Kenya

Clinton pledges to help expand AIDS treatment

Former President Clinton pledged Friday to help Kenya expand HIV/AIDS care and treatment, particularly for children and people in rural areas who traditionally receive the fewest services in poor countries.

Clinton said his foundation had received grants worth $1.5 million to help train medical workers for rural areas in this East African nation.

The money came from singer Elton John and the Children Investment Fund Foundation, a London-based charity that funds projects to improve the lives of children in poor nations, Clinton said.

Some 1.2 million Kenyans are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. About 200,000 of these need treatment with life-prolonging drugs, but only 44,000 have access to the medication.

Based on current estimates, it costs about $20 a person each year to do the tests needed to monitor the effectiveness of the life-prolonging drugs in Kenya. It costs an additional $140 a person a year for the medicine, Clinton said.

Mexico City

Archeologists find rare child sacrifice to god

Archeologists digging through an Aztec temple say they’ve found a rare child sacrifice to the war god, a deity normally honored with the hearts or skulls of adult warriors.

The child found at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor ruins was apparently killed sometime around 1450, in a sort of grim cornerstone ceremony intended to dedicate a new layer of building, according to archaeologist Ximena Chavez.

Priests propped the child – apparently already dead, since the sand around him showed no sign of movement – in a sitting position and workers packed earth around his body, which was then covered beneath a flight of stone temple steps.

Chavez said Friday there was no reference to child sacrifices to the war god Huitzilopochtli in accounts written by the Spaniards after the 1521 Conquest.

Warriors captured during battles with opposing cities were often sacrificed to the war god; in contrast, children have sometimes been found sacrificed to Tlaloc, the rain god.

Havana

Activist: Dissident leaders detained

Cuban authorities on Friday detained at least 20 opposition activists, including three prominent dissident leaders, who had organized a demonstration for the freedom of political prisoners, relatives and human rights monitors in Havana said.

Also Friday, government supporters prevented several other dissidents from leaving their homes to participate in the demonstration at the French embassy.

Among those detained by state security agents were Martha Beatriz Roque, Felix Bonne and Rene Gomez, said veteran human rights activist Elizardo Sanchez.

Roque, Bonne and Gomez are all former political prisoners and close collaborators who head a dissident coalition known as the Assembly to Promote Civil Society. In May they held a landmark opposition meeting, which drew 150 dissidents.

Assembly members on Friday scheduled a demonstration at the French embassy in Havana to call for the release of political prisoners. Gomez was not planning to be there, but Roque and Bonne were. They never arrived.

It was impossible to confirm whether any of the opposition leaders were temporarily detained for questioning or arrested.