The Guardian Today in Focus: The Tories and their Islamophobia problem

The Conservative peer Sayeeda Warsi has been an outspoken critic of Islamophobia within her party. Last year the former party chair called on the Conservatives to launch a full independent inquiry into Islamophobia, warning the Tories were pursuing a politically damaging policy of denial about the problem in their own ranks.

The situation does not appear to have improved. Last month, 25 self-identifying party members were found to have posted anti-Muslim comments on Facebook, while a further 14 members were suspended for allegedly making Islamophobic comments after a string of abusive posts were uncovered on social media.

Anushka Asthana talks to Lady Warsi about why she believes the leadership are turning a blind eye to the problem, including their refusal to accept a new definition of Islamophobia agreed by Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

And: the Guardian’s media editor, Jim Waterson, on his discovery that a series of hugely influential Facebook advertising campaigns, appearing to be separate grassroots movements for a no-deal Brexit, are secretly overseen by employees of Sir Lynton Crosby’s lobbying company and a former adviser to Boris Johnson.

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Haaretz: If Re-elected, Netanyahu's First Order of Business Will Be an Obscenity Against Democracy

The most common complaint about the past 100 days is that this campaign was devoid of substance and content. It occupied itself with the trivial and the sensational, along with displaying an addiction to mudslinging, cheap gimmicks and trashy video clips. We didn’t get to see party leaders sitting opposite one another and talking about their platforms, detailing their worldviews, presenting plans and serious content, confronting the issues.

That’s not only the fault of the politicians and certainly not of all of them. Part of the responsibility lies with the media, which was swept up in an ugly wave of false news and spins at the expense of the “issues.” [...]

But his path won’t be an easy one. Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu, has declared that he won’t support retroactive legislation. He would prefer to have Netanyahu continue in the role of defendant. Kahalon already committed to opposing the proposal. Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked will decide when the time comes. Not even all of Likud’s members will vote in favor: Gilad Erdan said he would vote against such a bill; maybe Yuli Edelstein and Avi Dichter will, too. Here and there, a few islands of sanity remain.[...]

Only Netanyahu, whose status in the global arena is extraordinary, is capable of enlisting the heads of the great powers and “third-party countries” to help him in his election campaign. So it was with U.S. President Donald Trump and the Golan, and so it was with Netanyahu’s trip Thursday to Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin, who instructed his army in Syria to assist in the “intelligence and operational” effort that led to the return of the remains.

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CityLab: Why France’s Former Prime Minister Wants to Be a Mayor in Spain

His candidacy is a grand gesture—one that represents the ideal of the European Union, of late so beleaguered, as a space where national borders and identities can dissolve into a glorious, larger transnational project. In practice, Valls’s campaign is a living example, even a cautionary tale, of how all politics is local, and of how that European ideal can be a vague and elusive abstraction in the rough-and-tumble of an election. [...]

By then, Valls was one of the most disliked politicians in France. Socialist voters felt betrayed not only by his joining En Marche, but also by the policies he had championed while in power: market-friendly labor reforms that didn’t go over well with the party’s left-wing base, and his stance in what could loosely be called identity debates, such as his efforts to strip French jihadists of their citizenship, a proposal the Socialists ultimately withdrew for lack of support. Valls was essentially seen as a neo-conservative. [...]

At the height of the independence push, when Valls was still an elected official in France, he made impassioned speeches in favor of Spanish unity, saying that “unmaking Spain is unmaking Europe,” and in this moment, the germ of his candidacy first sprouted. Valls has repeatedly said, including to me, that he’s a republican in France, which replaced its monarch in the French Revolution, and a royalist in Spain, where he sees the royal family as defenders of Spanish democracy. Opposition to the Catalan independence movement is a pillar of his mayoral campaign. One of Valls’s opponents in the race is an independista running his campaign from jail, adding an element of romantic martyrdom to the political drama. [...]

Barcelonians don’t seem to resent Valls for being an opportunist or a carpetbagger. The city has a pretty open heart for welcoming newcomers from all over the world, to say nothing of Catalans such as Valls. But it isn’t so keen on the fact that he lived here for only a matter of months before announcing his intention to run in September. That he keeps making gaffes doesn’t help. Valls got some flak after a television interview in which he admitted that he didn’t know how much a metro ticket cost here.

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Aeon: Swastikas on the Strand

The German invasion threat helped to reshape the British national character. It cast Britons as the saviours of Western democracy, a role that put them at the centre of world history and boosted their national pride. For more than a year after the retreat from Dunkirk in 1940, only Britain stood against Hitler. Its refusal to capitulate despite the enemy’s menacing preparations embedded itself deep in the nation’s self-image. During 1940 and ’41, the government carefully monitored civilian morale, and emphasised that the decision to fight on alone resulted from general principles, not mere expediency. Britain was not only refusing foreign domination but refusing Nazi control. To emphasise that point, the government celebrated the national traits that made Britons the opposite of Nazis. [...]

By the 1960s, the British were producing a body of literature on the spectre of a possible Nazi-occupied Great Britain. Sometimes, the occupation resulted from an invasion, and other times from a dishonourable peace. The literature of Nazi-occupied Britain offers a different kind of counterfactualism from that found in military histories. It draws out sequences of imagined events to create a picture of a society that might have existed. The books show a preoccupation with how Britain’s national character would have fared under Nazi occupation. Would Britons’ behaviour have differed from that of other Europeans? If so, how and why? The answers varied but the imagining of a Nazi Britain compelled intense British self-scrutiny. [...]

