Nation & world briefing
Doctor says human clone is weeks away
Ken Dilanian
Knight Ridder Newspapers (KRT)
ROME — The world’s first human
clone should be bom in about seven
weeks, a controversial Italian gyne
cologist said at a news conference
here Tuesday.
Severino Antinori offered no evi
dence for his assertion.
During a feisty give-and-take with
reporters at Rome’s Foreign Press
Club, he repeatedly declined to say
where the mother was living, citing
the need to protect her.
“I receive a lot of threats,” he said.
Antinori — who in 1994 helped a
62-year-old Italian woman become
the oldest new mother in history —
is part of a consortium of doctors
that announced last year it would at
tempt human cloning. In April, he
told an interviewer that the group
had successfully implanted cloned
embryos in three women.
On Tuesday, Antinori said the
mother of what would be the first
human clone ever born was 33
weeks pregnant.
“I expect it during the first week
in January,” he said. “An absolutely
healthy baby will be born.”
He said ultrasound scans —
which he did not provide — indicat
ed the fetus weighed between 5.5
and 5.9 pounds.
With all the bombast he could
muster, Antinori also blasted the
Vatican, which has roundly con
demned him, and expressed con
cern that the Italian secret services
might put a tail on him.
He scolded a German reporter,
complaining that German newspa
pers had likened him to Adolf Hitler.
And he accused a rival scientist of
planting a spy in the consortium.
Asked why he supported human
cloning, Antinori, who runs a private
fertility clinic here, said millions of
infertile couples could benefit from
the technology.
In April, he was quoted in Rome’s
II Tempo newspaper as saying that
the most developed of the three fe
tuses came from the cell of a
wealthy Arab man. At other times,
he has said the two other women
pregnant with clones were in for
mer Soviet republics.
Cloning is designed to create the
genetic twin of a life form. Scien
tists remove the DNA from an egg
cell and insert the DNA from the
adult being cloned. If it works, the
egg cell begins to divide and grows
into an embryo, which then can be
transferred to a female and carried
to term.
In the five years since the cloning
of the famous sheep Dolly, scientists
have duplicated a variety of animals.
But because of the risks of severe
abnormalities and other ethical con
siderations, most industrialized
countries, including the United
States and Italy, have banned
human cloning.
© 2002, The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune
Information Services.
Women make up half of AIDS sufferers, U.N. says
Jeremy Manier
Chicago Tribune (KRT)
CHICAGO — For the first time,
about half the people worldwide liv
ing with the virus that causes AIDS
are women, according to estimates
in a new United Nations report.
The figures also present a stark
warning about the swift inroads the
deadly disease is making among mil
lions of heterosexual victims from
China — where officials fear there
could be 10 million cases within a
decade — to Africa.
HIV has so thoroughly devastat
ed parts of southern Africa that it is
amplifying the effects of an already
urgent food crisis, with up to 60
percent of farms reporting some
loss of agricultural workers to
AIDS, according to the U.N. report
released Tuesday.
Most of the disease’s spread in
Asia is coming from heterosexual
contact and intravenous drug use,
adding to concerns that the toll there
could climb rapidly.
“We are far away from the gay
white men’s disease (AIDS) used to
be,” said Peter Piot, executive direc
tor of the U.N. program UNAIDS.
“Heterosexual transmission is on the
rise in just about every continent.”
Amid the worsening crisis of a dis
ease that infects 42 million world
wide, the new report offers signs of
hope that some prevention efforts
are working. In Cambodia, rates of
HIV infection among prostitutes
have fallen steadily since 1998 as
their use of condoms has increased.
Infection rates among young
mothers in South Africa edged down
in the last three years from 21 per
cent to about 15 percent, an im
provement experts traced to more
young people delaying their first sex
ual activity, limiting their number of
sexual partners and using condoms.
One source of the increase in
women’s HIV numbers is simple bi
ology. Researchers have long known
that because of the way fluids are ex
changed during sex, it’s easier for
women to contract HIV from men
than it is for men to get the virus
from women.
But young women also may be at
increased risk for infection in parts
of Africa and Southeast Asia because
some older men believe it’s safer to
have sex with younger partners with
less sexual experience.
