When the New Statesman New Scientist asked me for my idea of God, I described God as a ventriloquist’s dummy, worked by puppeteers in the religious bureaucracies. But in this video Canadian director Patrick Boivin delightfully makes puppets of the puppeteers also:
Thanks to Paul Canning for pointing me to Patrick’s work. Readers might want to [...]
For the last 10 days, I’ve been watching Indonesia gear up for parliamentary elections, which take place tomorrow. My expectations of politicians are lowest around this time, but even I was cross to see the country’s health minister undermining kids’ well-being in a bid to rack up the votes.
When I was here six months ago, [...]
I, like many who’ve written to me, am speechless with rage at the Pope’s first direct pronoucement on condoms. (Well, not quite speechless. I had a little vent about it in today’s Times.) To oppose condoms on dogmatic grounds is one thing. That’s the Pope’s job, if he considers it his job to defend Catholic [...]
You’d think the Catholic Church would be ecouraging people to sign up to its shrinking flock, not turning them away. But no, they’re now excommunicating people for saving children’s lives.
Here’s the story, as reported by The Irish Times: a nine-year old girl in Brazil is repeatedly raped by her step-father. Remarkably, she becomes pregnant wth [...]
New HIV-infections among gay men are rising everywhere they are measured, with the sole apparent exception of Sydney. That’s in part because Sydney has not dropped the ball (and the budget) on prevention. It hasn’t swallowed the “Treatment IS Prevention” mantra that seems to be behind the rise in many other places.
If we want [...]
As Canada prepares its first murder case against a man who had sex without telling his partners he had HIV, support groups are urging infected people to prepare the sexual equivalent of pre-nuptual agreements (shall we call the pre-fucktuals?)
The wonderful Xtra gives us strategies for putting the lid back on the can of legal worms [...]
The death rattle of the Bush administration puts it, once again, in the company of great defenders of human rights such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia. This time, it breathes its sickness on gays.
The US is one of nearly 60 countries which stamped its feet in opposition to France’s declaration (made in the United [...]
Many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, have observed that “we can’t treat our way out of this epidemic”. Today, The Lancet publishes a paper by many people, including the head of the WHO’s HIV division Kevin de Cock, claiming that we can, in fact, treat our way out [...]
Two wrongs don’t make a right. And Papua’s “plan” to implant HIV positive people with microchips is definitely wrong.
As the Jakarta Post pointed out yesterday (in a profile that called me a “raging dinosaur” — a compliment, I think) I was wrong to dismiss Indonesia’s “anti-pornography” bill as so silly it would never get passed. [...]
Tuesday evening. I spent it with baited breath sitting at the bar in Baltimore airport, surrounded by boys with buzz-cuts and camouflage who were headed for Iraq. They seemed strangely unconcerned by the drama that was unfolding in red and blue on the screens in front of us. I, for my part, nearly missed my [...]
