Given the popular support that billionaire Donald Trump continues to receive in the polls on the run-up to party nominations, it comes as no surprise that the adult industry would select him out of the 17 Republican candidates to immortalize. That’s right. There’s going to be a Donald Trump porn parody.
We live in a world where some stigmatized groups have finally achieved a rightful place in the streets where they can congregate and bring their grievances to the state. But just as they have attained this, they’re finding that new, much more effective avenues to change are being denied to them by powers that aren’t under any obligation to the public.
The Data Retention and Investigation Powers Bill, is a knee-jerk response from the United Kingdom to a ruling by the European Court of Justice that declared the Data Retention Directive of the European Parliament invalid in April. This new piece of legislation is being sold as a measure against terrorists, specifically “radicalized Brits returning from Syria” but no promises have been to target only suspects of terrorism.
Welcome to Sandy Springs, Georgia. Located just north of Atlanta, this city of 93,853 boasts IBM and Cisco Systems as its top employers, but you won’t find cutting edge innovation here. In fact, it could be said that some of its ordinances are just plain backward. For instance, you can’t sell sex toys here — unless the person buying has a prescription. This has been on the books since 2009, but it’s finally getting challenged.
It’s been nearly twenty years since the affair happened, sixteen since it exploded in 1998. For too long Monica Lewinsky has been tied to the Clintons and the blow job. It’s time we recognized that she deserves a life as something other than a political football — perhaps even as a human who is much more than an ill-advised affair she had while she was in her early twenties.
On April 2, the Labor and Employment Committee of the California State Assembly voted almost unanimously in favor of Assembly Bill (AB) 1576, which would mandate condom use, testing protocols and require adult companies to keep detailed health records of performers. The bill was sponsored by assemblymember Isadore Hall III. Tomorrow, it goes to the Arts, Entertainment, Sports, Tourism, and Internet Media Committee for a vote. If it passes, it will head to the Appropriations Committee, then hit the state legislature floor.
Over the past few weeks, Chase bank has been mailing members of the adult industry informing them that the bank is closing their accounts. While we’ve seen this kind of attitude from financial institutions before, we’ve never seen anything of this magnitude. Banks and payment processors have become incredibly risk-averse in the wake of efforts by the U.S. Department of Justice to combat fraud, but some suspect this exaggerated response is a ploy from financial institutions to garner bipartisan support and get the government off its back.
Traditionally, the butt plug has been used to stimulate the rectum for sexual pleasure, but Florida artist Fernando Sosa wants to repurpose it as a tool of dissent. A week ago, Sosa unleashed on the world a plug based on Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Initially, Sosa wanted to use his 3-D printer to make a voodoo doll, but he determined that casting Putin as an object representative of the thing he considers most corrosive to Russian society was the better bet.
Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ hoped to use the still frames they captured from millions of Yahoo chat users to develop facial recognition software in order to monitor targets and ferret out new ones. But what they discovered during Optic Nerve shocked them: “It would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.”
Conservative Christians around the nation have been clamoring for increased religious protections to match the advances made by by gay rights groups. The latest attempt fell flat yesterday in Arizona when Republican Governor Jan Brewer vetoed Senate Bill 1062, which would have effectively sanctioned discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people by businesses in the state.
