Taylor to mark birthday with donation for NOLA

Taylor to mark birthdaywith donation for NOLA
LOS ANGELES -- Elizabeth Taylor will ring in her 74th birthday Monday with a gift worth several hundred thousand dollars. Only it isn't for her. The two-time Oscar winner will commemorate her birthday by donating a mobile medical unit to the New Orleans AIDS Task Force, her publicist, Dick Guttman, announced. The medical unit is "like a large recreational vehicle, about 40 feet long, with two examination rooms and X-ray facilities," said Martin Delaney, founding director of Project Inform, a national AIDS organization that helped facilitate Taylor's gift. The vehicle, manufactured in Ohio, is already in New Orleans, Delaney said. It will be staffed by doctors who worked in AIDS clinics shuttered by Hurricane Katrina. The new medical vehicle will allow doctors to provide "vital care" to victims of the disease in New Orleans and surrounding neighborhoods, Delaney said. "There are a lot of areas in the Gulf Coast that have never been served well by AIDS clinics," he said. "This provides a chance to bring treatment out to a much wider range of places." The mobile medical unit is already being used for educational purposes and will be staffed by doctors soon, he said. An official launch is planned for late March. Taylor, a longtime AIDS activist, helped establish the American Foundation for AIDS Research in 1985 and created the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation in 1991.
Journalist Woodruffwill head back to PBS
LOS ANGELES -- Veteran broadcast journalist Judy Woodruff will return to her one-time home, PBS, for a project examining young people's views on religion, politics and other issues, including America's role in the world. After talking to a cross section of Americans ages 16 to 25, Woodruff will detail her findings in reports on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" beginning later this year and in a January 2007 documentary, PBS said. Her work is part of a yearlong multimedia project from MacNeil Lehrer Productions that will include Internet elements and has the working title, "Generation Next: Speak Up. Be Heard." Principal funding is from The Pew Charitable Trusts. "Our objective is to create a profile of the next generation, and to provide current decision-makers with better information about them," Woodruff said. "We want to help everyone understand the views of young people." Production was scheduled to begin this spring, with tentative plans calling for visits to Birmingham, Ala.; Minneapolis; Lincoln, Neb.; Cleveland; and San Francisco, among other cities. Woodruff worked at PBS from 1983-93 as chief Washington correspondent for "The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour." Last year, she left CNN after a decade as an anchor and correspondent to pursue other projects but remains a consultant for the cable channel.
Today's birthdays
Actress Betty Hutton is 85. Singer Fats Domino is 78. Political columnist Robert Novak is 75. Actor-director Bill Duke is 63. Singer Mitch Ryder is 61. Rock musician Jonathan Cain (Journey) is 56. Singer Michael Bolton is 53. Actor Greg Germann is 48. Actress Jennifer Grant is 40. Singer Erykah Badu is 35. Rhythm-and-blues singer Kyle Norman (Jagged Edge) is 31. Country singer Rodney Hayden is 26. Actress Taylor Dooley is 13.