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Thank you PeterRS for your kind and generous comment. But for me there was a real heroine in the UK who transformed how people regarded people with HIV, Princess Diana. The very well publicised visits which the Princess made to HIV/AIDS wards in London Hospitals changed things amazingly. In the early days of working at St Stephen's I remember on the long ten hour night shifts we would telephone other specialist wards. Calling the HIV ward at St Mary's, Paddington regularly I heard that a certain young lady had again sneaked up the back stairs in the early hours, and was sitting with one of her friends as he was dying. The Princess did this many times and the press never caught her. When Princess Diana came to open our new Outpatient HIV Clinic she met all the important people and spent about ten minutes with them in full view of the photographers and cameras, then walked through to where the patients who were fit enough to be there and closed the doors and then spent the next hour or more with them in private. It was the many pictures of the Princess holding hands and embracing patients that showed people that they should not be afraid.

It's back! This Saturday night. It's the Third Wave that everyone wants... Yes, yes, I know you're knitting a blanket for Harry and Meghan's new baby... but here's something better to get wrapped up in... lots of late night Brazilian sexy fun So put those knitting needles down - Go on, Treat Yourself! This month's line up includes: ▪️ EDER MONGEROTH ▪️ GUTO RECIFE ▪️ HENRIKI DIAZ ▪️ IZAQUE SANTOS (Tarzan lookalike) ▪️ JB BISCUYT ▪️ KEVIN NURF (caught being double penetrated in the last show) ▪️ LÉO RODRIGUES ▪️ NOBRE MORENO ▪️ NOVINHO XUPETA (very naughty - fisting by the pool) ▪️ OLIVER ▪️ TONNY VINNY If you haven't joined in before... it's a great big ZOOM meeting... but you don't need to turn your camera on! It all starts at 6pm (PDT), 9pm (EDT) and 2am Sunday (UK). More information here: https://www.instagram.com/hotbarbarizou/ and here https://www.facebook.com/events/481322916474687 Tickets available from here (they work out around $6 or £5): https://www.sympla.com.br/love-hot-barbarizou-dia-dos-namorados__1242476 (I think the Portuguese instructions are easy to follow... name, surname, email... choose "ingresso No1" from the drop-down box... make sure you click to pay with an international credit card... it's all safe and secure)

On this day in 1954, University of Manchester hero Alan Turing took his own life, two years after he was prosecuted for gross indecency during a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. He was chemically castrated for his sexuality just a few short years after his groundbreaking ingenuity and determination saved tens of millions of lives during World War II. He must never be forgotten.

June 5, 1981 was the first cases that AIDS was reported. Five gay men in LA died and currently over 32 million have died. I have lost friends and family to this. Our community was forever changed. https://www.hiv.gov/hiv-basics/overview/history/hiv-and-aids-timeline

I agree 100%! GCHQ apologises for 'horrifying' treatment of Alan Turing and discrimination against other LGBT people 'Their suffering was our loss, and it was the nation's loss too' After being chemically castrated, Mr Turing killed himself by eating an apple laced with cyanide (Susannah Ireland) GCHQ chief has apologised for the espionage service's "horrifiying" treatment of Alan Turing and historic prejudice against LGBT people. The pioneering mathematician, whose code-breaking skills are said to have shortened World War Two by two to four years, lost his job with the secret service following a conviction for indecency and was forced to undergo chemical castration. Robert Hannigan is the director of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the successor to the Government Code and Cypher School which first employed and then summarily fired Mr Turing. LGBT individuals were banned from joining the espionage organisation until the 1990s, because of what Mr Hannigan referred to as "completely archaic rules on sexuality". Speaking at a conference hosted by gay rights charity Stonewall, he said he had been asked to apologise and added: "I am happy to that today and to say how sorry I am that he and so many others were treated in this way, right up until the 1990s when the policy was rightly changed. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologise for it. "Their suffering was our loss, and it was the nation's loss too, because we cannot know what [those] who were dismissed would have gone on to do and achieve. We did not learn our lesson from Turing." Mr Turing received an OBE in 1945 for his work during World War Two, when he and his colleagues in Bletchley Park's Hut 8 constructed code-breaking devices that cracked German ciphers. Imitation Game Featurette Cracks the Code of Benedict Cumberbatch By decoding messages from the Nazi Enigma Machine, Mr Turing helped Britain to reverse its fortunes in the Battle of the Atlantic, locating German U-Boats anHowever, in 1952 he pled guilty to a charge of public indecency, admitting he was in a homosexual relationship with Arnold Murray. Offered the choice between prison and libido-reducing injections, he opted for the later.

