WASHINGTON — Rates for cancer cases and deaths went down in the 1990s, led by declines for prostate, lung and colon cancer, according to combined government and private studies. More breast cancer cases were detected, apparently because of aggressive screening.
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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department should investigate the possibility that minorities were intentionally denied voting rights in last year’s elections in Florida, the chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says.
Mary Frances Berry said Tuesday that she plans to request a meeting with Attorney General John Ashcroft and will recommend to the commission Friday that the Justice Department be asked to look into problems outlined in a commission report.
The report said thousands of Floridians were deprived of their votes by outdated equipment, improper purging of voter rolls, language barriers and inadequate access to voting booths.
Black voters were disenfranchised by a disproportionate margin, said the report, which has yet to be approved by the full commission. That vote is scheduled for Friday.
“We are asking the Justice Department and Mr. Ashcroft to look at the facts in our report and look at the remedy he should pursue,” Berry said in an interview. “He should determine whether there was intentional discrimination.”
Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson said he could not comment on the commission’s report because he hadn’t seen it yet.
“What happened in Florida is that there was bipartisan disenfranchisement — Democrats who were county supervisors did not do what they were supposed to do, and neither did the governor nor the secretary of state,” Berry said.
The report said the state’s highest officials, singling out Republican Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, were “grossly derelict in fulfilling their responsibilities and unwilling to accept accountability.”
Charles Canady, general counsel for the governor, responded in a letter Tuesday that the report was biased and rife with errors.
“The report grossly mischaracterizes the role of the governor and other state-level officials in overseeing the administration of elections in Florida,” Canady said. “Although Governor Bush has taken a leadership role in reforming our state’s election system, he clearly was not responsible for carrying out or overseeing the preparations for the November 2000 election.”
Bush said Tuesday he had not seen the report but the fact that it was leaked to the news media “points to the clear fact that this is a partisan group.”
“They have admitted that there was no systematic effort to discriminate,” the governor said, adding that Florida has responded to the election problems by creating a model system backed by a lot of money. “So I’m moving on,” he said.
The eight-member commission currently has four Democrats, three independents and a Republican.
Fifty-four percent of votes rejected during the Florida election were cast by black voters, according to the report. Blacks accounted for 11 percent of voters statewide.
“The disenfranchisement was not isolated or episodic,” said the report, the product of a six-month investigation. The commission held three days of hearings, interviewed 100 witnesses and reviewed 118,000 documents.
The commission is charged with investigating possible violations of the federal Voting Rights Act and other civil rights protections.
Florida officials and two members of the commission criticized the way the report was released. It was made available to three newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
The new Florida law requires that all counties have modern optical scan voting machines and stop using the punchcard machines that were the source of much controversy in the Florida vote recount. It also allows for provisional ballots for people who are not on voter lists but say they are eligible to vote. Election officials would later determine if the ballots were valid.
Commissioner Russell Redenbaugh, an independent appointed by Republicans, was sharply critical of the report.
“Without any doubt, there’s political motivation in this process,” Redenbaugh said Tuesday. “The way this has been handled and released reflects poorly on the commission and diminishes the impact it will have.
“President Bush needs to act to produce new leadership on the Civil Rights Commission.”

 CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — Though more than 22 million people have died of AIDS and 36 million others are infected with HIV, the pandemic is still in its early stages, the United Nations’ top AIDS fighter said Tuesday as he marked 20 years since the first official report of AIDS.
If the world does not act decisively now, AIDS could spread to countries that have so far avoided the worst of the disease, Dr. Peter Piot, the head of UNAIDS, told The Associated Press.
“When you look particularly at Asia at Western Africa at Eastern Europe it is clear that we are really at the very early phases of the spread of HIV,” Piot said in an interview.
More than 70 percent of the people with the virus that causes AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest region in the world. Global health officials worry the disease could spread as rapidly through a country such as India, with a population of 1 billion, as it has through South Africa, where 11 percent of the country’s 43 million people are infected.
Looking back, no one could have predicted the devastation that would be wrought by the disease first uncovered 20 years ago in a nine-paragraph write-up by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control about the strange deaths of five gay men, Piot said.
In the early years of the disease, many predicted a quick cure — or at least a vaccine, Piot said.
“I also thought that it would go away (as quickly) as it came up,” he said.
Since then, an estimated 58 million people have contracted HIV. More than 22 million of them have died. A cure remains a dream for the infected. Efforts to find a vaccine continue.
“This is now, without any doubt, the largest epidemic in human history, and we are certainly not at the end of it,” Piot told reporters Tuesday.
The face of the disease has changed from that of a gay men or intravenous drug user in the United States, to that of millions of African men and women who contracted HIV through heterosexual sex and their babies, who got the disease simply by being born.
The explosion of AIDS has proven how quickly a disease can spread across the globe in the newly connected world, Piot said. It has also taught the world a lesson in the devastation that can be caused when governments react too slowly.
U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan has asked wealthy countries to contribute from $7 billion to $10 billion a year to a fund to help prevent and treat AIDS in the developing world, where the pandemic has hit worst. About half that fund will be earmarked to fight AIDS in Africa.
The U.N. General Assembly has scheduled a special session from June 25-27 to discuss plans for fighting the pandemic.
“There is this enormous momentum that is building up and growing internationally,” Piot said.
Piot hopes the meeting, the first special General Assembly session ever dedicated to a disease, will produce a detailed declaration of commitment signed by every country in the United Nations.
The declaration would need to bind countries to work toward prevention, educate young people about the disease and destroy the crushing stigma surrounding AIDS, he said. The agreement should also commit countries to solving the complex web of problems preventing those infected from receiving AIDS drugs.
Those problems include the poor healthcare infrastructure in many of the worst-infected countries, people’s refusal to get tested for HIV, the costs associated with caring for those infected and the price of the AIDS drugs, Piot said.
“Unfortunately, I think the focus has been a lot on the price of antiretroviral drugs, reducing an extremely complex problem into something that is simple on paper,” he said.
Many of the hardest hit countries have detailed plans for fighting the disease, plans that, if implemented, could signal a turning point in the pandemic, Piot said.
But the worst infected countries in the world are also some of its poorest, and they need massive and sustained help from the developing world, he said.
“There’s not a lack of ideas, of strategies of what to do, but there’s a lack of cash,” he said.