ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 24, 1997 TAG: 9702240125
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
Titanic survivor sets sail again
LONDON - One of the last remaining survivors of the Titanic will finally cross the Atlantic by boat - 85 years after the liner struck an iceberg and sank.
Millvina Dean was just 9 weeks old when the Titanic - then the world's biggest liner - went down April 14 and 15, 1912, on its way from the southern English port of Southampton to New York.
Fifteen hundred people were killed, including Dean's father. About 700 crew members and passengers escaped on lifeboats as the vessel broke up and sank 560 miles off Newfoundland.
Dean, who was traveling with her parents and brother to start a new life in the United States, survived after being put into a sack and handed to a sailor who got her on board lifeboat No.13.
She plans to sail across the Atlantic on the QE2 luxury liner this year.
``I have never been on a big liner [as an adult]. I love the sea,'' Dean said Sunday, shortly after she visited a Titanic exhibition in the central English town of Dudley.
``I never had any emotions about the Titanic. I was too young, for one thing. I didn't know my father, and my mother never spoke about it.''
Dean, one of only seven living survivors, does not want the Titanic's wreck lifted from the seabed.
``I don't want them to raise it. I think the other survivors would say exactly the same. That would be horrible,'' she said.
- Associated Press
China will gut Hong Kong rights
BEIJING - China's legislature voted Sunday to dilute Hong Kong's civil liberties laws, saying they contradict the constitution Beijing drafted for the territory after it returns to Chinese control July 1.
Beijing has long vowed it would gut the laws, despite protests from Hong Kong's democrats and British governor, and a committee of Chinese officials and Hong Kong notables preparing for the handover also recommended the move Feb. 1.
The state-run Xinhua News Agency reported that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress voted to strike down 14 laws in their entirety and portions of 10 others.
The committee decided that Hong Kong's Bill of Rights, which guarantees freedom of speech and assembly and other civil liberties, would no longer have supremacy over other laws, Xinhua said.
The committee said two other ordinances - on public demonstrations and forming associations - also will need to be greatly revised.
- Associated Press
India succeeds at missile test
NEW DELHI, India - India on Sunday successfully tested a short-range ballistic missile that is part of an ambitious program criticized by the West because many of the missiles could be fitted with nuclear warheads.
The Prithvi missile can carry a half-ton warhead 156 miles, meaning it could reach several cities in neighboring Pakistan.
It has been tested 15 times before, but Sunday's test at a range on India's eastern coast was the first time a mobile launcher had been used, United News of India news agency said.
India is also reconsidering developing long-range missiles, capable of striking China, which is seen as less of a threat to India than Pakistan does. India and China have not fought a war since 1962, and tensions have steadily eased along their disputed frontier in the Himalayas.
- Associated Press
LENGTH: Medium: 70 linesby CNB