Nelson
Mandela’s birthday marked by lighting AIDS torch

South Africa on Monday celebrated former president Nelson Mandela's 87th birthday by lighting a special torch in his apartheid-era prison cell as part of a new nationwide drive to raise AIDS awareness. Lit just after midnight on Robben Island, where Mandela was incarcerated for nearly two decades, the torch returned to Cape Town in a blaze of fireworks and is now touring the country as part of Mandela's "46664" AIDS campaign, named after his former prison number. "The former apartheid government thought they could reduce prisoners to numbers and that the world would forget about them. It didn't happen," the Mandela Foundation said in a statement. "If we care for those infected and affected with the disease, it could prevent people from becoming part of statistics and reduced to numbers." (Reuters)