Canada Is a Terrifying Place to Be HIV-Positive

Arrests and prosecutions of Canadian residents who don’t disclose they’ve been infected with the HIV virus are commonplace; Nigeria’s first lady condemns those protesting her government’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the abduction of 236 schoolgirls by the Boko Haram group; meanwhile, a smartgun’s been developed that will work only for its owner, but a New Jersey law is keeping it off the market. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Canada’s Vicious HIV Laws In Canada, it is illegal for HIV-positive people to have sex without disclosing their status, in some cases even if they use a condom and even if no one gets infected.

Nigerian First Lady Reportedly Denounces ‘Missing Girls’ Protests, Orders Detention of Protestors More than 200 girls reportedly kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group are still missing in Nigeria; last week, protestors critical of the government’s failure to rescue the captives marched in the streets of Abuja, the country’s capital.

Peace Between Unequal Parties The collapse of Secretary of State John Kerry’s effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has provoked much handwringing.

What Should Concern Feminists More? Girls Wearing Pink or the Rise of Boko Haram? A funny thing happened in the Observer on Sunday. They ran a headline telling us that “pre-teen feminists” are “tired of pink” – with a massive photo of two of them wearing pink.

Ph.D. Students at Stanford Learn About Faculty Life at San Jose State U. San Jose State University’s densely built urban campus is the kind of regional public university that educates millions of Americans.

Capital Punishment Can Never Be ‘Humane’ In a masterful exercise in understatement, the White House said last week that a botched Oklahoma execution was not carried out in a manner that meets the nation’s high standards for such dubious rituals.

Can Radek Sikorski Save Europe? Meet the Oxford-educated Polish foreign minister fighting to get a wishy-washy continent to stand up to Russia.

Putin’s American Toady at ‘The Nation’ Gets Even Toadier If there’s a popular consensus out there, you can be sure that Stephen F. Cohen is going to disagree with it, because that’s the kind of original thinker Stephen F. Cohen is.

Gun That Can Only Be Fired By Owner Exists but No One Will Sell It Because of New Jersey The Armatix iP1 handgun is a “smart gun,” a term that’s used to describe a weapon that only works in the hands of a single designated individual; in the iP1’s case, that person has to enter a PIN code into a special watch before firing.