Central African Republic

23 die in plane crash

A Boeing 707 crashed in a sparsely populated area of Bangui Thursday, killing 23 people and leaving the two others aboard injured, witnesses and officials said.

The jet was carrying passengers along with a load of onions and garlic from N’Djamena in Chad to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo when it tried to land here because of technical problems, said officials at the regional air authority, Asecna.

It crashed about 11:15 a.m. two miles short of the runway at Bangui’s international airport in clear weather, Asecna said.

Officials had no comment on the cause of the crash.

Guam

Typhoon kills 37 in Micronesia

Typhoon Chata’an wreaked havoc on Guam early today after passing through the Federated States of Micronesia where it killed 37 people and injured more than 100 others.

The storm landed on the northern end of Guam with wind gusts of 110 mph to 120 mph, said Joe Javellana, the island’s civil defense administrator. No injuries were immediately reported in Guam.

The entire island was without electrical power, leaving some villages with little or no water, the Guam Power Authority reported.

London

45 million AIDS cases predicted in 8 years

About 45 million more people worldwide will be infected with the AIDS virus in the next eight years, a huge increase that can be averted only with drastic action, experts say.

In research released Friday ahead of next week’s International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, scientists estimate 29 million of the cases, about two-thirds, could be prevented.

But they said achieving that goal would cost $27 billion about $1,000 per infection avoided between now and 2010.

Annual worldwide spending on HIV prevention will have to quadruple from $1.2 billion to $4.8 billion by 2005, experts said. The true costs could be higher if the money is not used effectively in all countries, they added.

Havana

Cuba pays homage to Americans on July 4

Despite its friction with Washington, Cuba’s communist government announced an unprecedented Fourth of July observance to show the regime’s respect for Americans and their traditions.

The Communist Party newspaper Granma said the cultural event would be at the Karl Marx theater Thursday night and feature music and poetry in honor of the “noble” American people.

“The cultural, spiritual and moral legacy of the American people is also the patrimony of Cuba and of the Cuban people,” Granma said.

No other details were provided, and it wasn’t known if President Fidel Castro would attend or if the event would be open to international journalists.

Castro himself often reaches out to Americans, saying his feelings for them have nothing to do with his government’s problems with the Bush administration. He has said Americans are more welcome in Cuba than in any other country.

Netherlands

Anne Frank case opened to determine betrayer

Based on new theories, government historians said Thursday they were reopening the case file on Anne Frank to determine who betrayed the hiding place of the Dutch Jewish teenager to the Nazis.

The theories were raised by two biographers of Anne Frank, whose diary scrawled in notebooks during her 25 months locked in a secret warehouse annex made her a heroine of the Holocaust.

One theory alleged the betrayer was Anton Ahlers, a business associate of Anne’s father, Otto Frank, who was the only member of the family to survive the Nazi concentration camps.

The second theory pointed to Lena Hartog, who cleaned the canal-side warehouse in central Amsterdam below the annex where the Frank family was concealed along with another family eight people in all.

The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, publishers of the authoritative text of Anne’s diary, said it would conduct an inquiry into the theories, re-examining police files and the national archives.