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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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Branding

Branding: Laurie Taylor explores the 'persuasion industries' and their role in creating modern consumer society. How has their use of an emotional model of brand communication, whether in political campaigning or product advertising, transformed our understanding of the rational consumer? He's joined by Steven McKevitt, Visiting Professor in Brand Communication, at Leeds Beckett University. Also, how 'branding' can desensitize far right consumers to extremist ideas. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Associate Professor of Education and Sociology at American University, discusses her study into the ways in which extremism is going mainstream in Germany through clothing brands laced with racist and nationalist symbols.

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The Guardian Longreads: Dirty lies: how the car industry hid the truth about diesel emissions

And, as it turned out, Volkswagen wasn’t the only one evading the law. Less flagrantly, but to similar effect, the vast majority of diesel cars were making a mockery of emissions rules. In the wake of the revelations in the US, European governments road-tested other big brands too. In Germany, testers found all but three of 53 models exceeded NOx limits, the worst by a factor of 18. In London, the testing firm Emissions Analytics found 97% of more than 250 diesel models were in violation; a quarter produced NOx at six times the limit. “As the data kept coming in, our jaws just kept dropping. Because it is just so systematic, and so widespread,” German says. “VW isn’t even in the worst half of the manufacturers.” With a few honourable exceptions, “everybody’s doing it”.

In the US, where only around 2% of cars are diesel, the rule-breaking had an impact. But the health consequences have been far more severe in Europe, where drivers had been encouraged for years to buy diesel cars – when the scandal broke, they accounted for more than half of all sales. In 2015 alone, one study found that failure to comply with the rules caused 6,800 early deaths. To put it more plainly, tens of thousands of people had died because carmakers felt so free, for so long, to flout the law. [...]

While the US is, in so many ways, an environmental laggard compared to Europe, air quality is a glaring exception. The EPA has, over the years, built up tremendous legal and technical expertise. At least until its evisceration in the Trump years, the EPA was known for its diligence in supplementing regulations with circulars and advisories that precisely defined every term, clarifying ambiguities and laying out what was allowed and what was not. The result was a system that, if not watertight, was a lot less leaky than elsewhere. In Europe, while the rules might look similar, no one goes to the trouble of making clear exactly what they mean, so polluters provide their own interpretations. Its atrocious air offers a cautionary tale that those undermining US regulation would do well to heed. [...]

I learned to my astonishment that some in power knew about the consequences all along. I spoke by phone to Martin Schmied, an official at Germany’s federal environment agency. His department, he told me, had been taking cars on the road for 25 years to measure emissions – and publishing the results. Year after year, they found diesels producing NOx above the legal maximum; six times, in one recent test. I asked him to clarify: Germany’s government, and anyone who read its public reports, has known for decades that automakers were flouting the rules? Schmied responded that as long as emissions went down when limits were tightened, his department didn’t mind they were many times higher than allowed. “We publish this data,” he said. “In principle, this is nothing new.”

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Haaretz: Sex Parties, Drugs and Gay Escorts at the Pope's Residence: Undercover in the Vatican

This is not the only affair that Martel mentions from the period of Benedict XVI. He devotes a special chapter to the pope’s visit to Cuba in 2012. The visit, which was supposed to be a historic event in one of the last bastions of communism, devastated the pope. Backed by testimonies of high-level figures in the Vatican who accompanied the pope on the journey, and offering a vivid, concrete description, the chapter captures the despair that seized the pope when he grasped the scale of the homosexual prostitution and the pedophilia within the ranks of the Church there. What was flagrantly monstrous in the Cuban case was that the Castro regime knew what was going on within the Church and turned a blind eye, in return for the full cooperation of the Havana archbishopric with the regime.[...]

Martel also devotes a long chapter to the man who, in his view, was the most abhorrent pope of all – Paul VI, one of the strictest and most conservative leaders of the Catholic Church. In the face of the sexual revolution, in the 1960s, this pope toughened the Church’s stance: against the pill, against masturbation, against homosexuality. But as in many cases in which it turned out afterward that the most ardent combatants against sexual permissiveness were also the prime suspects, Martel elaborates on the rumors and gossip that were rife in the Italian press about a romantic relationship between the pontiff and a theater and TV actor named Palo Carlini, the vigorous denials and the ultimate dismissal of suspicions by none other than Ratzinger himself, who signed the decree that led to the title “Venerable,” and later sainthood, being conferred on Paul. [...]

“In order to familiarize yourself with the world of male prostitutes around Rome’s central station, you need to be multilingual and speak Romanian, Arabic, Portuguese and Spanish. I was helped a great deal in learning about these goings-on by a young man named Mohammed, who in return for a drink or a meal gave me information about what was happening in the neighborhood. Mohammed is a Tunisian who works with two friends, Billal and Sami, as prostitutes in Rome. I had another collaborator, Gabi, a young Romanian sex worker from Bucharest. He told me that from his point of view, the busiest days for work are Fridays, when the priests leave the Vatican in civilian attire, and Sunday afternoon, when the boredom in the Vatican drives them outside. He can identify them by the crucifix around their neck when they disrobe, but also without that – by the stress they’re under. Sometimes the priest takes him in to the Vatican. If the priest is a bigwig, they tell me, he will get paid generously, sometimes 100 or 200 euros instead of the usual 50 to 60. Some of them showed me proudly the phone numbers of the priests they visit regularly. [...]

“I interviewed quite a few graduates of seminaries. In my estimation, 75 percent of those who attend the seminaries are gay. All of them told me that in our day, masturbation, which in the past was a subject not mentioned in public, has become, at the Vatican’s instructions, a central issue in the training of priests. The reason is no longer the biblical injunction against spilling your seed in vain, but the need to exercise totalitarian supervision over the young man who is cut off from his family and from his body: It’s the negation of personality in the service of the collective. The Church’s opposition to masturbation became an idée fixe, utterly insane, with the result that those who masturbate necessarily live in a kind of ‘closet’ within a closet – a kind of doubly locked homosexual identity. What a shame for the Church, which is fighting masturbation more than it is fighting pedophilia. That says it all.”

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