Bush may be quacking around with a limp, but the fundamentalists that support him are squeezing all they can out of these last, lame-duck months. For me, the first sign that US Christians were prepared to terrorise people into dropping contraception was this poster in the Tanzanian capital Dar Es Salaam. But it now looks [...]
If you live your life among people whose lives, jobs or natural curiousity open their minds to the world, it is easy to forget how rigid some people are in their views. Today, I was sent a shocking reminder of the vitriol that comes with a small mind; it made me understand why some of [...]
The PEPFAR authorisation circus drags on. Senate leader Harry Reid is trying to force a vote on the bill. A handful of stubborn Republicans continue to stamp their feet about it. One of their worries is “mission creep” — PEPFAR money might be used to do things that are not 100% related to showing America’s [...]
One of the things I noticed on the left hand side of the Atlantic was how many people took the dust jacket off my book before taking it out in public. No one wants to be seen in the company of “Whores” on the subway. But who is the word offending? Both left and [...]
Apparently not willing or able to think for themselves, Christian fundamentalists have been programming their computers to automate their views. The result: content that they themselves would probably consider pornographic. This, for example:
“Homosexual dominated the competition. He started well and pulled out to a comfortable lead by the 40-meter mark. This time, he kept pumping [...]
We don’t have many success stories in HIV prevention. And it seems like the Bush government is determined to undermine the ones we do have. Cambodia and Uganda, both shining examples of success in HIV prevention, are being squashed into failure by ideologues who would rather see people die than help sex workers and young [...]
The Bronx, a borough of New York that is home to 1.3 million people, has decided that it is going to try to test all adults for HIV over the next three years, according to The New York Times.
The NYT story elicited this comment from a friend of mine, a journalist who is much more [...]
I’m sure many readers are aware that there’s been a bit of a debate lately about spending on AIDS in the developing world. Is AIDS crowding out other infectious diseases, other health issues, other development issues? Or has the AIDS epidemic focused attention on the woeful neglect of health in developing countries, and will it [...]
Earlier this month, the head of HIV programming at WHO told a journalist that HIV was not going to storm through the heterosexual populations of any continent outside Africa. And he was right. But days later, he issued a hasty and non-sensical “correction”. The correction made it politically correct, but epidemiologically incorrect. I got in [...]
Further to yesterday’s post, I find myself in California at a happy time. Same-sex marriages are a huge step forward in undermining the absurd qualms that our society still has about who has sex with whom. I notice that the qualms are still reflected, though, in reports of the happy day. My New York Times [...]
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