Get the latest row from another table in MySQL

Let's say I have two tables, news and comments.

news ( id, subject, body, posted ) comments ( id, parent, // points to news.id message, name, posted )

I just realized the query does not return results if there are no comments attached to the news table, here's the fix as well as an added column for the total # of posts:


SELECT
    news.*, comments.name, comments.posted, (SELECT count(id) FROM comments WHERE comments.parent = news.id) AS numComments
FROM
    news
    LEFT JOIN comments ON news.id = comments.parent AND comments.id = (SELECT max(id) FROM comments WHERE parent = news.id)