HAVANA
Cuban leaders say Castro recovering
Cuban officials said Saturday that Fidel Castro was steadily recovering from surgery and the government was still preparing for its worst-case scenario: an attack by government opponents taking advantage of the leader’s health crisis.
Castro, whose 80th birthday is Aug. 13, has made no appearances in the five days since his surgery for gastrointestinal bleeding was announced to the Cuban public. Defense Minister Raul Castro, his younger brother and the man named to temporarily replace him as the island’s top leader, also was nowhere to be seen.
Vice President Carlos Lage said that Fidel Castro is recovering satisfactorily from surgery and that the communist leader sent his “fraternal greetings” to the people of Bolivia, according to Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.
LONDON
Study simplifies ways to fight AIDS spread
At a time when millions of people each year are still being infected with the virus that causes AIDS, particularly in Africa, a rigorous new study has identified several simple, inexpensive methods that helped reduce the spread of the disease among Kenyan teenagers, especially girls.
In Kenya, where poverty drives some girls to sleep with older men for money or gifts, teenage girls are seven times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys the same age.
The new study found that when informed that older men are much likelier to be infected, teenage girls were far less likely to become pregnant by so-called sugar daddies.
The $1 million study, financed by the Partnership for Child Development, a London-based nonprofit group, did not seek blood tests for HIV, since its subjects were minors. Instead, it relied on pregnancy as evidence of unprotected sex.
SUCRE, Bolivia
President seeks new constitution
President Evo Morales’ drive to reinvent Bolivia takes a big step today with the opening of a convention to write a new constitution aimed at ending the centuries-old supremacy of the European-descended minority.
Morales, a leftist elected in December as Bolivia’s first Indian president, envisions the nationally elected Constituent Assembly as nothing less than the “refounding” of the country on a new deal for the Indian majority.
Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism party holds a thin majority in the national assembly but not the two-thirds needed to control the assembly outright. Even so, the party hopes to use the assembly to reshape the Bolivian state to give more power to the long-neglected Indian majority.
MUTTUR, Sri Lanka
Soldiers retake town, tell civilians to return
Sri Lankan soldiers retook control of a key northeastern town Saturday after six days of fighting Tamil rebels there, and the military urged thousands of displaced civilians to return.
The few civilians who remained in Muttur searched for friends and relatives amid shattered houses, sidewalks littered with artillery shell casings and streets pockmarked with craters. The army said corpses that lay in some areas were the bodies of slain Tamil Tiger rebels.
“We have the town totally under our control. We tell the people to come back and resume their normal lives,” said Maj. Nalin Jayatillaka, the military’s commanding officer for Muttur.
