Remarks by Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, delivered at a colloquium hosted by Yale University’s Global Health Leadership Institute and the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, CT, on November 28, 2011.
On the Gutting of the Global Fund
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has been the international financial armada in the battle against the three diseases. The collapse of the next round of Global Fund grants, known as Round …

Earlier this year, in July, I managed to get an interview with Johnson Uncle and Jamis Aiya, Chairman and General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Associations of Bus Jack-sons (SLABJ) who discussed their motivation to sexually harass women on the bus. They also claimed during that interview that the Transport Ministry had underreported their successes, and claimed the overall sexual harassment was actually around 70%, give or take a squeeze here, a grope there, and rub …

 For Immediate Release: Bangkok, Thailand, 27 November 2011: 
 We, the under signed civil society organisations working on HIV, AIDS and human rights express grave concern about the manner in which the KORUS Free Trade agreement was passed in the South Korean Parliament on Tuesday the 22nd of November 2011.
 The South Korean government has reportedly pushed its parliament to ratify the agreement without transparent and open public debate. This act of secrecy and lack of accountability to the public was …

PRESS RELEASE
November 23, 2011, Colombo
Introduction
One third of Sri Lanka’s population is young people who in tern drive the country’s economy as its workfoce. When Sri Lanka reached 21 Million on its population this year and successfully ended the 3 decade long civil war we are at the verge of the demographic bonus. If Sri Lanka is to prosper and economically develop to catch up the emerging economies, now is the time.
The demographic bonus is a window …

Thousands of drug users and alcohol consumers – and people found in possession of small amounts of drugs and alcohol – are subjected to judicially-sanctioned caning, flogging, lashing or whipping each year, says a new report.
In the landmark study, the non-governmental organisation Harm Reduction International** finds that over forty states apply some type of judicial corporal punishment for drug and alcohol offences.  The vast majority of these sentences are handed down in countries such as …

So Magic Johnson has lived with HIV for 20 years. You’ve got to read the story, if you haven’t already. He is 52 and fitter than most of us in our 30s. What a journey he’s had. He started off at a time when he needed to pop 15 pills to stay alive… a time when HIV still equaled AIDS in America, and stigma was at mercurial levels.
20 years ago, a friend of mine, now …

Ever paid attention to previous Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings? Have we even known they were on? We’ve not really heard much about the Commonwealth have we? Well, perhaps the corruption ridden Commonwealth Games in Delhi pushed it forward for a bit, as did the much publicized suspensions of Pakistan and Zimbabwe at the time… but beyond that?
Do we care about the Commonwealth? Do we care about the queen? Do we believe that the Commonwealth has …

America’s most admired inventor heaps praise on his own drug use, exposing the falsity at the heart of the Drug War
By Glenn Greenwald .
It’s fascinating to juxtapose America’s reverence for Steve Jobs’ accomplishments and its draconian drug policy with this, from the New York Times‘ obituary of Jobs:
[Jobs] told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life. He said there were things about him that people who had …

13 September 2011
The United Nations says the use of synthetic illegal drugs such as ecstasy and methamphetamine has overtaken cocaine and heroin.
A report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS) had become the second most widely used illegal substances.
It said data on seizures of tablets and discoveries of clandestine laboratories indicated a worrying growth trend.
Cannabis is still the most widely used drug.
Easy manufacture
The main producers of synthetic drugs remain …

 
A survey of countries that enforce the death penalty for drug offences reveals that in many nations the majority or even entirety of those facing execution are foreigners.
For immediate release: Thursday September 15, 2011 (London, UK)
In a follow-up to its landmark survey on the death penalty for drug offences, Harm Reduction International reveals that in many of the 32 nations or territories that have capital drug laws in force, the vast majority of those executed …