Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor face the death penalty in Libya.

Libyan ruler Muammar Abu Minyar al-Qadhafi has turned a deaf ear to pleas from the West asking him to rescind the death sentences given to five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor charged with deliberately infecting 426 Libyan children with HIV through contaminated blood products. (According to a report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Qadhafi accused the workers of taking orders from the CIA and the Israeli secret service to kill Libyan children in order to destabilize Libya.) The workers were arrested in 1999 along with nine Libyans who have since been acquitted; since then, more than 40 infected children have died.

The accused insist they are innocent and that any confession they made was coerced, the result of the rape and torture of two of the nurses. According to the International Council of Nurses (ICN), expert witnesses, including French researcher Luc Montagnier who first isolated the HIV virus, have testified that the children were infected as a result of poor hygiene at the hospital and that the spread of the infection had begun well before the accused started working at the hospital. The ANA and ICN have appealed to President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair to intervene on the workers' behalf.

FIGURE. Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were sentenced to death by firing squad on May 6, having been convicted of intentionally infecting more than 400 children with HIV. Here, they watch proceedings from inside the defendants' cage in a Benghazi, Libya, courtroom.

China announces new measures to fight AIDS.

According to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, since 1998 the number of reported AIDS cases in China has increased by about 30% per year. It's estimated that by 2010 some 10 million people could be infected, up from an estimated 1 million in 2002. The State Council, China's Cabinet, called for a series of urgent measures to slow the spread of the epidemic, including a program called "China Nurses-HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care Project," which calls on nurses to, among other things, teach the public about HIV and AIDS, work as patient advocates, provide counseling to patients and their families, ensure that HIV testing is conducted properly, monitor treatment, and provide care-including palliative care-in health care institutions.