Former South African President Nelson Mandela said Jan. 6 that his oldest son, Makgatho Mandela, 54, died of AIDS that morning.

Mandela, 86, delivered the news to reporters at his suburban Johannesburg home.

He said being honest about the matter was “the only way of making an ordinary illness ordinary.”

“Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and to say somebody has died because of HIV. And people will stop regarding it as something extraordinary,” Mandela said.

Makgatho Mandela’s wife died of pneumonia last year. The couple has four children.

Nelson Mandela has been very active in the fight against AIDS since leaving office in 1997.

South Africa is believed to have the world’s highest AIDS caseload. Six hundred residents die of the disease daily.

There are only five provinces and territories in Canada where courts have not legalized same-sex marriage, and residents of some of them wish it would stay that way.

Same-sex couples can marry everywhere but Alberta, New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Prince Edward Island.

A new Corporate Research Associates poll found that support for same-sex marriage stands at 38 percent in New Brunswick and 42 percent in Prince Edward Island.

The poll of Atlantic Canadians also found weak support in two provinces where same-sex marriage is legal — 46 percent in Nova Scotia and 44 percent in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Opposition stands at 52 percent in Newfoundland and Labrador, 53 percent in New Brunswick, 46 percent in Nova Scotia and 53 percent in Prince Edward Island. The remaining percentages of people had no opinion.

Same-sex marriage is permitted in British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and the Yukon Territory. Parliament is expected to pass legislation this winter extending same-sex marriage rights nationwide.

The poll questioned 1,500 people in Atlantic Canada and has a margin of error of 2.5 percent for the full poll, and from 4.9 to 5.6 percent for individual provinces.

Nepal’s first gay newspaper will hit the streets the third week of January, the Indo-Asian News Service reported Jan. 2.

Funded by the British Embassy and published by the gay Blue Diamond Society, the eight-page Blue Diamond Weekly “aims to sensitize locals about the gay community,” the report said.

Nepalese gays say they are routinely rounded up and beaten by the police.

In addition to news, the paper will offer personal stories, an advice column, recipes and beauty tips.

The international, fundamentalist Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei has lost a battle to force the Chilean gay newspaper OpusGay to change its name, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported Dec. 31.

Chile’s intellectual-property authorities said it “is difficult to see how the public could be exposed to mistakes or confusions” between the two entities.

Opus Dei officials claimed the paper’s name was a deliberate attempt to offend the organization and its followers.

Opus Dei, which means God’s Work in Latin, was founded in 1928 and has some 80,000 members in Europe, North and South America and elsewhere.

Membership is by invitation only. The organization aggressively opposes birth control, abortion and gays.

Critics, including some inside the church, have called Opus Dei secretive and manipulative.

Thirty-nine same-sex couples registered their relationship during the first year of the Australian state of Tasmania’s partnership registry, The Mercury newspaper reported Jan. 3. Four heterosexual couples registered also.

Twenty-two of the same-sex couples were male and 17 female.

Registration confers marriage rights in areas such as healthcare, parenting, adoption, kinship, wills and pensions. The registry is open to any two adults if one or both of them provide personal care and domestic support to the other, regardless of whether the relationship has a romantic component.

“The Tasmanian partnership registry is the first in the world for other types of significant personal relationships like older companions and carers and the people they care for,” said Rodney Croome of the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group.

Authorities in the African nation of Sierra Leone have arrested the suspected killer of leading gay-rights activist FannyAnn Eddy, afrol News reported Jan. 3.

Eddy, founder of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association, was murdered in the organization’s offices Sept. 28. She was raped repeatedly, stabbed and her neck was broken.

The suspect is a disgruntled ex-employee of Eddy, police said, so the killing may not have been an anti-gay hate crime. The man was fired from his janitor job weeks before the murder and promised revenge.

Eddy left behind a 10-year-old son.

Sierra Leone is in West Africa on the Atlantic Ocean between Guinea and Liberia. Its population is 5.9 million. About two-thirds of working-age people engage in subsistence farming. Average yearly income is around $500.

The 1991 to 2002 civil war between the government and the Revolutionary United Front resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of more than 2 million people, many of whom are now refugees in neighboring countries.