What the Pope Knows

According to various news sources:

After decades of fierce opposition to the use of all contraception, the pontiff will end the Catholic Church's absolute ban on the use of condoms. 

Wow. 

Key in on the word absolute, which I underlined and boldfaced.  As quoted in a different story:

"In certain cases, where the intention is to reduce the risk of infection, it can nevertheless be a first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality," he said.  The Pope gives the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as "a first step towards moralisation", even though condoms are "not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection".

Wow.

We've all known for ages that condoms are useful, particularly in struggling nations, to fight HIV/AIDS.  It just took a while for the Church to realize this, and do something about it.

Media Coverage of HIV/AIDS

There is a strong relationship between HIV/AIDS prevalence in a country and coverage of the disease in its media, according to this recent study (abstract only, sorry).

It's interesting.  The researchers used Google News archives to find news articles in 168 countries.  What makes this interesting is a bit of methodological geekiness -- it's unclear how well, or complete, or   comprehensive, Google News truly is as a way to find articles for content analysis.  There's a study for someone right there -- probably in information science -- whether web-based aggregators make for methodologically sound samplers of news content.  I suspect yes, given how Google scours the world of the web, but it's one that still needs to be done.  Be interesting to compare Google News with Nexis or others to see what gets missed, if anything.