Dali works to go on show
Fifteen drawings Salvador Dali made for a doctor who treated him are going on exhibit for the first time in Buffalo. The University at Buffalo’s Anderson Gallery plans to display the works of the Spanish surrealist for two months this summer. The university says in a release that the artist gave the late dermatologist Edmund Klein the personalized drawings as payment for treatment over nearly a decade, beginning in 1972. The drawings were made on pages from sketchpads, art books and a paper Klein had written. Some depict angels and bear dedications to the doctor. Klein and his family stored the drawings in a bank vault. His widow, Martha, revealed their existence last summer. She says she wants to sell them.
■UNITED STATES
Ammonia leak kills one
An ammonia leak on Saturday at a poultry processing plant in North Carolina killed one worker and injured four others, authorities said. Sheriff Kenneth Sealey said the leak occurred at the Mountaire Farms plant in Robeson County in southern-central North Carolina, about 26km south of Fayetteville. Sealey identified the worker who died as Clifton Swain, 47. County Emergency Management Director Charles Britt told the Fayetteville Observer that the leak has been contained. The four injured workers, who were not identified, were taken to hospitals. The ammonia leak happened while workers were doing maintenance work on a piece of machinery at the plant, the sheriff’s department said in a news release. Investigators have ruled it was an accident and that no crime was involved. Authorities have said that 30 to 40 people were at the plant when the leak occurred. Sealey said all workers have been accounted for at the plant, which employs 2,500 people.
■BRAZIL
Polio program begins
Health authorities on Saturday started their annual polio vaccination program that this year will immunize 95 percent of the country’s children under age five. The 46 million real (US$24 million) campaign will give anti-polio injections to 14.7 million children, with the second stage of the program to take place on Aug. 22, the health ministry said in a statement. Brazil stamped out polio in the 1980s after repeated vaccination campaigns. “Now, the importance of the vaccine is to keep the country free of the virus that causes this illness. The shots don’t have side-effects,” the coordinator for the ministry’s national immunization program, Maria Arindelita Arruda, said. Poliomyelitis is a serious viral infection that in a minority of cases, particularly in children, can cause nerve damage and paralysis. “The fact that polio is stamped out in Brazil is no reason for complacency,” Arindelita said.
■UNITED STATES
Health care changes popular
The overwhelming majority of Americans support substantial changes to the country’s health care system, including a government-run health insurance option, a new opinion poll found. The survey by the New York Times and CBS News also indicated most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance. Eighty-five percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt, according to the poll. In addition, the survey found that 72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan that would compete for customers with private insurers.
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