International Sex Workers’ Day was celebrated world wide last Sunday on June 2nd. Here’s some footage of French sex workers protesting  in Place Pigalle for the occasion. Australian sex workers’ rights orgs joined forces that day, rallying on the steps of Parliament to support a bill that would decriminalize sex work in South Australia.

We were briefly shocked into speechlessness by a Texan jury’s decision to acquit a man of charges of murder for killing 23 year old escort Lenora Ivie Frago, agreeing that because he was attempting to retrieve the $150 he’d paid her when she refused to have sex with him, the shooting was justified by a Texas law that allows “deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft.” Then Charlotte said it all for us.

Local police in China’s Bobai county have rejected an  application from sex workers’ rights activist Ye Haiyan’s lawyers to suspend her 13-day administrative detention for intentional injury. Ye was acting in self-defense after a group of ten plainclothes women broke into her home and assaulted her. It is believed that the attack was an attempt to silence her following her recent launch of an online campaign protesting a number of cases of child abuse, which quickly gained huge public support.

Nassau county police released the names and pictures of 104 men who tried to pay undercover cops for sex in a recent month long  sting. A Newsday op ed asks a pertinent question: “Is prostitution really the biggest problem in Nassau county?”

Zumba fitness instructor and alleged sex worker and madam Alexis Wright told reporters that she felt relief when police raided her business, because she wanted out. She claims that insurance owner and co-conspirator Mark Strong manipulated into believing she was an “operative” working for the state with the task of investigating “all manner of sexual deviants.” We really wanted to think of something snarky and cutting to say point out the absurdity of all this, but maybe the story speaks for itself.

A bill forbidding the use of condoms as evidence of prostitution was approved in the California Assembly and is moving to the state senate for consideration.

A California judge ruled that prisoners were allowed to read as much werewolf erotica as they want. Nice to hear after the New Zealand cartoon pixie sex arrest last month.

The Vancouver Sun interviewed Katrina Pacey, a a lawyer with Pivot Legal Society, who will appear before the Supreme Court of Canada on June 13 to argue supporting a case by Ontario dominatrix Terri-Jean Bedford, who wants to strike down laws that prohibit operating bawdy houses, making money from prostitution, and communicating in public to sell sex: “The real hypocrisy in the law is that Canada says sex work is fundamentally legal, however it is impossible to do it safely. They’ve criminalized everything around the core activity.”

Nigerian survival sex workers ask the government for aid in leaving the industry.

The New Statesman features an amazing profile of Australian sex workers’ rights activist and escort Grace Bellavue and her work advocating for decriminalization: “Decriminalisation works. It allows sex work to be socially contextualised and regarded as a valid profession to be afforded the same human rights as workers in any other job.” Bellavue also wrote a powerful op ed in favor of decriminalization which appeared yesterday in the Advertiser.