Missing girl’s family plans advertising blitz

Missing girl’s family
plans advertising blitz

LONDON — The family of a 4-year-old British girl missing in Portugal said Saturday it was planning a $160,000 advertising campaign urging people to keep looking for the child, whose parents have been named suspects in the disappearance.

The newspaper, television and billboard campaign will be focused on Spain, Portugal and other parts of Europe and will be paid for using donations from a $2 million fund set up to help find Madeleine McCann, her uncle, John McCann, said in a statement.

Saturday’s announcement followed the family’s decision not to spend the proceeds from the fund on legal costs for Madeline’s parents, Kate and Gerry McCann.

The parents were taking stock and preparing their legal case after a week of intense media speculation about their possible role in their daughter’s disappearance during their vacation in southern Portugal on May 3, said Natalie Orringe, a spokeswoman for the McCanns.

Ground broken on center
for wounded soldiers’ kin

SAN ANTONIO — Officials and volunteers broke ground Saturday on a $4 million support center for the families of severely wounded soldiers who seek treatment and rehabilitation here.

The privately funded facility will be the Army’s first designed specifically to aid the wives, children and parents of severely wounded service members. It will replace a cramped room at the Brooke Army Medical Center that opened months after the start of the Iraq war.

Judith Markelz, the program manager for the Warrior and Family Support Center, said the initial center was opened in December 2003 “naively thinking we’d close in six months.”

But the ongoing war — and the advances in battlefield medicine that allow soldiers with severe wounds to survive — has created growing demand for a place where families can get the comforts of home they abandoned when their loved one was wounded.

Rally urges U.N. to let
Taiwan join as a member

KAOHSIUNG, Taiwan — More than 100,000 Taiwanese rallied Saturday to demand the United Nations accept the island as a member, the most important step yet in the government-orchestrated campaign to emphasize its separation from mainland China.

The demonstration in the southern city of Kaohsiung gave ballast to President Chen Shui-bian’s pro-independence policies, and defied threats from China. The two split amid civil war in 1949.

The rally was called to back a planned referendum on membership in the world body under the name Taiwan, rather than the official title of the Republic of China.

Taiwanese U.N. membership would still need approval by the Security Council, and with China opposed to the island’s entry under any name at all, it would almost certainly wield its veto.

3 receive Lasker awards

NEW YORK — Two researchers who opened up the field of heart-valve replacement and a scientist who discovered a type of cell that plays a key role in the immune system have won prestigious medical prizes.

The $150,000 Albert Lasker Medical Research Awards will be presented Sept. 28 in New York by the Albert & Mary Lasker Foundation.

Dr. Albert Starr of the Providence Health System in Portland, Ore., and Dr. Alain Carpentier of the Georges Pompidou European Hospital in Paris will share the clinical research prize for developing replacement heart valves. More than 300,000 people a year worldwide get heart valves replaced, and it’s the second most common heart surgery in the United States, the foundation said.

In the 1950s, Starr and the late engineer Lowell Edwards defied conventional wisdom by developing an artificial heart valve that looked nothing like a natural one. Their design, a free-floating ball inside a cage, had been used in bottle stoppers for a century.

Now that’s a pot of soup!

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuelan officials claimed a world record Saturday for making the largest pot of soup, a giant cauldron of stew prepared by President Hugo Chavez’s government.

The hulking stainless steel cooking pot, set up outdoors in downtown Caracas, contained about 3,960 gallons of “sancocho” stew, Food Minister Rafael Oropeza said. That would dwarf the current record-holder listed on the Guinness World Records Web site, a pot of 1,413 gallons of spicy soup prepared in Durango, Mexico, in July.

Oropeza called it “Bolivarian stew” — a play on the name of Chavez’s socialist movement, named in honor of South American independence hero Simon Bolivar. He said it was enough to feed 60,000 to 70,000 people.

It contained 6,600 pounds of chicken, 4,400 pounds of beef and tons of legumes and vegetables.

Associated Press