These are crazy, crazy times – Gene Simmons tries to kiss it better

Gene Simmons has plenty to say. He always has plenty to say. And while he’s strident, if rather fascistic, on folk he’d like to send to a gulag and how he’d sort societal ills, he is also uncommonly expressive about his mother’s time in a concentration camp and very moving about discovering her name on a Nazi list of kids put on a train to the camps.

The homelessness tide is rising in London. The reasons are many but the net result the same. Some people are choosing to avoid the streets by sleeping on nightbuses traversing the city. We go onboard to uncover reality of life on the Number 25.

Every now and then Hollywood likes to tackle big issues. Speaking to its stars and producers we look at whether computer-game-to-big-screen movie Warcraft is a thinly veiled comment on the refugee crisis. And whether it works. There is also added John Rhys-Daves, a longstanding fixture in Indiana Jones movies and many more fantasy flicks, with his curious theory on human development and what comes next. Very entertaining.

John Bird opens up both barrels on the ‘vile, moralising, rude, abrasive, childish arguments’ from both sides of the Brexit debate. They’re letting us all down and we need to speak up to stop the ‘uglification’ of politics, he says. Cracking piece.

Samira Ahmed returns with a great look at what economic freedom and growth really means for women’s rights. And whether things have moved backwards in recent years.

Our featured vendor this week is Martin Clarkson, who sells in Clifton, outside of Bristol. He has been selling for a few years and The Big Issue has helped him move on from 10 years of sleeping rough, to a shelter and recently into a place of his own. “Being able to go home and sit down with a cup tea is a novelty that hasn’t worn off,” he says, simply.