Promoting male circumcision and fidelity to one partner seems to be more effective at curbing the spread of HIV than promoting abstinence and condom use, USAID researcher and technical adviser Daniel Halperin said last week, the Chicago Tribune reports. As Halperin and other researchers analyze 20 years of studies on HIV/AIDS throughout Africa, they have tried to ‘put aside intuitions, emotions, ideologies and look at the evidence in as coldhearted a way as we can,’ Halperin said. During a speech at a meeting of the Southern African HIV Clinicians Society in Johannesburg, South Africa, Halperin said he and his colleagues discovered that regular sex partners rarely use condoms, and abstinence merely delays HIV infection among young people by one or two years. For example, condom use in Ghana and Senegal seems to have helped in the reduction of the spread of the HIV, which in those countries is particularly prevalent among commercial sex workers and their partners. However, condom use in South Africa and Botswana has had little effect in reducing those countries’ HIV epidemics — which have reached the general population — because regular sex partners rarely use condoms consistently. In comparison, faithfulness to one partner has worked at […]
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has warned former employees not to have unapproved contacts with reporters, as part of a mounting campaign by the administration to crack down on officials who leak information on national security issues. A former official said the CIA recently warned several retired employees who have consulting contracts with the agency that they could lose their pensions by talking to reporters without permission. He added that while the threats might be legally ‘hollow,’ they were having a chilling effect on former employees. The CIA called the allegations ‘rubbish’. Jennifer Millerwise Dyke, spokeswoman for CIA director Porter Goss, said former employees with consulting deals could lose their contracts for violating the CIA secrecy agreement by having unauthorised conversations with reporters. But she stressed that under current law, ‘termination of a contract does not affect pensions’. The clampdown represents the latest move in what observers describe as the most aggressive government campaign against leaks in years. The Justice Department is investigating the disclosure to the media of secret overseas CIA prisons and a highly classified National Security Agency domestic spying programme authorised by President George W. Bush. Last week, the CIA fired Mary McCarthy, […]
LOS ANGELES — ‘What does it mean to be an American?’ ‘Opportunity,’ says Rosita Romero, a second-generation émigré from El Salvador, lunching at Twain’s Restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Los Angeles. ‘E Pluribus Hassle – out of many people, one bigger and bigger problem,’ says Brent Uggam, a truck driver from Kansas City, Mo. When a Purdue University professor asked that question of 1,500 adult US citizens nationwide, he was surprised by the response. Despite heated debate over illegal immigration, there is more uniting the country on the issue of national identity than dividing it, says Jeremy Straughn, the sociology professor who oversaw the telephone survey. ‘The reason there is a perception that the country is so divided has more to do with the structure of our political system and the way the two-party system works than in the underlying core beliefs we found,’ he says. For example, there is a wider acceptance of multiculturalism than in the 1920s. ‘This conclusion is very reinforcing of a changed attitude toward multiculturalism now being accepted in the US as opposed to the biases of extreme racial purity of Northern European stock that characterized immigration at […]
Many Tibetans believe that only the Dalai Lama can save Tibet from extinction. But even a Dalai Lama is mortal. And they are deeply anxious about what will happen when the present one dies. For Tibetans, he is not just a Buddhist monk, a god and a king – the latest in a centuries’-long line of spiritual and temporal rulers – but a larger-than-life symbol of their unique civilisation. For the past 50 years, from his sanctuary on the other side of the Himalayas, the 14th Dalai Lama has kept alive their dreams of survival as a separate people. Many fear that his death will rob them of their last chance of any genuine self-rule. Others predict chaos and bloodshed. Tibetan extremists might finally feel free to resort to terrorism, giving Beijing the chance to crack down harder. The Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, amidst a failed uprising against the Chinese occupation which had begun nine years earlier. Since then he has been the face of Tibet for the outside world. He has won the Nobel Peace Prize, the public backing of film stars, and the private support of presidents and […]
WASHINGTON – – More than 40 percent of Americans making between $20,000 and $40,000 a year went without insurance for at least part of the year last year, according to a study published on Tuesday. The research by The Commonwealth Fund also found that 20 percent of working adults are paying off medical debt — often $2,000 or more — and 60 percent of uninsured adults with chronic illnesses such as heart disease skip pills to save money. The Commonwealth Fund researchers called the 40 percent figure a ‘dramatic and rapid increase from 2001,’ when 28 percent of people in this moderate income bracket were uninsured. The group, which does the survey every other year, also found that 67 percent of the 48 million going without insurance were in families where at least one person worked full-time. ‘The jump in uninsured among those with modest incomes is alarming, particularly at a time when our economy has been improving,’ said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis, who helped write the study. ‘If we don’t act soon to expand coverage to the uninsured, the health of the U.S. population, the productivity of our workforce, and our economy are […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