After four years of Trump and with the Republican Party now in thrall to a self-centred 'Emperor has no Clothes' moron, I cannot help wondering: why is it that with so many investigations into his businesses and his own dirty deeds that have been going on for years, still no charges have been brought against him? The Manhattan attorneys have been investigating Trump for years, but still nothing has happened. How come? His Finance guy Weisselberg has finally been hauled before a Grand Jury, but what about all the other people supposedly involved? What is happening about the Deutsche Bank investigations? What is happening about all the Russians who bought Trump properties in Manhattan and Florida? I find it almost impossible to believe that investigations take so long even to drag up just one piece of evidence of illegal shenanigans.

Alan Turing: The codebreaker who saved 'millions of lives' Alan Turing - the Bletchley Park codebreaker - would have been 100 years old on 23 June had he lived to the present day. To mark the occasion the BBC commissioned a week-long series of articles to explore his many achievements. This second essay examines the impact the British mathematician had on the outcome of World War II. image captionTuring's Treatise on Enigma helped break Germany's encrypted messages Germany's Army, Air Force and Navy transmitted many thousands of coded messages each day during World War II. These ranged from top-level signals, such as detailed situation reports prepared by generals at the battle fronts, and orders signed by Hitler himself, down to the important minutiae of war like weather reports and inventories of the contents of supply ships. Thanks to Turing and his fellow codebreakers, much of this information ended up in allied hands - sometimes within an hour or two of it being transmitted. The faster the messages could be broken, the fresher the intelligence that they contained, and on at least one occasion an intercepted Enigma message's English translation was being read at the British Admiralty less than 15 minutes after the Germans had transmitted it. image captionTuring helped adapt a device originally developed by Poland to create the bombe On the first day of war, at the beginning of September 1939, Turing took up residence at Bletchley Park, the ugly Victorian Buckinghamshire mansion that served as the wartime HQ of Britain's top codebreakers. There he was a key player in the battle to decrypt the coded messages generated by Enigma, the German military's typewriter-like cipher machine. Bletchley's bombes Turing pitted machine against machine. The prototype model of his anti-Enigma "bombe", named simply Victory, was installed in the spring of 1940. His bombes turned Bletchley Park into a codebreaking factory. As early as 1943 Turing's machines were cracking a staggering total of 84,000 Enigma messages each month - two messages every minute. Turing personally broke the form of Enigma that was used by the U-boats preying on the North Atlantic merchant convoys. It was a crucial contribution. The convoys set out from North America loaded with vast cargoes of essential supplies for Britain, but the U-boats' torpedoes were sinking so many of the ships that Churchill's analysts said Britain would soon be starving. "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril," Churchill said later. Just in time, Turing and his group succeeded in cracking the U-boats' communications to their controllers in Europe. With the U-boats revealing their positions, the convoys could dodge them in the vast Atlantic waste. image captionThe bombe's operators read decrypted German messages by marking the position of its drums The Turingery Turing also searched for a way to break into the torrent of messages suddenly emanating from a new, and much more sophisticated, German cipher machine. The British codenamed the new machine Tunny. The Tunny teleprinter communications network, a harbinger of today's mobile phone networks, spanned Europe and North Africa, connecting Hitler and the Army High Command in Berlin to the front-line generals. Turing's breakthrough in 1942 yielded the first systematic method for cracking Tunny messages. His method was known at Bletchley Park simply as Turingery, and the broken Tunny messages gave detailed knowledge of German strategy - information that changed the course of the war. "Turingery was our one and only weapon against Tunny during 1942-3", explains ninety-one year old Captain Jerry Roberts, once section leader in the main Tunny-breaking unit known as the Testery. "We were using Turingery to read what Hitler and his generals were saying to each other over breakfast, so to speak." Turingery was the seed for the sophisticated Tunny-cracking algorithms that were incorporated in Tommy Flowers' Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer. With the installation of the Colossi - there were ten by the end of the war - Bletchley Park became the world's first electronic computing facility. Turing's work on Tunny was the third of the three strokes of genius that he contributed to the attack on Germany's codes, along with designing the bombe and unravelling U-boat Enigma. Ending the war image captionTuring and Bletchley Park's other cryptologists helped counter the threat posed by Germany's U-boats Turing stands alongside Churchill, Eisenhower, and a short glory-list of other wartime principals as a leading figure in the Allied victory over Hitler. There should be a statue of him in London among Britain's other leading war heroes. Some historians estimate that Bletchley Park's massive codebreaking operation, especially the breaking of U-boat Enigma, shortened the war in Europe by as many as two to four years. If Turing and his group had not weakened the U-boats' hold on the North Atlantic, the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe - the D-Day landings - could have been delayed, perhaps by about a year or even longer, since the North Atlantic was the route that ammunition, fuel, food and troops had to travel in order to reach Britain from America. Harry Hinsley, a member of the small, tight-knit team that battled against Naval Enigma, and who later became the official historian of British intelligence, underlined the significance of the U-boat defeat. Any delay in the timing of the invasion, even a delay of less than a year, would have put Hitler in a stronger position to withstand the Allied assault, Hinsley points out. image captionThe UK government did not disclose details of the efforts to crack the Enigma machine until 1974 The fortification of the French coastline would have been even more formidable, huge Panzer Armies would have been moved into place ready to push the invaders back into the sea - or, if that failed, then to prevent them from crossing the Rhine into Germany - and large numbers of rocket-propelled V2 missiles would have been raining down on southern England, wreaking havoc at the ports and airfields tasked to support the invading troops. Saved lives In the actual course of events, it took the Allied armies a year to fight their way from the French coast to Berlin; but in a scenario in which the invasion was delayed, giving Hitler more time to prepare his defences, the struggle to reach Berlin might have taken twice as long. At a conservative estimate, each year of the fighting in Europe brought on average about seven million deaths, so the significance of Turing's contribution can be roughly quantified in terms of the number of additional lives that might have been lost if he had not achieved what he did. If U-boat Enigma had not been broken, and the war had continued for another two to three years, a further 14 to 21 million people might have been killed. Of course, even in a counterfactual scenario in which Turing was not able to break U-boat Enigma, the war might still have ended in 1945 because of some other occurrence, also contrary-to-fact, such as the dropping of a nuclear weapon on Berlin. Nevertheless, these colossal numbers of lives do convey a sense of the magnitude of Turing's contribution.

