WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate, fending off opposition from some conservative Republicans, voted on Wednesday to spend $48 billion to fight AIDS worldwide over the next five years.

By a vote of 80-16, the Senate passed the legislation and ended weeks of delays orchestrated by some Republicans who thought the measure spent too much and objected to other provisions.

“In 2003, President Bush and this Congress launched the largest public health program in the history of the world,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, a Delaware Democrat, who pushed the legislation. “It is saving lives, millions of them.” Read more »

By Patrick Buchanan: 

Last week, the front pages of the world press blossomed with photos of four Iranian rockets, fired in salvo, heading skyward.

The image was powerful, and the message reinforced by the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Should Israel attack Iran, said Ali Shira, Tel Aviv will be “set on fire.” Read more »

Peter Egner talked freely to his friends about his service as a conscript in the German army during World War II, and even showed them the jagged scar on his hip - the wound that Egner said ended his military service.

“He was a (second world war) veteran, like I was a veteran,” said Russell Wilson, 81, his long-time neighbour in West Linn, Oregon.

But federal Nazi hunters say the 86-year-old Egler, of Bellevue, Washington, has lived a lie all these years, and yesterday moved to revoke his US citizenship, claiming he was a member of a Nazi death squad responsible for the murders of more than 17,000 Serbian Jews and others as the German Wehrmacht marched east on the Soviet Union. Read more »

According to the results of recent AIDS-oriented study performed by an international team of researchers, black individuals present a gene variant which, while ensuring a higher level of protection against some types of malaria, increases the body’s vulnerability to HIV infection by 40 percent. In their attempt to find an explanation for the high frequency of AIDS cases within the world’s black population, the scientists have identified this subtle genetic trait (with 60 percent of African-Americans and 90 percent of Africans). It is believed that this is the reason for the disproportionate global share of recorded AIDS cases.

Statistics say while the Sub-Saharan Africa covers about ten percent of the world’s population, it brings together 70 percent of today’s HIV infection cases. A somewhat similar situation can be observed with the U.S. : while African-Americans represent 12 percent of the population, they account for roughly 50 percent of HIV infections. SOURCE>>>>>>>>

Americans are approaching this first general election with a major African-American candidate for president sharply divided by race, with blacks and whites holding vastly different views of Barack Obama, the state of race relations and how black Americans are treated by society, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

Black and white Americans are in agreement that the United States is ready to elect a black president, but disagree on almost every other question about race in the poll. Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said that race relations are generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Two-thirds of blacks think that white people have a better chance to get ahead in U.S. society; 35 percent of whites said the same thing. Read more »

Lancaster (myfoxla.com)  –  Authorities are looking for a man suspected of using a sword to fatally stab his live-in girlfriend in their Lancaster home in front of their four young children.

Jesus Humberto Canales is wanted in connection with the stabbing death of Lucy Preciado, who was found dead of multiple stab wounds in their home in the 4100 block of West Avenue L shortly after 2 a.m. on Saturday, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Headquarters Bureau.

Canales, who is 28 years old and from El Salvador, was last seen driving away in a dark-colored vehicle, possibly a bronze 2002 GMC Safari van with a California license plate 6CBY663, according to authorities. Read more »

Alvarez was part of the radical Latino group MEChA.  MEChA was founded for the sole purpose of radicalizing young Latino students with a hatred for America, Chicano pride, and separatism.  Note that no hate crime charges were filed in this case. 

LOS ANGELES - A man who murdered 11 people by causing a commuter rail disaster was spared the death penalty Tuesday by jurors who wept while listening to victims’ relatives but decided he should get life in prison without parole.

Juan Alvarez parked his gasoline-doused sport utility vehicle on railroad tracks in January 2005, causing a Los Angeles-bound Metrolink train to derail and crash into another train going the other way. Aside from the dead, about 180 people were injured in the wreck in Glendale, northeast of Los Angeles. Read more »

WASHINGTON - A two-decade ban on people with HIV visiting or immigrating to the United States may end soon through a Senate bill aimed at fighting AIDS and other diseases in Africa and other poor areas of the world.

The U.S. is one of a dozen countries — including Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Russia — that ban travel and immigration for HIV-positive people.

Even China, said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., recently changed that policy, deciding it was “time to move beyond an antiquated, knee-jerk reaction” to people with HIV.

“There’s no excuse for a law that stigmatizes a particular disease,” Kerry said Tuesday at a speech to the Center for Strategic & International Studies HIV/AIDS Task Force. Even people with avian flu or the Ebola virus have an easier time than those with HIV when it come to applying for visas, he said.   MORE>>>

FLINT, Mich. - Officials in Flint, Mich., say they’ve had to replace hundreds of manhole covers and grates that were probably stolen and sold for scrap.

The Flint Journal reported Monday that nearly 400 cast iron covers and grates have been taken from streets in the past year. A cover can fetch $20 from a scrap yard but can cost the city more than $200 to replace.

Officials in neighboring Burton say they’ve lost about 200 covers and grates during the same period. Utilities supervisor Mike Holzer says it leaves behind holes up to 35 feet deep.   MORE>>>

CINCINNATI - John McCain is telling the NAACP he will expand education opportunities for children in failing schools.

McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on Wednesday is addressing the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization.

In excerpts released in advance of the speech, McCain says that the worst educational problems in the country are often found in schools in black communities and that as president he will provide greater school choices and scholarships for such students.

McCain also asks the group to excuse his absence from their convention last year, saying he was “a bit distracted” dealing with his then-faltering presidential campaign.  MORE>>>