At COP27 in Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt, climate justice and human rights advocates found ways to come together and make their voices heard, despite the country’s repressive regime. But some worry about what comes next, for Egyptian activists when they are no longer in the international spotlight, and for climate activism at next year’s U.N. summit in Dubai.

The post Egypt’s Climate Summit Was a “Rehearsal” for COP28 in Dubai appeared first on The Intercept.

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The first dressing room I remember was at Hudson’s, a Detroit-based department store where middle-class people in my town went to get things that were “nice.” It was the place where my mother bought me overalls and hair bows, where she bought herself high-heeled shoes displayed like pastries on wooden pedestals.

On those shopping trips, my mother would gather a pile of clothes, hunting and pecking her way through the various women’s departments. We both loved this part. For me, the initial search on a shopping trip is when optimism is at its peak, the time when all the garments on offer might actually fit, when they still might actually look good. It is during the second act of the shopping experience when it all goes awry.

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My mother, always so neat and thoughtful, hung up her garments before changing out of her own clothes. She had once worked in a Hudson’s, and so was aware of all the perpetual folding and steaming that the saleswomen had to do. She unfurled each pair of new pants, stepped inside them, and examined herself in the mirrors.

This was the hard part.

My mom rarely liked clothes once she wore them. The promise she’d seen in each garment on its hanger was dashed once she had buttoned and zipped it onto her body. The hem was revealed to be too long, the waist too wide; the material hugged her too tight. But her language—our language—for what was wrong was never about the clothes. Instead, it was about ourselves. “I’m too short,” she’d say, or, “My arms are too flabby.” And always, always: “My butt is too big.” In other words: The clothes are not flawed. I am.

Read More: Inside the Fight to Take Back the Fitting Room

In addition to all the other tacit work the fashion industry does to define what different body types mean, clothing offers a frank materialization of rightness. Pants are a physical object you can hold in your hands, reminding you that there are parts of your body that literally do not fit. For everything that reveals itself to be too big, or too small, there is the clear indication that somewhere there is a thing that is just right, a body that is in the middle, a body that is correct.

This middle thing is somehow both an ideal and an average, made perfect by not being too much of anything. But what is this middle thing, this normal thing? My mother always said her butt was too big. I often say the same thing. But “too big” compared to what?

“Normal” is an insidious concept—and one that the fashion industry has long tried to define. Bodies are bespoke, yet most clothes made since the 1920s are mass-produced industrial products: when the pants don’t fit, it’s because the proportions of a body don’t match up to the proportions that the clothing companies imagined for it. But the fashion industry isn’t the only entity that has invested in the damaging idea of “normal”—it has long been used by society at large to other and exclude.

Norma’s butt is 29 inches across, from hip bone to hip bone. It’s round and pert and, because it’s made of stone, alarmingly smooth. It is substantial, a handful, but no one would call it big. If it were made of flesh, it would fill out a swimsuit nicely, but I doubt it would elicit a long second look. Norma has the Goldilocks butt, the Goldilocks body. Everything about her, at least according to the people who designed her, is “just right.”

In June 1945, Norma made her first appearance, at an exhibition hall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. On the other end of the hall stood her male counterpart, Normman. The pair were representations of the “typical” reproductive human adult male and female, and were created by gynecologist Robert Latou Dickinson and artist Abram Belskie.

Norma was not voluptuous and she was not skinny. She was strong, robust, and capable of bearing many children—not too sexy, but clearly fertile. As her name suggests, Norma was not, in any real way, exceptional. She was normal.

But just what did that mean? The statue suggests a very specific concept of normal: she was white, heterosexual (Normman steadfastly stood by her at all times in the exhibition hall to reassure us of that), and able-bodied. She was a little dour, offering none of the seduction of classic statuary, and stood perfectly erect, arms by her sides, posed as if in a scientific drawing. She was appealing (as her name suggests) in her normal-ness—and that was the intent.

Norma and Normman were a project of American eugenics, the racial science invented by Francis Galton that had built on the work of Georges Cuvier and other 19th-century thinkers to create and enforce a hierarchy of human bodies. While one strain of eugenicists in the United States was working hard to eliminate the unfit through sterilization, others were busy encouraging the “right” people to have children. Those involved in this branch of eugenics—called positive eugenics—tried to make it as clear as possible which Americans they thought should be procreating.

Standing in the halls of the most famous natural history museum in America, Norma and Normman exemplified to visitors what kinds of adult bodies, and people, were “fit.” The museum displayed them as singular objects, creations meant to codify the aesthetics of normality in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when normal was what many people very much aspired to be.

In the interests of maintaining a “scientific” approach, Belskie and Dickinson relied on data in the creation of Norma and Normman, rather than subjective preference. The specifications for Normman’s creation had been easy enough to come by: during World War I, the military had measured every drafted U.S. serviceman. There also was data from men who had volunteered to be measured at the Chicago World’s Fair, as well as statistics from the early years of the Ivy League posture studies and insurance company physicals. They just had to be added up, divided, and voilà! The average American man.

