It is time for the African-American community "to face the fact that AIDS has become a black disease" and find ways to defeat it, said the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NCAAP) at the international AIDS summit on Monday.
Julian Bond, Reverend Jesse Jackson and other major African-American leaders called on their own community to accept responsibility for ending the devastation of AIDS, which has claimed more than 200,000 black Americans since the epidemic began 25 years ago.
In a first for the political leaders, they blamed the disaster on a lack of will and pledged to do more.
"The story of AIDS in America is mostly one of a failure to lead and nowhere is this truer than in our black communities," NAACP chairman Bond said. "We have led successful responses to many other challenges in the past. Now is the time for us to face the fact that AIDS has become a black disease."
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-Americans account for half of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It is the leading cause of death for black women between the ages of 25 to 34. Overall, blacks are seven times more likely to die from AIDS than other at-risk groups.
"Because of poverty, ignorance and prejudice, AIDS has been allowed to stalk and kill black America like a serial killer," Jackson said.
Jackson didn't make the conference, but issued a statement of support with the other leaders.
The US black delegation pledged to draft a five-year plan to reduce HIV rates among African-Americans and to boost the percentage of those who get tests and learn their HIV status.
The 16th annual AIDS summit opened on Monday with the double Bills of the global fight against AIDS -- Microsoft founder Bill Gates and former US president Bill Clinton.
Clinton irritated some delegates when he suggested that the Bush administration's call for abstinence to combat AIDS was not all bad.
Gates and Clinton both praised US President George W. Bush for his pledge of US$15 billion over five years to combat AIDS in 15 countries, noting it was the largest single pledge ever made to fight a disease.
The program, however, calls for at least 30 percent of the funding earmarked for prevention to go toward abstinence programs.
"An abstinence-only program is going to fail and in the end you're going to wind up being in a cruel fix," Clinton said. "On the other hand, I think if you want the benefit of that American money ... then it's a mistake to walk away from that message altogether. It's just that you can't do abstinence only."
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the