They're Studying What? Where? Doctors and specialists from the New York Psychiatric Institute are in the middle of a two-year investigation, on a $400,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), on why gay men have risky sex in Argentina. Researchers visit gay bars nightly in Buenos Aires and question men about their behavior and substance abuse.
Wayne State University (Detroit) researchers, operating on a $2.6 million NIH grant, are now "training" prostitutes to drink alcohol responsibly, to reduce the women's willingness to engage in risky sex. However, the training is taking place in Guangxi province, China.
Challenges of Geography: In March, China's Minister of Railways, Liu Zhijun, acknowledged that the government has plans for a rail line connecting Beijing and Taipei, Taiwan (which would involve traversing the Taiwan Strait, which is 108 miles across at its narrowest point).
The Czech Republic newspaper Lidove Noviny reported in May that, as late as 1975, the communist government of Czechoslovakia was actively planning to dig a tunnel from that landlocked country underneath Austria and the part of Yugoslavia that is now Slovenia, to give it rail access to the Adriatic Sea, 250 miles away. It is not known what the Austrians and the Yugoslavs thought of the idea.