Norma’s creation, however, proved to be more difficult. Women didn’t serve in the military at the time, and, at first, there seemed to be no large repository of measurements of the female population. But Belskie and Dickinson were living in an age of metrics, a time when it seemed that all things could and must be measured, managed, and known. Surely the female body was of interest to researchers somewhere.

In 1945, they finally found the data set they were looking for. Five years earlier, a group of researchers had measured thousands of American women at the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics, one of the only places where female scientists and statisticians could find a home in the first half of the 20th century. The effort had been led by a chemist named Ruth O’Brien, who worked to find a way to create standard sizes for ready-made clothes.

The study, funded by the Works Progress Administration and lasting for one year, sought to discover the girths, lengths, and heights of the American woman in all her difference. To do so, O’Brien sent government-employed measurers to Illinois, Maryland, Arkansas, New Jersey, North Carolina, and California. In municipalities across the country, “measuring squads,” as she called them, recruited volunteers from local women’s clubs. Each was asked to wear cotton measuring shorts and a not-too-tight-fitting bandeau bra and was invited to step onto a measuring platform, where they were weighed using a government-issued scale. Then, the measurer took 58 additional measurements, including “sitting spread girth,” “anterior crotch length,” and “maximum thigh girth.” The squads brought in 15,000 surveys, but O’Brien ultimately only used 10,000. She discarded the other 5,000 for one of three reasons: there had been a gross error, there were too many young people in the data set, or the volunteers weren’t white. The truth was, O’Brien wasn’t interested in data for all American women; she wanted data from all American-born white women.

Read More: Can Gen X Women Love Their Bodies?

In his article about Norma and Normman, “A Portrait of the American People,” which ran in the museum’s magazine in 1945, Harry L. Shapiro, the curator of physical anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, praised the statues for helping to codify the “White American”—a category of person he feared was in danger of being sullied and diminished through racial mixing. Shapiro, who would go on to be the president of the American Eugenics Society, also emphasized how the average could be an ideal. “Norma and Normman, although they were designed to conform with the average adult before the onset of the ravages of age, exhibit a harmony of proportion that seems far indeed from the usual or the average.” Their averageness was notable and, paradoxically, unique. Shapiro said, “Let us state it this way: the average American figure approaches a kind of perfection of bodily form and proportion; the average is excessively rare.”

When I first read Shapiro’s conflation of the word normal with perfection, I found it to be a bit of a stretch. Perfection, after all, suggests an apex rather than a middle, a singular kind of human who is, in some sense, above all others. The way I’d always understood it, a perfect human woman would be smarter, more beautiful, thinner, and more graceful than the rest. She’d be special, not typical.

And yet, Shapiro’s formulation does make intuitive, if not actual, sense. I had often found my own body to be, in some small sense, abnormal. My large butt, my slightly crossed eye, and my poor performance in any and all sports always felt like defects when, in fact, they were characteristics of mine that were surely quite common. And yet, those characteristics never felt normal, because the notion of normal is not about averages or commonly occurring traits, but instead about an unattainable ideal.

The idea of normal, it seems, always comes with some kind of agenda. In the case of Norma, the minds that collated her measurements were enthusiastic eugenicists, motivated by a desire to effectively eradicate insufficiently white, disabled, and queer people. They were openly attempting to engineer a race of perfectly normal Americans, equating full citizenship with having this decisively average, yet demonstrably unattainable, body. By codifying normal, the Norma boosters were also codifying abnormal, which is always the implicit project of the creation of an ideal.

But if the creation of Norma proves anything, it’s that no body actually is normal. Despite all her rigorous measuring, Ruth O’Brien’s study failed—even after measuring thousands of women and crunching and tabulating all the data, there were too many variables for her to create a meaningful set of recommendations for ready-to-wear clothes. She failed to find the superlative normal that she craved, because creating something singular inevitably separates it from the group. Her project couldn’t work because bodies aren’t standard.

It’s tempting to think that we have outgrown Norma, that we have transcended the pernicious fantasy of an empirical and enforceable “normal.” But the truth is that while the material of normalcy is a moving target, the concept of “the normal” is extraordinarily durable, even if there are no scientists and sculptors openly regulating it. It may not be staring us down in a museum of hygiene, but it is always lurking—in dressing rooms, in magazines, in the endless scroll of Instagram.

Copyright © 2022 by Heather Radke. From the forthcoming book BUTTS: A Backstory by Heather Radke to be published by Avid Reader Press, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen resigned as head of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on Saturday after her strategy to frame local elections as showing defiance to China’s rising bellicosity failed to pay off and win public support.

The elections for mayors, county chiefs and local councillors are ostensibly about domestic issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic and crime, and those elected will not have a direct say on China policy.

But Tsai had recast the election as being more than a local vote, saying the world is watching how Taiwan defends its democracy amid military tensions with China, which claims the island as its territory.

