David Wellington: 13 Bullets: New York: Three Rivers Press: New York: 2007.
For conoisseurs of zombie fiction, David Wellington is the author of the celebrated zombie apocalypse Monster trilogy. Well, in this new series, he remakes the vampire mythos, and one of the central characters is a lesbian.
For a straight guy, Wellington writes some fairly good […]

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When it comes to social movements, there tend to be two essential characteristics required for their success and effectiveness. One is effective strategic alliances with allied professionals, who can present evidence-based research to assist them. The other is strategic unity. At the moment, New Zealand’s euthanasia reform movement has neither.
Last week, TV3 broke the story […]

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Over in Sydney, there’s yet another controversy about the cultural crossroads between erotic media and art. Renowned Australian photographer Bill Henson has just had several photographs removed from an exhibition at Sydney’s prestigious Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, because they contain art photographs of naked barely pubescent girls. Sigh. Not again. Cue memories of Pictura Britannia and […]

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The following is reproduced from the Health Canada website, with annotations. I apologise for any breach of copyright to the involved parties, but I felt it important to get this official information out into the wider public domain as soon as possible:
May 12, 2008
Dear Health Care Professional:

Subject:
New safety information regarding PREZISTA* (darunavir) and hepatotoxicity

Tibotec, a […]

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[In Australia, their] National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS (NAPWA) has issued an urgent alert for people taking the antiretroviral drug Darunavir, brand name Prezista, and formerly known as TMC-114.
The drug has been linked to serious liver side effects after a series of problems arose for patients in Canada.
Canadian health officials registered a concern over the […]

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This morning, I intend to get round to two items lurking in my in-tray. These are, respectively, a heartening story about a successful British gay asylum case that involves a gay Iranian man, and a developing item about the risks of an overseas HIV/AIDS pharmaceutical, although I’m holding off on the latter until I get […]

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Sadly, it seems that not only Teletubbies megastar Tinky Winky has to deal with slurs against his putative attributed ’sexual orientation’ in children’s television.
For example, note the controversy about Toombliboo
“Ooo” , a character in the popular BBC toddler’s series In the Night Garden.  After complaining about dislocating his pelvis in an allegedly designed faulty animatronic […]

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Poland’s current Civic Forum leader, Donald Tusk, has admitted how embarrassing it was when the right-wing Law and Justice Party were in power, and Poland was seen as “a country of homophobes and Teletubbies specialists.”
This followed Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s placement in Human Right Watch’s “Hall of Shame” for his inflammatory remarks about same-sex marriage and […]

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As a rule, I write far too much about the “Christian” Right or equivalent Muslim social conservatives, so it’s a pleasure to deal with the positive aspects of mainline church social services again.
As I reported in one of my earlier blogs, the Council of Christian Social Services is doing its best to focus public attention […]

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In May/June 2008’s (US leftist) Mother Jones magazine, Debra Dickerson has some startling news about fundamentalists. Could it possibly be the case that there are far fewer of them than we thought?
Granted, Dickerson is writing about the United States. Anyway, according to Texas Southern Baptist journalist Christine Wicker, only eighteen per cent of current Southern Baptist […]

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