BBC Sport pays tribute to Rafael Nadal's incredible career and looks back at the 2008 Wimbledon final, after the 22-time Grand Slam winner announced he will be retiring at the end of the season.

Former scrum-half Matt Dawson on what England should learn from their agonising last-gasp defeat by Australia.

England's Liz Young wins the Women's Indian Open by one shot to claim her second Ladies European Tour title.

Andy Murray endured a bout of nerves when he played in the BMW PGA Championship pro-am with fellow Scot Bob MacIntyre on Wednesday.

Dragons scrum-half Rhodri Williams is recalled by Wales head coach Warren Gatland more than 10 years since his last Test cap.

Head coach Luke Williams hopes a change of ownership at Swansea City will mean a "very exciting" future for the Championship club.

Oban Elliott is ready to realise his lifelong dream of fighting at Madison Square Garden at UFC 309

Ex-Wales back row Sioned Harries says the problems with the national women's team run far deeper than just blaming former head coach Ioan Cunningham.

Luke Williams wants Swansea City to open contract talks with Josh Key after comparing the right-back to a young Gareth Bale.

Lock Jeremy Williams says Australia have come back down to earth after beating England and are fully focused on facing Wales on Sunday.

Guernsey squash player Chris Simpson sets his sights on a match with world number one Nick Matthew at the British Championships.

How four healthcare students joined 40,000 others in volunteering to join the NHS's fight against the pandemic.

The Bill was passed in Holyrood with 105 votes to zero with seven Scottish Green MSPs abstaining.

Dr Sandesh Gulhane, husband of TV doctor Punam Krishan, gave the man CPR at the Scottish Parliament.

The situation at one primary highlights the issues raised in a report on the state of school buildings.

Andrew Muir says Labour's first budget in 14 years is "bad" for farmers.

The law could force health staff to be open with patients and their families when mistakes are made.

Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen says changes to the law will be introduced in "bite-sized chunks".

Proposals for renewable energy schemes in Wales could be sped up under new plans.

A full-time fraud financial advocate will support victims in pursing compensation.

A police force formally rejects 72 complaints against officers by patients' relatives.

Barnsley black belt Mayon is still awaiting the outcome of his citizenship application from 2020.

The cost of broadband and devices can be a barrier to getting online, the Doncaster charity says.

Pop star Robbie Williams will perform at Bath's Royal Crescent in June next year.

About 700 patients have been identified as being at risk of developing serious liver problems.

A review identifies aspects of poor care and issues with the neonatal service.

World sidecar champion Harry Payne plans to also compete in the British Championship next year to help boost his profile.

Westmorland and Furness Council trading standards safe shopping advice.

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust wants to help bats with improved habitats on six of its reserves.

The development and rising popularity of AI is not only impacting the tech we use, but also the career paths the next generation are taking. A recent study by laptop and tech […]

The post AI university course uptake increased by 453% over 5 years, claims study appeared first on Tech Digest.

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The Notting Hill pub gets its festive glow-up.

Via Lori Smith, I was alerted to this claim last week by police in Cornwall that a lap dance venue license application should be rejected because such clubs 'might' cause sexual violence. As Lori points out over on BitchBuzz, this is territory I've covered before: the widely-publicised claims that lap dance clubs in Camden caused more rape turned out to be false.

Of course the statistics for a specific area of London over a certain number of years are only that: specific to London and those years. It's dangerous to take a trend for one area, at one point in time, and generalise it to all places at all times. In order to claim that "Factor X causes Outcome Y" you need a lot more data. In the book I set out some comparisons, then, with London and other locations summarising what we know from the scientific literature, national statistics, and so on.

So what's interesting is that The Sex Myth discusses not only the situation in cities like London but also specifically, as coincidence would have it, Newquay.

Guess what? The link between lap dance and sexual violence that the police claim 'might' exist? Not only does it not exist, local media in the Southwest have already reported on this.

In 2010, the Newquay Voice obtained Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s figures of sexual assaults. They found that the total number of recorded sexual assaults (including rapes) in and around Newquay peaked at 71 in 2005, the year before Newquay's first lap dance club opened. In 2006 however,  following its opening, the number fell to 51.

In 2007, when the town’s second lap dancing venue opened, the total number of recorded sexual assaults fell again to 41, then dropped to 27 in 2008 when a third lap dancing club opened. In 2009 the number rose slightly, but with a total of 33 offences, it is still less than half the total than before the clubs appeared.

Using publically available population data, I took these figures and calculated the incidence rate (since population varies from year to year as crime stats do, if you don't calculate a rate, the numbers are not very informative). Here are the incidence rate calculations using midyear population levels for the council of Restormel where Newquay is located:

I was re-reading Iceberg Slim recently (as you do), and wondering what exactly it is the anti-sex brigade mean when they go around calling people "pimps".

I've been called a pimp before. By Julie Bindel, to my face, and I laughed because it is so ridiculous: I have never profited off of anyone's erotic capital but my own… and arguably Billie Piper's, though that makes me no more and perhaps significantly less pimp-like than (say) her agent and the show's producers.

I don't get particularly offended by such obviously over the top labels. But the word itself has started to crop up more and more in the arguments surrounding sex work and the proposed laws regarding prostitution. Take for example in Ireland, where the widespread assumption is that all sex workers are a) women and b) "pimped". Both of these are demonstrably and flagrantly not true, and yet are found in virtually any media coverage of the topic which is heavily influenced by an unholy coalition of extreme religious groups and extreme radfem ideologues.

The side issue dogging the proposed changes, that is, the discourse about what exactly constitutes trafficking and who exactly is trafficked, is of course pretty openly racist - both the words and the imagery. This has been covered in some detail and extremely well by eg. Laura Agustin, whose work on the topic I highly recommend.
 

