flickering pictures

As The Economist wrote when China launched its first manned space mission a few years back: “Congratulations! So no more aid then?”
From the Times of India:

The spacecraft, lodged at `Checkout 2′ room at the centre is all decked up with golden multilayer insulated foils covering a major part of its body with the highly […]

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The state-run AIDS Control Society in the southern Indian state of Kerala will reserve one government job for HIV/AIDS-positive applicants — the first time I’ve ever heard of a quota for people with a particular illness. The employee will help build government sensitivity to the disease and improve communication with its sufferers, and aims […]

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Here’s a story I bookmarked a few months ago and was saving for a rainy day.
On April 17, Pakistan’s Daily Times picked up an Agence France-Presse article about Iran’s experiments with condom and syringe vending machines targeted at drug users.

“Five machines will be installed at Tehran city’s welfare shelters for addicts,” the deputy head of […]

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That number shoots up to 40 per cent among teens who actually admit to having had sex. I’m not sure how the rest of them contracted their diseases, but I’m guessing public toilet seats didn’t have much to do with it.
And those figures don’t even reflect gonorrhea, warts, HIV/AIDS or other nasties that researchers […]

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Looking for hockey coverage, I came across an excellent Boston Globe feature on David Farmer, a Boston doctor who set up a free hospital in one of the Rwandan regions hardest hit by the 1994 genocide that killed 800,000 people, mostly by machete.

Farmer, who teaches at Harvard, was taken to Ruhengeri, in the country’s northwest […]

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