selling novel.

Howard told The Independent: "We experienced a lot of obstacles in shooting. We were even taken away from areas that weren't controlled by the Vatican."

In June the Vatican banned the makers of Angels & Demons from entering the Holy See and any church in Rome.

Instead they shot scenes in studios and relocated to Caserta, near Naples.

Father Marco Fibbi, a Vatican spokesman, said at the time: "Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn't necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough."

The Vatican attacked The Da Vinci Code as heretic when it was published and was equally vehement about the film version.

The fictional novel proposed that Jesus sired a secret bloodline through Mary Magdalene that had lasted to the present day. It also painted the Catholic...

Forty years ago, two black Americans, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won gold and bronze medals in the 200m final at the Mexico Olympics, and used their time on the victory podium to protest with a Black Power salute.

The photograph of the two men with their heads bowed, each of them with an arm raised in the air and a fist clothed in a black leather glove, is one of the most striking images of the 20th Century.

Their actions caused havoc at the Games, ensuring the pair were ejected from the US Olympic team. But three men won medals in that race, and the consequences for the third athlete on the podium would be every bit as significant.

The silver medallist was a laid-back Australian, an up-and-coming runner called Peter Norman who, in the words of his coach, "blossomed like a cactus" when he got to Mexico. While observers expected the Americans to make a clean sweep of the 200m medals, Norman kept them interested by breaking the world...

In May 1940, the German army moving across northern France, driving the bedraggled British Expeditionary Force towards the beaches of Dunkirk, laid siege to the small market town of Bourbourg. On the morning of the 25th the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste was struck by an artillery shell, and that afternoon a German fighter plane, hit in aerial combat, fell from the sky, shedding a tail of flaming petrol on to the roof of the church, transforming it within minutes into a blazing furnace. A photograph taken not long afterwards shows the extent of the damage inflicted on the beautiful Gothic choir: while its arches remain intact, the roof has vanished, its charred remains scattered on the floor, amid a sea of broken masonry and rubble.

In the years following the war, the roof was replaced, the rubble cleared. But the choir remained empty, sealed off from the rest of the church behind a high brick wall. 'It was like a legend,' Françoise Dubois, a curator from...

Shadowy figures from the Dark Ages including Ead, Giric and King Constantine will emerge as Scotland's nation-building heroes when a new series of documentaries is aired across British television from next month.

After two years' preparation, Scotland's History will be broadcast on BBC Scotland and BBC Two. Presented by the archaeologist Neil Oliver, it sets out to demythologise Scottish history and to introduce unfamiliar characters, as well as the well-known William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Mary, Queen of Scots.

“We've all heard of the big names. We had the opportunity here to come afresh. Many Scots are familiar with Columba and Kenneth MacAlpin — who feature in the first episode — but very few will have heard tales of Ead, Giric and Constantine,” said Neil McDonald, creative director of documentaries for BBC Scotland.

This trio were “crucially important figures”, Mr McDonald said. “They have been overlooked because of a tendency, in...

We’re often reminded of Faulkner’s aphorism: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” It truly applies in the case of “The Last Lynching,” an hourlong sampling of American civil rights history on Monday night, a “Koppel on Discovery” special.

In telling the stories of three delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August, Ted Koppel weaves Senator Barack Obama’s presidential nomination into the same social fabric as some of the best-known events of the civil rights era and some of the country’s least examined acts of violence.

We hear from Bob Filner, a California congressman who in 1961 was a Cornell University sophomore turned Freedom Rider arrested in Jackson, Miss., and sent to Parchman Farm, the state’s maximum security prison, for breaching the Jim Crow peace. And we hear from Lizzie Jenkins, president of the Democratic Black Caucus of Florida, who recounts two little-discussed outbreaks of lynch-mob violence against blacks in her state in...

Antonio Banderas says he's tired of Hollywood, where he has lived since 1992, and wants to return to his Spanish homeland to develop his career as a director.


The 48-year-old, whose triumph in Hollywood as a Latin lover/villain figure paved the way for Spanish successors like Javier Bardem, says he now wants to create the sort of movies suffocated by Hollywood.

His latest project may be a case in point. Mr Banderas, with his film star wife Melanie Griffith by his side, is travelling the Arab world raising money for his forthcoming movie "Sultan", which he has written and hopes to direct and star in. It tells the story of Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Spain, who was forced to surrender his beloved Granada to the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, a historic turning point that marked the birth of modern Spain.

The ageing Malaga-born screen star wants to tell the story from a pro-Arab viewpoint, and has been busy...

The campaign to save two Titian masterpieces received a boost yesterday after 60 of Britain's leading artists called for them to be saved for the nation and a leading arts organisation donated £1m to the cause.

Diana and Actaeon, considered one of the greatest paintings in private ownership, and its sister painting, Diana and Callisto, have been on public view in the National Gallery of Scotland as part of the Bridgewater collection since 1945 under a loan agreement.

But the decision by their owner, the Duke of Sutherland, to sell them has led to fears that a sale on the open market could see the 16th-century paintings leave the country.

He has offered first refusal to the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh for £100m - less than half their market value - which would allow the duke to take advantage of tax benefits. The galleries have until December 31 to raise £50m for Diana and Actaeon, which will also buy four more years to raise further...

Through most of the undistinguished history of films about American presidents, concern for truth has been in short supply. From "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939) to "Wilson" (1944) to "Sunrise at Campobello" (1960) to "The Missiles of October" (1974), to the many other, often cheap and cheesy films that populate cable television and direct-to-video products, the purpose of these movies has mostly been hagiography, propaganda or both. "Young Mr. Lincoln" (with Lincoln played by Henry Fonda) portrayed a saintly lawyer engaged in an idealized and implausible battle for justice. "Wilson" is a mediocre and now justly forgotten film that won five Academy Awards because of its usefulness to the debate over the aftermath of World War II. "Sunrise," drawn from a Broadway play, was a tribute to Franklin Roosevelt's courageous conquest of polio (a conquest that in reality never occurred) and a portrayal of a "great American...