The daily trend appears to be shifting slowly in a positive direction. From The Tourism Authority of Thailand

.. am.enjoying reading and viewing all of your previous posts and am glad that you're beginning to have a wonderful stay and are viewing it through a different lens. Perhaps things look remarkably different because of the shut down and closure and the few individuals who are out and about. ...same has happened to me while I've been in San Francisco, especially during the early pandemic days as well as in parts of the area on the coast where I live in Cali. I have visited Buenos Aires 4 or 5 times during this century, and each time I've stayed in Recoleta, one of the upscale barrios in the city. The apartments that I rented from a gay company were always timely furnished, quiet, and mighty welcoming. My friend and I stayed in a penthouse apartment in one of the Palermos during our last visit. It was elegant, and the price quite wonderful. While I read what you wrote, I reminisced, smiled, and felt sad in thinking about the past vs now, and I identified with you when you wrote that you'd not seen your motherin two years. ...the same here which I broke for five days last month. I visited my mother and sister and brother and brother-in-law in Kansas City, MO to surprise and honor my mother on her 101st birthday. She's alert and upbeat but is homebound because of her health. i became emotional as I left for California. Do enjoy yourself and post when you can. I've always enjoyed viewing and reading and vicariously living through what you've written. Gracias, Axiom

I'll like when he's doing time.

yes it would, though I hadn't really considered that (yet). Plus i wonder how the bureaucratic part about vaccination would work out in that case, i.e. get an "official" vaccination certification. Neither place can really issue that, not having administered both shots themselves. Could lead to headaches when traveling maybe? I would and will make sure my vaccination will be entered properly in my yellow vaccination book, but will that be sufficient? If an electronic one becomes the norm, could I get that and how? Besides, in Germany I could easily get Pfizer or Moderna, which would be quicker than AZ, so no need to try the two-country strategy. The 16 week gap in Thailand was done to stretch supplies to allow more first shots to be given faster, same rationale as the UK did a while ago. It may actually be a good thing from a virological/immunological point of view, as a longer gap leads to better protection. So shortening it, as you are looking to do @spoon, may not be such a good idea...

