SAO PAULO, Brazil -- Princess Diana, touring Brazil with her husband Prince Charles, stole the limelight Wednesday at a children's center where she held several youngsters infected with the AIDS virus.
While Prince Charles was giving a lengthy speech to business and industry leaders, Princess Diana found instant popularity at a branch of the Brazilian Foundation for the Welfare of Minors.
She spent about 45 minutes at the center, meeting 16 children between the ages of 5 months and 4 1-2 years who have tested positive for the AIDS virus. Center officials said all but one of the children contracted the virus from their mothers. The other acquired it through a blood transfusion.
Brazil has the fourth-highest number of AIDS cases in the world, behind the United States, Uganda and Zaire.
Some 365 children are cared for at the center visited by the princess. Another branch of the foundation in Sao Paulo, which cares for older children, has been the subject of several news stories lately because of fights, shootouts, drug abuse and other social problems.
Princess Diana also watched the orphans and handicapped children at the center perform games and acrobatics, and she spoke with several of them through an interpreter.
The royal couple spent four hours in Sao Paulo as part of their five- day tour of the country. Sao Paulo is the financial and industrial center of Brazil, and putting the city on the royal couple's agenda was an apparent effort to boost trade between Brazil and England.
Far from the rain forests of the Amazon where the prince was scheduled to visit Friday, the traffic jungles of Sao Paulo proved just as much an adventure as Charles and Diana weaved through South America's largest city in plush new Jaguars.
'This is indeed the industrial heartland of South America,' Prince Charles said in a luncheon speech at the state government palace, where he and the princess were hosted by Governor Luiz Antonio Fleury.
The prince later gave a lengthy speech to business leaders in which he outlined ways in which industry can put back into the community that which they take out, both in social and environmental programs.
The highlight of the trip was to be a daylong seminar on environmental conservation on Friday aboard the royal yacht near the northern city of Belem, near the mouth of the Amazon River.
