Kachin World AIDS Day. I cannot read this language but the programme looks interesting.

Vix has dared the [him] moderator to post her World AIDS Day photos from Mae Sot. Here is the tabloid headline and text. You can view the pictures on her site.

Here is USAID's take on HIV in Myanmar. Notice the omission of MSM in the first paragraph?

There are participants from Myanmar there … but they are only talking about Yangon.

The use of English by the official China news agency is always interesting. The [him] moderator's dictionary defines 'declination' as 'the angular deviation of a compass needle from true north'.

Will anyone from Myanmar or interested in Myanmar be making a submission about the fate of the thirteen young men in Yangon sentenced to jail for sex work?

Thirteen young men in Yangon have just been sentenced to two years in jail for alleged prostitution with men and contacting other men via the internet. They were initially in police custody for a week and were beaten at that time. They have been in Insein for the past eight months but the sentence was announced only this week. The thirteen were rounded up by police who were said to be trying to solve the murder of a gay Myanmar man over five years ago. They were initially held on suspicion but after they were cleared of any involvement in that death the prostitution charges appeared. ….. What action have the United Nations or nongovernmental organisations taken on their case? Financial support? Legal support? Publicising the case to the 'international community'?

In him 1306 and on the website at http://www.hivinfo4mm.org/blog/_archives/2010/10/31/4668404.html the [him] moderator asked what happened after the MSF France programme closed in Mae Sot. Hat tip to SEA-AIDS for the following analysis. … Medicins sans Racines seems more like it.

World AIDS Day was marked in the capital city of the Union of Myanmar last week. … Harry states that: “Myanmar has achieved a unique distinction of bringing a gradual decline in HIV prevalence of 0.94 per cent in 2000, 0.67% in 2007 and 0.61% in 2009. Such an achievement is due to multi-sectoral coordinated efforts of all implementing partners and the entire community.” … This is certainly a distinction, though not unique by any means.

Here is the Myanmar Times on the almost-eviction. The new eviction deadline of 1 December, World AIDS Day, has passed.

ဒီႏွစ္ ကမာၻ႕ေအအိုင္ဒီအက္စ္ေန႔ သတင္းေတြ၊ ေဆာင္းပါးေတြထဲက ယခု ေဆာင္းပါးက ရင္ကို ထိထိရွရွ ျဖစ္မိတယ္။ …. ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္က ေရွ႕ဆံုးတြင္ ထိုင္ေနၾကေသာ ေ၀ဒနာရွင္ ကေလးမ်ားၾကား ၀င္ထိုင္၍ အသက္ ၂ ႏွစ္ အရြယ္ အက်ႌ အနီေရာင္ ဝတ္ထားသည့္ ကေလးငယ္တဦးကို တရင္းတႏွီး ေပြ႕ခ်ီလိုက္သည္။ သူ႔ေဘးက ဂါ၀န္ အျပာေရာင္ ၀တ္ထားေသာ ၃ ႏွစ္အရြယ္ မိန္းကေလးက “အေမ၊ အေမစု” ဟု ေခၚရင္း ႏႈတ္ဆက္သည္ကိုလည္း လွည့္၍ ျပန္ထူးသည္။ …. … ဘာျဖစ္ျဖစ္ စိတ္မညစ္နဲ႔။ ဒါၿပီးရင္ ေကာင္းသြားမယ္ … ဆိုတဲ့ စိတ္နဲ႔ ျမန္မာျပည္သစ္ကို ေမွ်ာ္လင့္မိပါတယ္။ ေမာ္ဒေရတာ (ျမန္မာပိုင္း)

The final line of this article is irrational. “Observers suggest the junta might face strong international condemnation if the true extent of the problem was known.” ….. The junta already faces strong international condemnation. And the true extent of the problem is very well known. There is a public record. Many of the documents downloadable from the HIV Information for Myanmar [him] website are official Myanmar government publications. What do the observers think is being hidden?