In brief: AIDS summit chief calls for action
VIENNA, Austria – World leaders lack the political will to ensure that everyone infected with HIV and AIDS gets treatment, the head of a meeting dedicated to the disease said Sunday.
Julio Montaner, president of the International AIDS Society and chairman of the AIDS 2010 conference, said the G-8 group of rich nations has failed to deliver on a commitment to guarantee so-called universal access and warned this could have dire consequences.
“This is a very serious deficit,” Montaner said. “Let’s rejoice in the fact that today we have treatments that work. … What we need is the political will to go the extra mile to deliver universal access.”
In 2005, G-8 leaders committed in a communique to developing and implementing an Africa-focused package for HIV prevention, treatment and care with the aim of getting “as close as possible to universal access to treatment for all those who need it by 2010.”
But a G-8 accountability report from a summit of world leaders in Canada last month acknowledged that the universal access targets will not be met by 2010.
KAMPALA, Uganda – Two suicide bombers, one Somali and one Ugandan, carried out the twin bombings that killed 76 people in the Ugandan capital of Kampala seven days ago, police said Sunday.
Somalia’s Islamist insurgent group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the blasts, which ripped through a rugby ground and an Ethiopian restaurant as football fans watched the World Cup final.
“Our experts have recognized the facial features of the suspected suicide bombers from photographs of their heads from the scenes of the blasts,” Major General Kale Kaihura, police inspector general, told reporters.
The police chief told reporters that FBI experts flown in from the United States helped identify the unclaimed bodies of the suspected bombers.
CALCUTTA, India – A speeding express train collided with a passenger train at a station in eastern India early today, mangling the carriages and killing at least 49 people, railway police said.
The crash happened about 2 a.m. when the Uttarbanga Express slammed into the stationary Bananchal Express as it left the platform at Sainthia station, about 125 miles north of Calcutta.
Rescuers recovered 49 bodies from the crash site and about 100 other people were injured, said railway spokesman Samir Goswami.
BEIJING – Rescuers found two bodies in a flooded coal shaft in northwestern China and 11 miners remained trapped today – a reminder of the dangers of an industry that claimed the lives of 36 others just days ago.
More than 100 rescuers pumped water out of the mine shaft in Jinta, a county in Gansu province, which was under construction at the time, the official Xinhua news agency said. Three miners were lifted to safety after water gushed into the mine Sunday.
On Saturday, 28 miners were killed when an electrical cable caught fire inside a coal shaft in northern Shaanxi province. There were no survivors.