Jason Kennedy


19 October 2010

No More Than Six Balloons

The Interactive Emergency Evacuation Exhibition Center in Taiwan is one of the world’s odder transport museums. The Taipei Metro System (MRT), according to its official literature, aims to go ‘beyond its role as a mere transportation mode by also transporting passengers to a beautiful new world’. The IEEEC, however, transports you to a world where everything has gone wrong. It’s aimed at children. Large wall displays in the foyer show the layout of the centre, the range of souvenirs on offer, and a cartoon child fleeing the Grim Reaper: ‘Knowledge is the key to survival!’

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11 October 2010

It happened before the coup

The US has issued an apology to Guatemala after the discovery by an American historian, Susan Reverby, that John Cutler, one of the doctors involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study in the 1960s, conducted similar experiments on unconsenting Guatemalan subjects twenty years earlier. The Guatemalan experiments, in which the local authorities appear to have been complicit, were carried out on prisoners and mental patients. In some cases prostitutes with syphilis were brought in to infect the men; others had the bacteria poured over abrasions on their penises or injected into their spines. It happened between 1946 and 1948, during the Ten Years of Spring (1944-54), a period with a cherished place in the national imagination.

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