SOLOMON HUGHES highlights a 1995 Sunday Times story about the disappearance of ‘defecting Iraqi nuclear scientist.’ Even though the story was debunked, it was widely repeated across the mainstream press, creating the false – and deadly – narrative of Iraqi WMD that eventually led to war
‘It’s just a joke’
It’s tiring always being viewed as the ‘wrong sort of woman,’ writes JENNA, a woman who has exited the sex industry
Time spent in the sex industry can be challenging to recover from
RUBY ALDEN GIBSON believes Scottish parliament has enough powers to curtail Westminster Labour’s savage attack on welfare
KEVIN DONNELLY reports from Monte Faudo and its annual remembrance of the region’s WWII partisan anti-fascist battles
The Trump government is seizing overseas students from their homes and campuses and even off the streets, with no legal grounds and no due process, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
As global fascism grows, ROGER McKENZIE urges the left to reclaim May Day’s revolutionary roots — not as an act of nostalgia, but as fuel for building a ‘community of resistance’ against exploitation and the rise of fascism
Our unions need to make a firm stand against so-called ‘defence spending’: the boss class say there’s no magic money tree — and there should be no magic mushroom cloud either, argues NATHAN HENNEBRY
KEITH FLETT revisits the 1978 origins of Britain’s May Day bank holiday — from Michael Foot’s triumph to Thatcher’s reluctant acceptance — as Starmer’s government dodges calls to expand our working-class celebrations
I SUFFER WITH depression and have done for the majority of my life. I know why. It’s not a mystery. Traumatic things happened, lots at a young age and that’s how my brain has come to be. I do my best though, I meditate, I read, my book shelf has seen more self-help books than I should probably admit to.
But an easy tool, one that I’ve used since childhood is comedy. Reruns of my favourites. It’s the ultimate comfort, like putting on an old pair of PJs and getting under a blanket. It’s familiar and the characters say words you’ve heard a hundred times before. It’s like being with friends who just let you sit with them in silence and with no expectations.
Comedy changes a lot, though. What we’re allowed to laugh at changes and what we find uncomfortable and questionable switches over time. It’s changed since I was a child in the ’90s watching Only Fools and Horses as the homophobic and racist jokes went over my head. There’s one subject that’s always good for a laugh though and that’s those women who aren’t like your regular women. It’s the kind that get paid for sex. The whores, the trick-turners, the ladies of the night, those good old-fashioned prostitutes.
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As TUC Women’s Conference prepares to debate the decriminalisation of prostitution, EMMA, who exited the sex industry more than nine years ago, reflects on how her harrowing experience changed her initial view that ‘sex work is work’
ESTHER, from Nordic Model Now! explains how decriminalisation of prostitution, rendering it just another form of ‘work’, would undermine the Equality Act 2010
Attempts to redefine prostitution as ‘work’ conceal the reality of commercial sexual abuse, writes ROBYN MARTIN
From prostitution to surrogacy, access to women’s bodies can be bought for a fee. LYNNE WALSH reports from a conference exploring the mounting crisis in which women are increasingly seen as products to be consumed