Hundreds protested against the US-Israel attacks on Iran in Parliament Square on Saturday, fearing a wider conflagration and horrified by the targeting of young schoolchildren, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
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Violent and harmful: legally tackling online pornography
Mountains of research show that hardcore material harms children, yet there are still no simple measures in place
PULLING NO PUNCHES: Activists from the feminist campaign group Not Buying It at the Liberal Democrat Conference in Brighton in 2018
LUKE FLETCHER outlines Plaid Cymru bold plans for wide-ranging policy consultations with trade unions in Wales
With this attack on Iran, Trump and Netanyahu are taking a reckless leap toward escalation. The region is balancing on the brink of a major war that could undermine the global economy and nuclear security, says MARC VANDEPITTE
Liverpool Trades Council has unveiled a ‘People’s Budget’ to fight £56m cuts and council tax rises. DEAN YOUNG reports
As Washington and Tel Aviv escalate their assault on Iran, the rhetoric of ‘great power’ politics masks a faltering empire resorting to familiar regime-change tactics, says JOHN McINALLY
Labour’s by-election defeat tells a story Scotland has known since 2008. A party that assumes loyalty while offering little more than managed decline will eventually discover that voters always have somewhere else to turn, says MATT KERR
WHEN I was a teenager, the only generally available pornography or erotica was surreptitiously traded postcards of coyly posed, naked women or under-the-counter magazines with innocuous titles like Health and Beauty. Not exactly uplifting visual material, but hardly damaging.
Today, we are living in a world where access to extremist material of all kinds of sexual depravity is readily available on the internet. Pornography has taken on a new and frightening significance. It is also a perfect paradigm of capitalism in that it exploits the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies, engenders huge profits and cultivates urges and desires no-one knew they had.
As a recent article by Harriet Grant in the Guardian showed, many of the men convicted of online child abuse say that they began by logging on to one of the many “mainstream” porn sites, but were, over time, taken to increasingly more abhorrent material, involving violence and child abuse by the inbuilt algorithms and without their conscious desire for such material.
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