TDB Top 5 International Stories: Sunday 26th February 2017

5: Porn Is Teaching Us How to Do Sex

Schools won’t, so sex workers, porn distributors, and erotic artists are stepping up to educate their fans about the basics of sex ed.

Ari Yarwood’s sex education amounted to a brief anatomy lesson, scary words about STIs, and a video about abstinence hosted by Kirk Cameron at—for some reason—a scary haunted carnival.

“I grew up in a rural, conservative area,” Yarwood said. “There were still big gaps in my knowledge base that I needed to fill in as an adult, especially as a queer woman.”

If only Cameron and his clowns could see her now. Today, Ari is editorial director of Oni Press’s new Limerence Press, an imprint dedicated to comics focusing on erotica and sex education. Under her leadership, the company is hard at work on books like Oh Joy Sex Toy, an erotic coloring book by artists Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan, and an erotic story entitled Small Favors by Colleen Coover.

Vice News

4: Fox News Interview With Fake Expert on Sweden Further Baffles Swedes

A man interviewed by Bill O’Reilly of Fox News this week, who was identified in an on-screen caption as a “Swedish Defense and National Security Advisor,” turns out to be entirely unknown in his native country, with no connections to either the nation’s defense or security services.

As the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reported on Friday, Nils Bildt, who echoed President Donald Trump’s debunked claim that immigrants from Muslim majority nations had driven a rise in violent crime in Sweden, has no known expertise in national security, and has not lived in his homeland since 1994. Officials at the Swedish Defense Ministry and Foreign Office told the newspaper they have never heard of this “unknown Bildt.”

The Intercept

3: John Dean: The Difference Between Trump & Nixon is Trump Says Publicly What Nixon Said on Wiretap

We compare President Donald Trump’s attitude toward the media to that of President Richard Nixon with Nixon’s former counsel, John Dean. “The big difference is, Trump is doing this right out and challenging the First Amendment, one of our most important because it involves freedom of the press and freedom of speech,” Dean says. “Anything that he doesn’t like, any reporting, he calls being an enemy of the people … It’s just ludicrous. And it’s troublesome that he would try to sway the press by using the bully pulpit of his office to intimidate them.”

Democracy Now

2: Palestinian diaspora holds first global conference

Thousands of Palestinians representing diaspora communities from 50 countries have gathered in the Turkish city of Istanbul to discuss establishing a political structure that will represent them better.

The Palestine Abroad Conference, which was attended by more than 5,000 people on Saturday, is the first of its kind in terms of inclusivity.

Many of the speakers and attendees said they no longer have faith in the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories because of their failure to deliver tangible outcomes as a result of decades of peace negotiations with Israel.

The conference was held amid a spat between its organisers and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), which was formed in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.

PLO has accused the organisers of trying to undermine and replace it.

Aljazeera

1: Trump’s media war threatens journalists globally, protection group warns

The Trump administration should “act as a champion of press freedom”, a senior member of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said on Saturday, rather than prosecute a war with mainstream US media that could “send a signal to other countries that it is OK to verbally abuse journalists and undermine their credibility”.

Rob Mahoney, deputy executive director of the CPJ, a nonprofit that promotes press freedom worldwide, told the Guardian Trump’s attacks on the press do not “help our work trying to deal with countries like Turkey, Ethiopia or Venezuela, where you have governments who want to nothing more than to silence and intimidate the press.”

Mahoney also said attempts to favour conservative press outlets and declare the mainstream media the “enemy of the American people” looked like a deliberate effort by the White House to “inoculate itself from criticism”.

The Guardian