A (farang) friend of mine got an appointment some weeks ago through the Thai registration app, because a Thai person (forgot how they relate) put him in as "family". First it was supposed to be at the Siam Paragon vax center, but later he could move it (within the app) to BNH Hospital, where the farang friend is regular patient anyway, so very convenient. Friend went to BNH about a week ago to inquire about the appointment, and yes indeed it was in the system and the lady confirmed it. Will wait and see what happens when the day comes.... I'm not eligible under the foreigner application website yet. So being able to register will take some more time, and the actual appointment will presumably not be before late July, or even August. In which case I'm thinking I'm better off waiting for October and get the Moderna shot then, because for AZ they do a 16 weeks (!!) gap here, so a July/August 1st shot will have the second in November/December! Would be the same with a 1st Moderna shot in October. And of course even better with J&J. And while I wait for October, an opportunity may arise to go to Germany and come back fully vaxxed with more reasonable hassle than under the stupid Phuket Sandbox model.

Somehow, Buenos Aires is more beautiful than usual in the middle of the restrictions. I guess is just my nostalgia. Yesterday was a sunny beautiful Fall day, but today is raining and cloudy. I am still working for my school, so my freedom is limited for this and next week. However, yesterday I left Palermo to have lunch with my mother in my old neighborhood, the famous Recoleta. 90% of the people is using masks, even outdoors. This is the block where I lived for more than 20 years, in Rodriguez Peña street. Right in the corner, Rodríguez Peña & Guido, there is a travel agency where you can change your cash dollars safely and without a paper track. If you are staying nearby, that is the place I used 2 years ago. After I came back home I fucked my first Grindr hook up (I have a long cue), a cute 26 y.o. athletic guy who asked me to trim my pubic hair because it looked unseat. This was a first time. Additionally, he was not the only one who made that kind of comment amongst my hook apps candidates. Apparently they do not mind for a hairy body, but they want my pubic hair short. As a side note, I had not trimmed my pubis in a long time. Damn, I have a lot of grey hair below my cock. Afterwards, and already in curfew time (my hook up left during curfew time and he did not care), I contacted my first escort. I am still stuck to my place and do not want to bring anyone I have not already met, so I went for Douglas, the Carioca I have already reviewed. His fee is only $AR 2,500 (26 bucks at official exchange, 16 at Blue's). I will see him tonight, hopefully. My friend Y also got my weed supply. I purchased 10 grams at $AR 6,000 and 10 at 8,000. Total of $AR 14,000 (U$S 143 off/91 Blue. I was not sure how much 20 grams was after so many years purchasing ounces in the USA, and pressed cheap Paraguayan when I was living here. Not only I bought too much. Besides, afterwards, an old friend who is getting married got as present premium weed (I do not know how much yet) and he is giving it to me). I will be living in a cloud of weed smoke starting tonight. These are the flowers I got from Y's providers: I rode in a regular taxi cab yesterday. For a 20' ride, I paid $AR 400 (U$S 4 Off/ 2.60 Blue). And I have to get into a zoom. More info later.

Cant agree more. The homeless, the illegals, the prisoners, basically all who can be infected, and spread the virus needs to be vaccinated.

Good video summary of all (some) of the new features. I have a hard time keeping up with all these changes. I am probably most excited about the new look to Maps.

I seem to recall that was the drug AZT. Although it was a breakthrough of sorts, didn't it have to be taken in a strict regimen every few hours, often along with some other drugs because like all viruses HIV was mutating? It was a Taiwanese-American, Dr. David Ho, who discovered the first real protease inhibitor treatment in the early 1990s that made life for HIV patients far more bearable. I remember only because he was on the cover of TIME magazine! I am sure @Ruthriestonis far better informed. I still consider the account of the early history of the AIDS crisis by Randy Shilts 'And The Band Played On' the near definitive book that everyone should read. Vastly better than the TV series packed with stars of the same name. Its one major error was in propagating the "Patient Zero" myth. When the doctors in NYC and LA noticed they were dealing with clusters of cases among young gay men, they eventually realised there almost certainly had to be a common link. Their research led them to a Canadian airline steward named Gaetan Dugas. All at one time had had sex with him. His work had taken him to Africa where it was then discovered there had been a major outbreak of AIDS in the 1920s in and around Kinshasa. We now know it had jumped the species barrier from chimpanzees to humans. Dugas was located. After being tested, he was found to be positive and informed about his passing HIV to others. He was asked to stop having sex with other men. Allegedly, he said he would not. Someone had given him the virus and he saw no reason why he should cease his activities since he was not responsible for his being infected. While that part of the tale may be true, by the end of the century it had become obvious that Dugas, who had by then died, was not Patient Zero and had been much maligned by being so named. However, later research suggested HIV had ben present in the USA much earlier. In 1968 a 15 year old teenager named Robert Rayford from Missouri entered hospital suffering from a variety of ailments. Doctors were baffled. On questioning, they suspected that Rayford was gay and had perhaps been either seriously molested or he was a male prostitute. None of the treatments seemed to work. As his condition worsened he soon developed a pneumonia-like illness and his immune system was discovered to be dysfunctional. He died in May 1969. The autopsy found rare purplish lesions on his left thigh, unheard of in black teenagers. The odd thing about the case was that Rayford had never travelled outside his home state and never received a blood transfusion. The only later connection thrown up was that he lived close to TWA's airline hub of St. Louis. Tissue samples were kept for later analysis. It was found that antibodies against all nine detectable HIV proteins were present in the blood samples. This was published in a medical journal in 1988 but only ever once again referred to, at a Conference in 1999 in Australia. Unfortunately the last known samples of Rayford were destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Anthony Fauci was one who was both curious and baffled. “It certainly could be true, and may even be likely that it’s true,” Fauci said, “but the absolute nailed-down proof isn’t there.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/05/15/mystery-illness-killed-boy-years-later-doctors-learned-what-it-was-aids/

