As I entered my Edinburgh polling station today, I walked past a forest of A boards from the different parties. The Conservative’s consisted entirely of a lie. It said, “Only by voting for Ruth Davidson’s team can you stop the SNP winning a majority of seats”. Scotland has six seats, and six parties in contention…
Read moreSearching for the entrance to France’s ‘prostitution exit programme’
Click:national clothing asian costume In April 2018 we co-authored a report, now translated into English, on the French Prostitution Act of 2016. This act introduced the ‘Nordic model’ to France, which targets the demand for commercial sex by criminalising its purchase (the clients) rather than its sale. Our report drew on data from over 70…
Read moreIus soli: Italy’s opportunity to harness much-needed talent
Great Nnachi comes from a Nigerian family. What’s remarkable about her is that she set a new pole vault record on April 27, in Turin, the northern Italian city where she was born. She jumped over 3.70 meters, beating the Italian outdoor record set in 2012. But here lies the problem: Nnachi, 14, can’t apply…
Read moreToday, DiEM25 has every reason to celebrate. Tomorrow we get down to work
Dear DiEM25 members, dear European Spring activists, dear fellow progressive Europeanists, Today is a day to celebrate, while taking stock of our remarkable achievement. Today is also a day to lament Europe’s downward spiral, while planning the next phase of our paneuropean effort to bring hope back to the hundreds of millions who have lost…
Read moreThe unbearable silence of Chechnya’s lesbians
“There are no gays in Chechnya,” said Ramzan Kadyrov in a now notorious interview in 2017. Two years on, it seems like the Chechen leader is trying to make good on those words by launching a new purge against LGBT people. According to recent reports, two LGBT people have been killed and nearly forty detained…
Read moreHow can we shift to a regenerative culture in every sphere of life?
You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.” Buckminster Fuller In recent years there's been a global awakening to the momentous choice humanity now faces: do we cling to the old system and choose extinction, or create a new system…
Read moreTowards an anti-fascist AI
This article was published in partnership with Human Rights and the Internet. Read more from the series here. concrete Computers are essentially just faster collections of vacuum tubes. How can they emulate human activities like recognising faces or assessing criminality? Think about a least squares fit; you're trying to assess the correlation between two variables…
Read moreThe obstacle to Gay rights in Lebanon: homophobia or westphobia?
There is a historical paradox: the last decades, not the preceding centuries or millennia, seem to shape the present. The homoerotism of 8th century poet Abu Nawas, the medieval love between Hind and Al-Zarqa – a history of queer desire in the Middle East vanished under the rug of a briefer history of desiring the…
Read moreSwitching the UK on to mutual credit
If you ask a business owner if they would like to make more money the answer is usually "Yes", followed swiftly by "but what's the catch?" The default competitive market has bred a naturally suspicious mindset, which creates a challenge for ideas that promote reciprocity, co-operation and collaboration – especially those that promise more profit….
Read moreThoughts for my fascist brother in the North of Italy
In a small town in the north of Italy, fog and humidity make parmesan cheese and ham tasty. But most of the time it smells of a tomato sauce factory and pigs. I hated life there. When I go back to my hometown, I argue with my brother who has joined a neo-fascist group, I…
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