The main opposition party the Kuomintang, or KMT, was leading or claimed victory in 13 of the 21 city mayor and county chief seats up for grabs, including the capital Taipei, compared to the DPP’s five, broadly in line with expectations and similar to the results of the last local elections in 2018.

“The results failed our expectations. We humbly accept the results and accept the Taiwanese people’s decision,” Tsai told reporters at party headquarters as she quit as party head, which she also did after 2018’s poor results.

“It’s not like the DPP has never failed before,” Tsai, who will continue serving as president until 2024, added. “We don’t have time to feel sorry. We fell, but we will stand up again.”

Tsai said she had rejected a resignation offer from Premier Su Tseng-chang, also a senior DPP member, adding she had asked him to stay in office to ensure her policies would be properly implemented.

The Cabinet said Su had agreed to stay due to the need for stability amid the “arduous” domestic and international situation.

China’s response was muted, with the official Xinhua news agency simply noting Tsai’s resignation “to take responsibility for the party’s performance in Taiwan’s local elections”.

Both the DPP and KMT, which traditionally favours close ties with China though strongly denies being pro-Beijing, had concentrated their campaign efforts in wealthy and populous northern Taiwan, especially Taipei, whose mayor from the small Taiwan People’s Party could not run again due to term limits.

The KMT has accused Tsai and the DPP of being overly confrontational with China, and of trying to besmirch the party for being “red” – a reference to the colours of the Chinese Communist Party.

It focused its campaign on criticising the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially after a surge in cases this year.

KMT Chairman Eric Chu celebrated their victory, but said they would also protect Taiwan’s freedoms.

“We will insist on defending the Republic of China and protecting democracy and freedom,” he told reporters, using Taiwan’s official name. “We will also work hard to keep regional peace.”

China carried out war games near Taiwan in August to express anger at a visit to Taipei by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and its military activities have continued, though on a reduced scale.

The election took place a month after the 20th congress of China’s Communist Party, where President Xi Jinping secured an unprecedented third term in office – a point Tsai repeatedly made on the campaign trail.

Focus will now turn to the 2024 presidential and parliament election, which Tsai and the DPP won by a landslide in 2020 on a pledge to stand up to China and defend Taiwan’s freedoms.

Tsai is serving her second term in office and cannot stand again as president because of term limits.

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Ukraine returned 12 compatriots from Russian captivity: eight military and three civilians, one of whom was considered missing.

That’s according to the head of the President’s Office, Andriy Yermak, who broke the news on Telegram, Ukrinform reports.

“Another POW exchange. We managed to free 12 of our people. Among them are four Navy troops, two national guardsmen, border guards, and one is from Territorial Defense. There are also three civilians – a family couple and another man who was considered missing. Among the military are two officers, as well as seven privates and sergeants,” Yermak said.

He noted that among the troops there are defenders of Mariupol, the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and Snake Island. At the same time, the head of the President’s Office recalled that this week 98 Ukrainians were returned from Russian captivity.

“We are working on the release of all our people. We are not stopping. I’m grateful for the efforts of the Coordination Headquarters on POW treatment,” he emphasized.

The post Another 12 Ukrainians Returned From Russian Captivity appeared first on Kyiv Post.

Donald Trump and Kanye West have the same problem: they’re both pretending to run for President in 2024, but the media is usually only willing to help promote one fake campaign at a time. No wonder they’re attacking each other. They’re each screwing up the other’s con.

There’s only honor among thieves until they get in each other’s way. When two thieves find themselves trying to con the same mark, they both know that neither one can succeed unless one of them backs down. They each come up with reasons why the other should be the one to back down in the name of doing the “honorable” thing.

The trouble for Trump and Kanye is that they each, for their own reasons, need this. Kanye is a once-respected musician and businessman who’s already nearly destroyed himself by constantly generating negative attention for himself. He thinks that pretending to run for President in 2024 will at least keep him relevant, and that if he gives that up, he’ll just fade away.

Trump knows he’s about to be indicted on federal criminal charges like espionage, and is pretending to run for President in 2024 so he can raise money from his remaining supporters and keep up his lavish lifestyle in the meantime. Trump can’t stop himself from going to prison. But he can line his pockets for now by pretending he’s going to be a 2024 candidate, and given that New York is targeting his assets even as the Feds are targeting his freedom, he must try to line his pockets for now by pretending he’s going to be a 2024 candidate.

So it’s not difficult to figure out why these two con artists are at an impasse. They’re both pandering to the same far right loons in order to stir up controversy, relevance, and income. They’re both doing it by pretending to run for President in a future election cycle that hasn’t even come close to existing yet. They both need the mainstream media’s complicity to keep their respective cons going, even though the mere presence of both means the media can’t help either of them. They’re each too desperate to back down. And they’re both unstable enough to keep harming themselves in the name of trying to take out the other.

The post The real reason Donald Trump and Kanye West are now trying to destroy each other appeared first on Palmer Report.

Belarus foreign minister Vladimir Makei has died at the age of 64, the state news agency Belta reported on Saturday.

Makei had held his post since 2012.