Deaths elsewhere

Lark Previn, 35, a daughter of actress Mia Farrow whose sister Soon-Yi Previn was at the center of Farrow's messy breakup with Woody Allen, has died.

Lark Previn died Christmas Day at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn, the medical examiner's office said. No cause of death was given. A cremation was held Tuesday at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.

Lark Previn was born in Vietnam in 1973. She was one of three children adopted by Farrow and her then-husband, conductor Andre Previn. The couple also had three biological children.

Representatives for Farrow and Previn didn't immediately return calls.

Farrow adopted two children and had a biological son during her relationship with Allen. Their relationship ended in 1992 when she discovered that Allen was having an affair with her daughter Soon-Yi, then 22. Soon-Yi Previn married Allen, who is 35 years her senior, in 1997.

Christine Maggiore, 52, an activist who vehemently denied that HIV causes AIDS, declined to take anti-AIDS drugs and sued Los Angeles County for stating that her 3-year-old daughter succumbed to AIDS-related pneumonia, has died.

Maggiore, whose HIV was diagnosed in 1992, died at her Van Nuys home on Saturday. She had been treated for pneumonia in the past six months, but her official cause of death was pending, county coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter said Tuesday.

A call to her home seeking comment from her husband, Robert Scovill, was not answered.

For a year after her diagnosis, Maggiore was a volunteer at AIDS shelters and spoke about the risks of the virus. She began to change her views in 1993 when she had more HIV tests that gave contradictory results, some negative and some positive.

"The more I read, the more I became convinced that AIDS research had jumped on a bandwagon that was headed in the wrong direction," she wrote on the Web site of her nonprofit organization, Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives.

Eric Wilson, 96, a British World War II hero who fought valiantly in North Africa despite severe wounds, has died 68 years after he was "posthumously" awarded the nation's highest combat honor by officials who thought he had been killed.

Wilson had been the oldest living holder of the Victoria Cross, according to obituaries published Tuesday in the Times and the Daily Telegraph. Jenny Hunt, a warden of St. Mary Magdelene church in Stowell, where Wilson lived, said he died Dec. 23.

Wilson had been reported killed in 1940, but was later found alive and trying to tunnel his way out of a prison camp in Eritrea. He went on to further service in Africa and Burma.

Two years ago, Wilson commented: "'What is bravery? I don't know. You just did what you had to do."

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