The Vietnamese government has passed a decree to allow the punishment of people who discriminate against HIV-positive individuals in the country. This allows the government to fine anyone who, for example, publicises test results, names, addresses or photos of HIV-positive people without their consent.
"One of the things to understand when trying to comprehend what Japan is all about, is that it’s a formalised society, with multiple layers of rituals and traditions stretching back to a time when the Western world was still living in straw huts, making dung fires and thinking a distance of 5km was a long journey." Ian Fraser looks eastwards and tries to unpack Japanese culture.
”Forget the tabloids. South Africa’s small-town and suburban newspapers are where the best stories and writers can be found. I came to this appreciation as a judge in this year’s Caxton community newspapers competition. Take the tale told of the Van den Bergs, as recorded in the Randfontein Herald.” Guy Berger samples some of the pleasure premiums in SA’s small-town rags.
As a child I developed the belief that old age would be a glorious estate, a time of enlightenment and peace, and everything before — childhood, adolescence, the subsequent decades — simply the chaotic dues you paid before achieving geriatric nirvana. This belief has taken a knock with the news from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons that its fastest-growing market is pensioners.
Last week’s call by the United Nations Population Fund to governments to increase spending on reproductive health may prove to be hard for Kenya to implement. Kenya has no budgetary allocation for reproductive health. Concerns are mounting that without state commitment to provide family planning in Kenya, maternal mortality may continue to rise.
It is the early 1980s and I am eight years old. Two dark nipples are firmly stuck on my chest. I think of them as inconsequential parts of my body. I touch them when bathing and forget them as soon as my hand moves to more useful parts. Is there space to nurture and raise sexually confident children in a world where violation of girls’ and women’s bodies is common practice?
Influenza has good PR for a disease that inflicts a six-figure death toll each year and, from time to time, leaps out to become a mass killer that claims even more lives than Aids. Flu is typecast as a bad case of the snuffles — high fever, wheezing and coughing, a few days in bed and a couple more days convalescing, and everything starts to get back to normal. But this is not the diagnosis for all.
The heroine of Robert Doisneau’s Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville, the archetypal photograph of Paris’s most archetypal open-air activity, has decided to sell her original print at auction half a century after it was taken. Françoise Bornet, who performed the kiss with her real-life then boyfriend, Jacques Carteaud, 55 years ago, said the print would go under the hammer on August 25.
Click on image for full-size view.
Donor countries have pledged to give ,5-billion over the next two years to cover Sudan’s humanitarian and reconstruction needs, organisers of a 60-nation conference said on Tuesday. Before the Oslo meeting, organisers had hoped for promises totalling ,6-billion from the conference.