The New Press

2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest is now open.

Today is World AIDS Day. World AIDS Day is held on the 1st December each year and is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died. 

Globally, an estimated 34 million people have HIV. World AIDS Day is important because it reminds the public and Government that HIV has not gone away – there is still a vital need to raise money, increase awareness, fight prejudice and improve education.

For more ideas on how to get involved, visit www.worldaidsday.org.

From the TED-Ed Lesson Why it’s so hard to cure HIV/AIDS - Janet Iwasa

Afro: The Girl with the Magical Hair (2016)

When the people of Yackiland run out of Kanek weaves, the kingdom is thrown into chaos. Ruled by an evil, straight hair-obsessed queen for so many years, the people of Yackiland have forgotten how to grow their own hair. It is up to Afro, the girl with the magical hair, to save the kingdom. But the queen has plans of her own…

by Okechukwu Ofili (Author), Sharee Miller (Illustrator)

Get it  now here

Okechukwu Ofili is an author, motivational speaker and engineer. His previous books include How Laziness Saved My Life and How Stupidity Saved My Life. Afro: The Girl with the Magical Hair is his first children’s book. 

“Founded in 1987, the WHO Special Programme on AIDS was the initial global reaction to the pandemic that focused the world’s attention and fear. Posters were the initial means of communication for the disease that affected primarily the young and healthy and for which antibiotics were ineffective and no vaccine was available. Wordless and visually striking, posters have a centuries-old record of use in politics, revolution, and public health, providing their message to an illiterate target population as well as the highly educated. Commissioned by the UN, the graphic designer, Milton Glaser, produced an intentionally ambitious design, incorporating two hearts with a skull, perhaps suggesting that in the midst of erotic love lurks death. Or is he suggesting that love can conquer death? By 1991, however, the red ribbon had replaced this logo as the international symbol for AIDS advocacy and four years later, UNAIDS replaced the Programme as the United Nations locus for action.”

– Mary & Michael Grizzard, Cover Art Editors, Clinical Infectious Diseases

To mark World AIDS Day, observed every December 1 since 1988, the editors of the Infectious Diseases Society of America journals have compiled the following collection of articles:

“The Clinical and Economic Impact of Attaining National HIV/AIDS Strategy Treatment Targets in the United States” by Ethan D Borre, et al. from The Journal of Infectious Diseases

“2017 HIV Medicine Association of Infectious Diseases Society of America Clinical Practice Guideline for the Management of Chronic Pain in Patients Living With Human Immunodeficiency Virus” by R Douglas Bruce, et al. from Clinical Infectious Diseases

“Top Questions in ID: Pre-exposure Prophylaxis for HIV” by Douglas S Krakower, et al. from Open Forum Infectious Diseases

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Friday to one felony count of lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador last year, bringing the special counsel investigation into the 2016 election deeper into President Donald Trump’s inner circle.

Prosecutors said Flynn’s conversations about sanctions with then-Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in late December 2016 appeared to come after input from at least one other person working on Trump’s presidential transition.

The charge from special counsel Robert Mueller — who is probing Russian interference in the election and whether any members of the Trump campaign were involved — is the latest turn of fortunes for Flynn, a retired Army general who served as national security adviser for less than a month. He is accused of lying to FBI agents in January, shortly after the inauguration, about his conversations with Kislyak.

Flynn admitted that he told agents that he had not asked Kislyak to avoid escalating tensions over sanctions imposed by former President Barack Obama, and he also told agents he had not asked Kislyak to delay or defeat a pending resolution at the UN Security Council, both of which proved to be false, according to court documents.

At the court hearing where Flynn entered his guilty plea Friday, prosecutor Brandon Van Grack offered additional details that appeared to connect Flynn’s Russian contacts to the highest levels of the Trump transition. Van Grack said Flynn spoke with Kislyak about sanctions after a phone call on the topic with “a senior official of the transition team at Mar-a-Lago.”

“Immediately after that phone call, the defendant called the Russian ambassador,” Van Grack said.

The White House has consistently said the national security adviser misled top aides including Vice President Mike Pence about his sanctions conversations. On Friday, the administration sought to play down the severity of the situation, pointing to Flynn’s brief tenure.

“Today, Michael Flynn, a former National Security Advisor at the White House for 25 days during the Trump Administration, and a former Obama administration official, entered a guilty plea to a single count of making a false statement to the FBI,“ White House attorney Ty Cobb said in a statement. “The false statements involved mirror the false statements to White House officials which resulted in his resignation in February of this year. Nothing about the guilty plea or the charge implicates anyone other than Mr. Flynn. The conclusion of this phase of the Special Counsel’s work demonstrates again that the Special Counsel is moving with all deliberate speed and clears the way for a prompt and reasonable conclusion.”

All these men. All these men. The collages floating over think pieces about rape, sexual harassment, abuse, and assault keep adding more familiar faces. As I write this, Charlie Rose, the intelligentsia’s premier interviewer for decades, has just gone down.

Gone down. Like a plane in the night; like a boy in a rec room.

I do not know whether art and personality connect to each other significantly enough for boycotts of bad men to make sense. I’ve had more questions than answers about that relationship since I was a preteen. I can’t stomach the end of love for the art of bad men, but I can’t believe people are lining up, still, to work with Woody Allen.

Is it all particular? Dependent on the abuses and the art? Rape is rape; a masterpiece is a masterpiece. Arbiters exist for these extremes, but between them, my reckoning gets fuzzier. Do I care about Al Franken’s contributions to the fabric of American culture more than I care about the women who felt violated by him?

Is the binary really so simple as that? Is it even a binary, or a kind of quantum calculation instead? Does it exist if we don’t look at it?

When all knowledge exists a mere click away, how can any man hide from his deeds?

This list is not evergreen. It’s not complete. It never could be.