If Britain Had Fallen stresses that these British Nazis would not have been representative of the occupied British nation. Longmate portrays the struggles of British judges, lawyers, district nurses and doctors, postmen, teachers, tax collectors, mayors and city clerks pressed between the subjugated people and the Nazi overlords. If Britain Had Fallen gives us a very different Nazi Britain from Clarke’s England Under Hitler. Clarke’s model of British behaviour had been Major Colin Gubbins, the head of the Auxiliary Units, assassinating Nazi perpetrators after a village massacre. Twelve years later, in Longmate’s If Britain Had Fallen, the exemplary Briton is the anonymous civil servant, ‘a good mayor or, perhaps even more, a good town clerk’, bearing the day-to-day burden of carrying out German orders and consequently ‘likely before long to be unpopular all round’. [...]

In her book The Model Occupation (1995), Bunting reasoned that the Channel Islands’ occupation might serve as an accurate model of ‘What … could have happened in the rest of Britain’, which would debunk ‘the myth of the distinctiveness of the British character from that of Continental Europeans’. In an occupied Britain, she asserted, Britons would have behaved as they did in the actually occupied islands; they would have ‘compromised, collaborated and fraternised just as people did throughout occupied Europe’. Bunting urges Britons to discover what they truly are from the Channel Islands’ experience: typically European. Acknowledging their Europeanness would help them to accept their proper place, which is in Europe.

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Quartz, Students in the UK and Germany learn about the EU in entirely different ways

In the English textbooks, Europe was seen almost exclusively in political terms—with strong emphasis on the EU being a controversial issue. In one book for example, although there are references to the European Convention on Human Rights along with the European court and a brief mention of the European Economic Area, most of the limited space given to Europe is about the European Union—and about “different viewpoints on EU membership.”

In the German books there was a very different approach: Europe is seen more expansively and positively with an integrated approach to politics and identity. The German textbooks also had references to Europe being “our historical, cultural and intellectual home,” a “community of values,” and, a place where “enemies became friends.” [...]

The project was informed by previous research, particularly, work undertaken by one of the project team which involved interviewing 2,000 young people across 29 European countries. The project aimed to find out how young people in Europe construct their political identities—which we found often transcend traditional boundaries of state and nation.

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CNN: How men and women use condoms differently

That's the conclusion of a recent study that examined condom negotiation in men and women ages 18 to 25. The researchers found that heterosexual men, heterosexual women and men who have sex with men all used different strategies when negotiating condom use with a new partner.

Overall, the findings are in line with what my colleagues and I have noticed in our practices: Straight men tend to be more willing to have sex without a condom, while women may withhold sex if their partner refuses to use one, and men who have sex with men aim for a balance between these approaches. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's take a look. [...]

Likewise, men might care less about the consequences of sex when they're not motivated to be in a relationship. "It sounds like an oxymoron, but it appears that men who have higher relationship motivation tend to take less risk when it comes to protecting themselves and partners from unintended pregnancies and STIs," sex therapist Renée D. Burwell said. "Men who don't really care about their relationship becoming serious tend to be riskier and more dependent on their partner to protect them." [...]

This study found that men who have sex with men are more likely to verbalize their negotiations about condom use than their heterosexual peers, possibly because they may view themselves on a more equal playing field with their partners.

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CNN: Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski might have been a woman or intersex

Researchers who used DNA to identify Pulaski’s bones are convinced the gallant Pole who died fighting for America’s freedom was either a biological woman who lived as a man, or potentially was intersex, meaning a person whose body doesn’t fit the standard definitions of male or female. [...]

Estabrook said her team is not the first to suspect that Pulaski might not have been a man. Others also noticed the delicate bone structure after the skeleton was extracted from the Pulaski monument in Savannah, Georgia. The general was only between 5-foot-2 and 5-foot-4 inches tall.

“Part of the reason it wasn’t more publicized at the time was that without DNA confirmation that this was Pulaski, it was easy to dismiss,” Estabrook said. [...]

“Probably he was not completely aware,” Estabrook said. “What we do know about Pulaski is that there were enough androgens (male hormones) happening in the body, so that he had facial hair and male pattern baldness. Obviously, there was some genital development because we have his baptismal records and he was baptized as a son.”

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The Guardian: Companies abandon Brunei's Dorchester hotel over gay sex law

With other celebrities including the actor George Clooney giving their support to the boycott campaign, a string of companies confirmed on Friday that they would no longer be using the five-star hotel’s facilities. The TV Choice awards, several major property companies and the Financial Times were among those that said they would be cancelling events.

“The new laws introduced by Brunei breach the most basic human rights, and we believe it is our duty as a firm to take action against them,” the Deutsche Bank chief risk officer, Stuart Lewis, said in a statement. [...]

Most of the hotels in the Brunei-owned chain have deleted their social media accounts following a barrage of protest. The Dorchester Collection group has a notice on its website saying: “Inclusion, diversity and equality are the foundation of Dorchester Collection … We understand people’s anger and frustration but this is a political and religious issue that we don’t believe should be played out in our hotels.” [...]

The University of Aberdeen and King’s College London have already confirmed they are reviewing the honorary degrees they have given to the sultan, while 40,000 people have signed a petition calling on the University of Oxford, which gave him an honorary diploma in 1993, to follow suit. [...]

This has caused concern among LGBT soldiers in the British army, who fear they could be caught up in the legal regime if they are serving in the country. The defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, told the Times he was seeking reassurances at the “highest levels” that UK troops would not be affected.

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