Mackenzie Phillips is discovering what many who claim they are victims of incest have learned when they come forward — their families don’t always believe them.

Mackenzie Phillips is discovering what many victims of incest have learned when they come

The former child star of “One Day at a Time” returned to the Oprah Winfrey Show today to defend her decision to write her bombshell book “High on Arrival,” in which she confessed to engaging in a 10-year consensual sexual relationship with her father, rock star John Phillips, the lead singer for the ’60s group the Mamas and the Papas.

“It’s been heartening and heartbreaking at the same time …with the way my family’s reacting,” she said about the response to her appearance on Wednesday.

The mayor of Vienna has admitted that the Michael Jackson tribute concert that was expected to be held in Austria’s capital was badly organised.

Mayor Michael Haupl told the city’s council the show would have been “very interesting… had it been properly prepared and organised but it was not”.

Organisers cancelled the planned 26 September concert after struggling to find major stars to perform.

A replacement show has been planned for June next year, in London.

Vienna authorities had initially agreed to subsidise the tribute at Schönbrunn Palace and planned to give organisers 600,000 euros (£550,000) after city experts estimated the event’s advertising value to be around 35m euros (£32.1m).

But the funding was pulled on 11 September when the concert’s organisers - led by Michael Jackson’s brother, Jermaine - failed to present the “top stars” promised to perform at the event.

Short notice

Vice Mayor Renate Brauner said, at the time: “The advertising value is unlikely to be as high as we had initially expected it to be. We will call off all talks with the organisers.”

Later the same day, the concert was cancelled - with Jermaine Jackson admitting “numerous stars were just not able to change their schedules” at such short notice.

Organisers also blamed the Austrian media for the cancellation, saying it viewed the line-up as “B-List” artists, who were “made fun of and generally disrespected”.

Artists Mary J Blige, Chris Brown, Natalie Cole, Sister Sledge and Akon had originally been announced as performers, however plans were dealt a blow when representatives for Blige, Brown and Cole later said none of the three would be performing.

World Tribute Productions said they were hoping to hold the rescheduled concert at Wembley Stadium.

Editor’s note: On CNN’s “State of the Union,” host and chief national correspondent John King goes outside the Beltway to report on issues affecting communities across the country.

County administrator Brenda T. Buck is trying hard to help create eight to 10 sawmill jobs for Jefferson County.

FAYETTE, Mississippi– The odds are against Brenda T. Buck, and she knows it. So she counts on what she calls the Sandwich Philosophy: “Take it one bite at a time.”

Buck is the county administrator in Jefferson County, a rural area in southwest Mississippi dotted with small churches, modest homes and markers noting a Civil War skirmish.

“It is a great small town, and everybody knows everybody,” Buck says.

If you look through the statistics, three things jump out:

• The Census Bureau lists the population of Jefferson County as 86 percent African American, the highest percentage of any county in the United States.

• It is the fourth-poorest county in the United States, with a median income of $15,037.

• The unemployment rate in August was 18.6 percent, the highest of Mississippi’s 82 counties.

“It has not always been this way,” says Angelia Shelvy, a single mother of three who is among the unemployed. “I think we are forgotten.”

Shelvy had a job making $10,000 a year as a teacher’s assistant, but she left it to take a job paying twice as much, signing on with a union that provides workers to nuclear power plants. Her parents agreed to care for her children when she had to travel, for months at a time, as far away as Arizona.

Shelvy thought it was the right thing to do for her family, but phone calls to home at bedtime proved otherwise. Her 4-year-old, especially, had a rough time adjusting.

“I’m like, ‘You have Granny.’ He’s like, ‘No, I don’t want Granny; I want you to hold me,’ ” Shelvy told us. “I missed Mother’s Day twice; for two years I missed it. … So I decided that it was more important for me to be here with my children.”

Back home now, she has been searching for work since March, looking as far as 90 minutes away from Fayette.

“I did Internet searching, different jobs, hospitals, different schools,” she said. “They’re not hiring. They either say they are not hiring, or I’m not qualified. I don’t have enough years of experience. ‘We’ll call you later.’ ‘Get back with us.’ And it’s been stressful for me.”

Buck spends hours a day trying to help, and most of her time with the Board of Supervisors is spent debating economic development ideas. At home, too, she is reminded of the bleak local jobs market.

Her husband isn’t there. He’s working 900 miles away, at the moment, in Indiana.

“He works with a company that has been going into a lot of the car plants” during refittings and downsizing, Buck said. “We have four kids. … He is here basically maybe a total combination of, maybe, two months out of the year.”

The county got a modest amount of federal money to buy new police cruisers. But its requests for stimulus money to improve its roads have been ignored, at least to date, and as Buck continues to press those requests, she also is pushing smaller economic development grants.

Reliable Mat LLC is her current obsession. The screeching hum of a giant saw greets visitors, and inside the warehouse are dozens of pallets of neatly stacked firewood, waiting to be loaded on 18-wheelers and distributed across the country for the coming winter.

On the grounds, there are 10 workers, some running giant logs through the saw, others stacking and wrapping the wood for shipment. On average, the men make about $100 day, and Paul Southerland, the company’s general manager, says the noise and activity attracts others who are down on their luck.

“I see a lot of people come by looking for jobs, yeah,” Southerland says during a tour of the grounds.

The company’s main product is giant wooden mats used to create flat surfaces to provide access — on foot and in vehicles — to oil and gas fields. All of the work has shifted to the firewood production because orders for the mats have dropped dramatically.