It was 1976 when I met a young man whose radiant smile I could not get out of my head. We soon became fast friends and for 11 years he was the most important person in my life until he was taken in 1987. The cure began to emerge that year but too late for Billy. I did not have another relationship like that for 29 years. This time it was in November of 2016 when another young man, standing at Soi 4 and Silom rd., smiled at me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he, too, was to change my life and continues to do so to this day. Those of us who lived through and survived AIDS all have our own stories. But the one thing we all have in common is that as we still await a vaccine for that horror. Visitors and volunteers walk on the 21,000-panel AIDS Memorial Quilt on October 10, 1992 in Washington. (CNN)

I always thought the first cases were of kaposi's syndrome identified in New York. But I see from the link that the two sets of cases were discovered on the same day. Thank you @TotallyOzfor reminding us all of this pivotal moment in our lives. It is one we should never forget. It brings back so many memories, many of fear because in those early years being informed of a positive test was quite literally the door opening to a long lingering death. And if we had lovers or just casual acquaintances with whom we might have had sex, we were terrified of what might happen to them and then to us. The fear, too, of the possibility that we were infected and were passing death on to others. And yet, looking back I sometimes wonder if those days were quite as frightening for most of us as perhaps they should have been. I did not refrain from sex after i had heard of HIV. I did not even start to use condoms until I had learned a lot more about the disease. But then I was in a part of the world where it took a longer time for reality to dawn. It took the death in 1987 of one whom I had loved passionately to knock me to my senses. Although we had not been together for four years, we eventually became good friends and I had had tea with him just 10 weeks before his death. His new lover informed me of his passing. He had meant so much to me that I flew the round trip of 12,000 miles just to attend his funeral. Although I was 99% certain I could not have been HIV+ as a result of our relationship, I started to think of all the other men I had slept with, many in different countries. I became more afraid. What if I was positive? A little earlier, in October 1984 three friends in Tokyo had birthdays within 4 days of each other. They invited me to the joint party they would be holding. I said I had to decline. I just could not afford the trip. Nearer the time, I thought this is silly. They are good and close friends and I do want to be there. So I bought a ticket. I did not tell them I would be coming. So when they opened the door and saw me bearing gifts (as it were), there were lots of smiles and laughter. I am glad I went. It was a wonderfully happy evening. I ended up with another of their guests who had seemed such a quiet soul but was a tiger in bed. What I could not know then was that I would see none of my three friends again. They all died of AIDS. I admire @Ruthriestonso much for all he did for those young men he cared for before and after death. You, sir, are one of the many saints and one of the many heroes of those times.

I qualified as a Registered Nurse in Aberdeen in Scotland in 1986 but there were no jobs to be had and I was forced to move to London where I went to work in the HIV ward in St Stephen's Hospital in Fulham. We had eighteen beds in small rooms and we had at least nine deaths every day, mostly young gay men. We had to receive and transport patients ourselves as the porters wouldn't transport them, also the bodies had to be prepared by us and taken to the mortuary by the nurses too. Those were the hardest years of my life and I too lost many friends and colleagues.

missed it! when will the next one be up?

Well @anddy I did indeed speak too soon. A friends Thai wife saw a post on the internet that all vaccine appointments not made on the official app were being cancelled - my appointment was made at an outreach clinic of the local hospital where my details were entered manually on a register. We went to the vaccination site this morning to find out if I was on the register - and of course I wasn't. A lady member of staff there played about on her computer and said she had made me an appointment for August 5th which is considerably later than my original June 23rd. Frustrating but TIT I'll find out if I'm going to be jabbed in 8 weeks time.