Typical "trafficking" propaganda: shades of White Slavery all over the place.
 
Anyway, back to the concept of "pimp". Now we all know, or think we know, what a pimp is, and much of this archetype comes from highly fictionalised misrepresentations of Mr Slim's own work.
Go on, you know exactly what people mean by the word. What "pimp" implies. A man who runs women, lures them with money and romance, then turns them out to whoring, often beaten, always drug-addicted.

And he is black.

Starting to sound like casual use of "pimp" is dog-whistle racism, isn't it?

For the life of me I have never met a person even remotely like the stereotypical pimp, and yet I "know" they exist, largely because I have been told so over and over again. I've met streetwalkers, both drug-addicted and not; escorts and call girls, same; not one ever had what popular imagination would classify as a "pimp," but then I keep getting told I'm not representative, so maybe the literally hundreds of men and women, cis and trans sex workers I've met are just "not representative" too?

Occasionally you also hear talk of the "Eastern European gangmaster", but for some reason the class- and racially-evocative term "pimp" comes up far, far more often. Could that be because plain xenophobia just doesn't inspire the troops in quite the same way bald racism does?

Independent sex workers who organise their own affairs and work solo. Roommates who share a flat and both happen to sell sex. Managers running escorts agencies with a dozen or so girls they mostly interact with by text. Massage parlour owners. Women whose house is used by other sex workers, so technically I guess are madams. People who set up message boards and internet forums where clients and sex workers talk among themselves and with each other. All of these are people who get called "pimps" by the anti-sex lobby.

A guy in a crushed velvet suit on a street corner, keeping his girls high and working the neighbourhood? Not so many of those to the pound.

But, let's say he really is out there, because we all keep getting told he is. This working-class black man in the loud clothes who is sexually and physically aggressive and probably has a criminal record. This "pimp".

Do you think his choice of work isn't somehow constrained by society too? That he wouldn't rather be earning money some other way? Because anyone with any sense can surely suss out that a lot of activities, both legal and illegal, would be far more profit and far less hassle than running girls.


Iceberg Slim: hustling because it's not as if you were going to save him and his mother from poverty, were you?
 
This is the reality of waged work, all waged work, whether sex is involved or not. No one, but no one, has "free choice". If you think otherwise, remind yourself what you wanted to be when you grew up, and reflect on how exactly you ended up where you are now. Did you freely select from all career choices in the world, ever? Or did you choose as best you could from the options offered by your abilities and (more crucially) your circumstances? You know, like Iceberg Slim did?

Some folks seem especially resistant to acknowledging the truth about work, so I'll underline it some more. Entire towns in the North weren't full of miners because everyone there just happened to have the aptitude and preference for that sole job, but because it was the only job going. NE Scotland isn't full of fishermen because they have a particular concentration of people whose life's dream was to catch fish, but because that's what the job market offers. Everyone's outcome is the product of limited choices, from streetwalkers to the Queen. And no one's suggesting she needs to be "rescued" from her lack of career options.

If you want to improve someone's options, you address the things that constrain their choices in the first place. Poverty, addiction, education, to name a few. Not take away the only choices they have.

The pimp as we perceive him is a low-end tough. He's not exactly a criminal mastermind. And unlike a lot of the people who talk about "pimps" and whatnot, I know criminals. I have seen that life up close and fucking personal. I have lived in their neighbourhoods and their houses, and even in their families. I know that anyone who runs a business in the way the supposed pimp supposedly does is making little money, if any. What's 50% of that £10 anal bareback the anti-sex lobby claim is available in red lights everywhere? A fiver? Yeah, that sounds logical. Now pull the other one.

I know that his power - again, if he exists, because even when I was living in Cracktown, Pinellas County I saw shit that would stop your heart but I never once saw a "pimp" - is a power of an extremely limited kind. The power of someone with few and possibly no other options.

The anti-sex lobby's fantasy use of the term "pimp" is bogus and it is racist. Anyone who claims otherwise is being purposely disingenuous for the sake of striking fear into white, English-speaking, middle-class people.

Reflection on current events

The post Possible causes of your problems appeared first on Dave Walker.

A new webcomic about domestic incompetence

The post Household Problems appeared first on Dave Walker.

In the round-up: Teams "welcome freedom" of 2026 regulations • Alpine targets Colapinto - reports • Pulling quickest in Formula E test

All 10 Formula 1 teams will participate in a new "season launch event" in February next year to reveal their liveries together.

Do you remember when bloggers just sometimes did short posts about things they had enjoyed and just wanted to share them? I know, I am such a boomer*. Anyway, here is one of those, with a couple more to follow...

Let anesthesiology assistants work for themselves

In Spain and other civil law countries, you seem to need a notary for anything of gravity. You buy a house, you need a notary. You inherit some money, you need a notary. You start a company, you need a notary. The list goes on. What do notaries do in common law countries? So little […]

A public-form notarial act is a document drafted by a notary that contains the entire notarial act. It is narrated from the notary’s perspective and includes all the details and circumstances of the act. All Spanish notarial acts are in public form (documents elevados a público). In England and Wales, notarial acts are usually in […]

This post looks at how to translate the names of the two* main types of public-form Spanish notarial acts, escrituras públicas and actas notariales. It also identifies handy language to use in translations of them. Escritura pública An escritura pública records an act executed before a notary. How you translate the name of an escritura […]

“Deed” is sometimes used as a translation for escritura pública. Is it a good translation? What is a deed? A deed is a formal legal document. In England and Wales, transfers of land, mortgages, powers of attorney, some business agreements and wills must be executed as deeds. In the US, deeds are only required for […]

Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers' lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users.