The Pope has said that condoms do not help in the fight against Aids. In an analysis of the background in Wednesday's Times I explain why this is inhumane. As Jonathan Clayton and I report, on his flight to Africa, his first trip to the continent most devastated by the disease, he ruled out any relaxation of the Roman Catholic Church's anti-contraception stance, even where lives are at stake. This rather extraordinary cartoon by Peter Brookes appears in The Times of Wednesday 18 March.
Labour lost the language of generosity, kindness and community as it lost the tempo of the country. England's abiding culture was never socialist, but as we misunderstood its essential ethic of solidarity we lost our ability to build a politics beyond the market - to mould a radical hope for the country.
Pope Benedict, en route to Africa, goes there on AIDS and HIV:
''You can't resolve it with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary, it increases the problem.''"
As anyone who loves poetry will testify, when you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration. When some disaster overwhelms you, or when you are feeling unusually cheerful – or when you are experiencing any human feeling whatever – it is amazing how often some line or phrase will swim to the surface and help to articulate your emotions, to intensify them or to console.
That is why it is so sad that children are no longer learning poetry off by heart, and doubly sad because poetry is the one art form in which the English are unsurpassed. The Germans beat us at classical music. The Americans invented rock and roll. I am afraid that the Italians, the French, the Dutch and the Spanish can all boast a more illustrious roll-call of top painters, and the Russians have produced the greatest novels. But no other nation has ever produced so much high-quality poetry – mainly, I think, because of the language itself.
The Obama administration signalled today that it was ready to repudiate the prohibition and 'war on drugs' approach of previous presidents, and steer policy towards prevention and 'harm reduction' strategies favoured by Europe.
David Johnson, an assistant secretary of state, said the new administration would embrace policies supporting federally funded needle exchanges. The aim, he said, was to establish a policy based on public health needs. 'This will result in a policy that is broader and stronger than the one we had in the past,' Johnson said on the sidelines of a UN drug strategy conference in Vienna.
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty this morning released an 82-page report saying that 3 percent of District residents have HIV or AIDS, a total that surpasses the threshold that constitutes a severe epidemic.
In a desperate attempt to reverse 25 years of failure to develop an Aids vaccine, scientists have a new approach: studying people who have been infected with HIV for many years without any signs of ill-health. The patients' secret? Natural immunity.
The researchers have investigated the virus-fighting antibodies found in the blood of six long-term survivors of HIV whose own immune systems appear to be capable of shrugging off the virus. Results of tests show that a prototype vaccine made from several of the antibodies produced by those long-term survivors can prevent HIV from infecting human cells. The experiments have been successful on human cells growing in a test tube. Now further trials are planned on laboratory animals and human volunteers.
French physicist and philosopher of science Bernard d'Espagnat won the Templeton Prize for religion on Monday for work which acknowledges that science cannot fully explain ''the nature of being.''
"WASHINGTON — The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.
When Grigori Rasputin was murdered in 1916, some claim he was also castrated. Since then, a number of people boasting to be in possession of his severed penis and testicles have come forth, although none of them have been able to come up with definitive evidence.
In 2004, Igor Knyazkin, the chief of the prostate research center of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, announced that he was opening a Russian museum of erotica in St. Petersburg, Russia. Among the exhibits, Knyazkin claims, is the 30cm (12 inch) long "preserved penis" of Grigori Rasputin , along with several of Rasputin's letters.
My own feeling is that there is something ambiguously homoerotic in a man's conducting a lengthy affair with a married woman who remains at home and continues to sleep with her husband. This was a habit of Greene's. And there is the twisted logic of Greene's proclaiming his fidelity to his mistress while cheating on his wife, and also of course seeing hookers, for whom he had a hopeless penchant.
Once he had achieved his object and his wife was pregnant, he broke his marriage vows and became a serial adulterer with at least 47 prostitutes whose identities are known and with dozens more who remain unknown.
An alcoholic, he abandoned his wife and two children for affairs with a series of married mistresses.
And though he vehemently denied rumours of bisexuality, his closest male friend was a homosexual who daily preyed on young boys, while there is clear evidence that Greene regularly seduced under-age teenage lads on the Italian island of Capri.
Although Greene claimed to dislike the label “Catholic novelist”, he retained his faith, if not his belief, in Catholicism all his life. To his dying day he kept a photograph in his wallet of the Italian stigmatic Padre Pio, whose hands and feet were said to display the wounds of Christ. Whether these lesions were of neurotic origin – psychological rather than supernatural – Greene did not care to know: he wanted there to be a mystery at the heart of life. It may seem incredible that an intelligent man could be awed by the irrationality of stigmatism. But as Greene told the Tablet in 1989: “There is a mystery. There is something inexplicable in human life”.
