… but did not have the time to…
I would like to have blogged about this thought provoking excerpt from Russell Banks’ The Darling on the difference between empathy and sympathy.
“What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time, I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It’s good politics. I see a blind man about to cross a street and think, He can’t see the whizzing traffic, he needs me to see it for him, to take his arm and escort him over to …

A response to IRIN/PlusNews list of six potholes in the road to significantly increasing HIV treatment coverage in Africa.
1. Cost:
The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has estimated that US$ 28 billion to US$ 50 billion would be needed globally every year from 2010 to 2015 in order to progressively reach universal access targets for HIV/AIDS by 2015. One-third of this will contribute towards the cost of the drugs.
The figure may sound “staggering” but it needs to be put in perspective with a few other figures such as:

The cost of …

Back in January, I wrote a comment following Rick Rowden’s public launch at SOAS of his book “The Deadly Ideas of Neoliberalism: How the IMF has Undermined Public Health and the Fight Against AIDS”.  Today I open this blog to Rick who emailled me with the following response. I am still reading through Rick’s book and hope to come back to this issue very soon.
Dear peripheries:
Thanks you for covering the launch of my book at SOAS in London in January. I appreciate your attempt to review my book before reading …

When the slogan of this year Pride was announced, “Paint the Town Ruby Red”, the hope for a meaningfull event vanished in turpentine. But I was wrong (it does happen) and here are a few examples why.

Rating 3.00 out of 5

As a volunteer for a gay men’s organisation I am sometimes involved in HIV prevention work in gay venues in central London. The organisation I work for develops posters, adverts and booklets to promote HIV prevention messages targeting a specific audience.
Recently, I was helping pre-testing our latest booklet to which I had also contributed. Therefore I knew what the booklet was about, which is usually not the case since editorial and testing teams are different. Over a period of two hours I interviewed ten people who agreed, some after a …