In areas where most infected men
do not know they are carrying the
virus, that’s a recipe for spreading
the disease to a new generation of
women, experts say. Women ac
count for 58 percent of HIV-infected
adults in Sub-Saharan Africa, ac
cording to the new report.
The new U.N. estimates suggest
that women still account for slight
ly fewer HIV cases than men. 19.2
million adult women worldwide,
compared with 19.4 million adult
men. Children make up another
3.2 million cases. U.N. officials said
this is the first time the estimates
for men and women have been
nearly equal.
© 2002, Chicago Tribune. Distributed
by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information
Services.
News briefs
President Bush signs
terrorism-insurance bill
WASHINGTON — President
Bush signed a sweeping bill Thurs
day to help the insurance industry
cover catastrophic acts of terrorism
like the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
but with a major catch: Taxpayers
would bear much of the cost.
In a White House ceremony, the
president justified his departure
from free-market principles by say
ing commercial developers can now
go ahead with more than #15 billion
in construction projects stalled by
the lack of terrorism coverage.
“The nation’s hard hats will get
back to work, being able to put food
on the table for their families,”
Bush told an audience that includ
ed construction workers and insur
ance officials. “Investors in mar
kets will have greater confidence
that our economy is strong enough
to withstand a future attack.”
In the event of another massive
attack, the cost to taxpayers could
be hefty. The industry would make
insurance payments equal to 7 per
cent of premiums in the first year,
with taxpayers picking up 90 per
cent of the remainder of the cost,
up to a total of #100 billion.
The industry’s “deductible,” or
initial share of the costs, would rise
to 15 percent of premiums in the
third and final year of the program
in 2005, although the law could
easily be extended by Congress.
But the cost-sharing plan still
heavily favors the industry, accord
ing to critics, and essentially turns
the federal government into the in
surer of last resort. Economist
Stephen More, who heads a politi
cal action committee supporting
conservative candidates, said the
bill “smacks of corporate welfare.
It’s basically a giveaway.”
— William Neikirk, Chicago Tri
bune (KRT)
Sharon holds solid lead
against Netanyahu
JERUSALEM — After two years
of fighting the latest Palestinian
rebellion, Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon still has strong support
among the Israeli public and is
poised for a decisive leadership win
over his closest Likud party rival,
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sharon must garner half the
votes in Thursday’s primary to re
tain the party chairmanship and
move toward a nationwide election
in January. Recent polls show
Sharon leading Netanyahu, the
current foreign minister and a for
mer prime minister, by 18 points.
Netanyahu is campaigning hard
but has hinted in speeches that he
expects to suffer a political setback.
In banquets halls and media ap
pearances, Netanyahu repeatedly
raised the possibility of keeping the
Foreign Ministry post he acquired
just a month ago in a Sharon Cabi
net shake-up.
Sharon, ever the tactician, has
only said he would be “glad” to see
Netanyahu as foreign minister,
leaving options open for whatever
coalition possibilities arise from
the January balloting.
Sharon’s appeal, at a most unset
tled time in Israel, may well stem
from the political risks he has been
willing to take within the Likud
Party and with Israeli voters at
large, analysts said. Sharon time
and again has positioned himself as
“the man in the middle,” as one an
alyst said, a leader providing much
needed political ballast in a year of
volatile emotions.
“What Israelis don’t want ...
when buses are blowing up is for
the political system to pull us
apart,” said Reuven Hazan, a politi
cal analyst at Hebrew University.
If Sharon wins Thursday, he and
Likud will have a real fight on their
hands for the first time in nearly
two years.
Labor candidate Amram Mitzna,
who last week won that party lead
ership race handily over former
Defense Minister Benjamin Ben
Eliezer, has promised to offer a
“clear alternative” to the present
policy of fighting terrorism solely
with military might.
Mitzna, mayor of Haifa and a for
mer general, has bluntly called
Sharon’s policy a failure for Israeli
society, unable to provide foolproof
security and wreaking economic
havoc. Fight terror, he said in a
speech this week, but negotiate at
the same time.
— Christine Spolar,
Chicago Tribune (KRT)
Today's crossword solution
015211
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