“Mississippi is always last to feel the effects of a recession, and most of the time it is the last to pick back up,” Southerland said. “It hit us about June. .. It really hit us hard, too.”

Still, Southerland expects orders to pick up early next year. He hopes to expand the business by then if the county secures an economic development grant to help him buy a bigger sawmill.

“If we had that sawmill, we would be able to add eight or 10 more folks,” Southerland said.

Eight or 10 more jobs might not seem like much in many places. But Jefferson County’s population is just shy of 9,000, and when nearly one in five are unemployed, Buck invokes her Sandwich Philosophy.

“My short term goal is to get that grant, to get those eight people working,” she says. “My philosophy, when I walk through the doors in the morning, just like a sandwich: take one bite at a time.”

She also sees a bigger gain than just eight or 10 jobs.

“Just imagine, eight people, if it were eight men making $10 to $11 an hour could actually come home and be home at night with their families,” she said. “The impact that it would make not just from the economical standpoint but from the social standpoint.

“That father’s presence there in that household and not having to travel so far. I mean you have a double whammy. It’s a win-win for any family.”

Researchers found those who received the vaccine combination were 31 percent less likely to contract HIV.

A vaccine to prevent HIV infection, the virus that leads to AIDS, has shown modest results for the first time, researchers have found, raising hopes that a disease that kills millions every year may someday be beaten.

Researchers found those who received the vaccine combination were 31 percent less likely to contract HIV.

In what is being called the world’s largest HIV vaccine trial ever — involving more than 16,000 participants in Thailand — researchers found that people who received a series of inoculations of a prime vaccine and booster vaccine were 31 percent less likely to get HIV, compared with those on a placebo.

“Before this study, it was thought vaccine for HIV is not possible,” Colonel Jerome Kim, who is the HIV vaccines product manager for the U.S. Army, told CNN.

HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus, which is the virus that causes AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

Kim emphasized that the level of effectiveness of the latest vaccine was modest, but given the failures of previous HIV vaccine trials, “yesterday we would have thought an HIV vaccine wasn’t possible.

He called the results from the trial an important first step that will help researchers work toward a more effective vaccine.

Researchers have tried to prevent the spread of HIV since they discovered its cause in 1986. Previous vaccine trials failed to prevent infection. And during one trial, the vaccine seemed to boost the chance of being infected, which ended testing early.

The new study was conducted in Thailand, with more than 16,000 people between ages 18 and 30 participating. They were all HIV negative at the beginning of the trial.

Nearly 8,200 received a placebo and a similar number received a combination of six vaccines over six months. All were followed for three years.

Researchers found that those who received the vaccine combination were 31 percent less likely to contract HIV compared with those on a placebo.

“This shows a statistically significant effect,” Kim said.

He cautioned that a lot more research was necessary, because the vaccine did not prevent everyone from being infected.

Fifty-one people in the vaccine group eventually contracted HIV, compared with 74 in the placebo group.

“These results show that development of a safe and effective preventive HIV vaccine is possible,” said Colonel Nelson Michael, who is director of the U.S. military HIV research program.

The combination of vaccines tested targeted strains circulating in Thailand. It was unclear how the vaccines would work elsewhere, Kim said.

Researchers will announce details of their initial findings at the AIDS Vaccine Conference next month in Paris, France.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command.

According to Kim, the U.S. military was involved in the study because U.S. service members are at risk and “there’s a national security threat from HIV.”

He said Congress set up a program to protect service members from HIV and the U.S. military has collaborated with health officials and researchers in Thailand for a long time.

The vaccines are manufactured by Global Solutions for Infectious Diseases and Sanofi Pasteur. The Thai Ministry of Health carried out the clinical trial.

According to estimates by WHO and UNAIDS, 33 million people were living with HIV at the end of 2007. That same year, some 2.7 million people became newly infected, and 2 million died of AIDS, including 270,000 children. Two-thirds of HIV infections are in sub-Saharan Africa

A man who produced a do-it-yourself jihad book has been sentenced to 12 years in prison in Australia.

Bela Khazaal was found guilty last September of producing a 110-page book, in Arabic, entitled Provisions Of The Rules of Jihad.

This advised about terrorist acts such as exploding bombs, shooting down planes and assassinating people such as former US President George W Bush.

Khazaal had claimed his book was never intended to incite terrorist acts.

At his sentencing in Sydney, Justice Megan Latham said she found it “unsurprising” a jury had rejected his defence.

“It beggars belief that a person of average intelligence who has devoted themselves to the study of Islam over some years would fail to recognise the nature of the material,” she said.

“The dissemination of extremist activity, connected or unconnected with a terrorist plot, is caught by the government’s (anti-terror) scheme … (because such material) is capable and is shown to foment terrorist activity.”

Khazaal, a former Lebanon-born Qantas Airways baggage-handler, compiled the book from a range of Internet sources, his lawyer George Thomas told the court at an earlier sentencing hearing.

Its full title is Provisions Of The Rules of Jihad - Short Judicial Rulings And Organisational Instructions For Fighters And Mujahideen Against Infidels.

He is the first person to be convicted on the charge of making a document connected with assistance in a terrorist act, which carries a maximum jail term of 15 years.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that US international terrorism consultant Evan Kohlmann, who was called as a witness at Khazaal’s trial, described the book as a “do-it-yourself jihad” manual, aimed at people who “don’t have Osama bin Laden’s telephone number”.

The Supreme Court heard that, in December 2003, a military court in Lebanon sentenced Khazaal to 10 years’ hard labour for terrorism-related offences, including forming a terrorist association for the purpose of committing crimes against people and property.