More skulduggery:

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee was on his way to an event in Washington late Tuesday when the evening’s plans abruptly changed. After taking a brief phone call, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) swapped cars and slipped away from his staff, congressional officials said. He appears to have used that unaccounted-for stretch of time to review classified intelligence files brought to his attention by sources he has said he will not name.

The next morning, Nunes stepped up to a set of microphones in the Capitol complex to declare that he had learned that U.S. spy agencies had “incidentally collected information about U.S. citizens involved in the Trump transition.”

Trump promptly burst into tweets about how right he was when he said Obama wiretapped him.

Last year, Nunes repeatedly skirmished with intelligence leaders over assessments that Russia sought to help Trump win. He has sought to help the White House knock down news stories alleging close ties between Trump associates and the Kremlin. And Nunes has pushed his panel to focus on lines of inquiry — including hunting the sources of damaging news leaks — that seem more favorable to Trump.

Nunes’s latest move came Friday, when he made a flurry of announcements that on the surface signaled promising new investigative paths, including an agreement to hear testimony from Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. But to Democrats, Nunes’s actions again seemed to show the hidden agenda of the White House.

Most immediately, Nunes canceled an open hearing that had been scheduled for Tuesday with former senior officials who have battled Trump. Among them is former acting attorney general Sally Q. Yates, who was fired by Trump; former director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., who publicly disputed Trump’s wiretapping claim; and former CIA director John Brennan, who has said that Trump should “be ashamed of himself” over his behavior toward U.S. spy agencies.

He didn’t postpone it, he canceled it – on his own, without consulting the committee. He’s an ally of Trump’s. You do the math.

Schiff also implied he suspects a White House hand in what he called Nunes’s “dead-of-night excursion” to view classified documents. Several congressional officials said they were told about the phone call and swapped cars by members of Nunes’s staff.

Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, disputed the depiction. “That account is inaccurate,” Langer said. He declined to elaborate.

To review classified files without breaking the law, Nunes would have needed to do so at a secure facility. Congressional officials said that the director of National Intelligence, the FBI and National Security Agency had all indicated that they got no late-night visit from Nunes, a trip that probably would have been entered in security logs.

Nunes has repeatedly refused to say where he went or whether the documents were provided by the White House, including when confronted by committee members during a closed-door meeting on Thursday, officials said.

Is that sleazy and compromised enough yet?

Navalny has been arrested:

Russia’s main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has been arrested at an anti-corruption protest he organised in the capital, Moscow.

Thousands of people joined rallies nationwide, calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev over corruption allegations.

At least 500 other protesters were detained in the capital and across the country.

Most of the marches were illegal, organised without official permission.

It’s lose-lose, isn’t it. If they ask for permission, the answer is no. If they don’t, they get locked up.

Alexei Navalny was detained as he arrived to join the rally in central Moscow. Protesters then tried to prevent a police van from taking him away.

In a tweet after his detention, he urged fellow protesters to continue with the demonstration.

“Guys, I’m fine. No need to fight to get me out. Walk along Tverskaya [Moscow main street]. Our topic of the day is the fight against corruption,” he said (in Russian).

I hope so. I hope we don’t hear tomorrow that he very suddenly and unexpectedly fell off a high place.

Meanwhile in Belarus –

Belarus has defended the mass arrests on Saturday during protests against a tax on those seen as under-employed.

Hundreds were arrested and some beaten up as thousands took to the streets of the capital, Minsk, and other cities.

The foreign ministry said the demonstrations were not peaceful as “petrol bombs and arms-laden cars” were found near the Minsk protest.

How near? A few hundred miles perhaps?

Defending the government, foreign ministry spokesman Dzmitryy Mironchyk said the “actions of law enforcement agencies were completely appropriate” on Saturday.

He said the rallies had been unauthorised, which “bears specific consequence in any country of the world”, and noted that no tear gas or water cannons were used.

Not true about the consequence actually. For instance in the US:

In some cases, government can require a permit as a condition of protest on public property. For example, government often can require a permit for parades in the streets, given the impact on vehicle traffic. Likewise, government often can require a permit for large protests in public parks and plazas, in order to ensure fairness among the various groups seeking to use the site.

On the other hand, the First Amendment generally bars government from requiring a permit when one person or a small group protest in a park, or when a group of any size protest on a public sidewalk in a manner that does not burden pedestrian or vehicle traffic.

There’s a big difference between requiring a permit for disrupting traffic and requiring one for expressing dissent in public. The state can of course claim to be doing the first while really doing the second, but that can backfire.

The authorities are reported to have jailed more than 100 opposition supporters for terms of between three and 15 days in the lead-up to Saturday’s demonstration.

The weekend’s events follow weeks of sporadic protests against a $230 (£185) levy on those unemployed for six months, dubbed a “social parasites” tax.

Isn’t that lovely? Fining people for being unemployed. Nobody tell Trump, he’ll want to do it too.

Time for a feel-good story.

A Brazilian teacher has come up with a unique way to help a schoolgirl who was being bullied because of her hair.

Ana Barbara Ferreira, from Sao Paulo, said her student was “sad” after being ridiculed by a boy, who had said her hair was “ugly”.

“At that moment, the only thing I could tell her was that she was wonderful and shouldn’t care about what he was saying,” she wrote in a Facebook post that went viral.

That would be this post.

That was all she could do at that moment, but the next day she did more.

Fran and Dan Keller are out of prison, after 21 years.

Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.

Hm. Something a bit off there? Wouldn’t that kind of thing be noticed rather quickly? So quickly that no one could actually do all of it? Even if anyone wanted to do all of it, which seems…unlikely

It was frankly unbelievable—except that people, most importantly, a Texas jury, did believe the Kellers had committed at least some of these acts. In 1992, the Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child and each sentenced to 48 years in prison. The investigation into their supposed crimes took slightly more than a year, the trial only six days.

Hm. Seems a bit off. You’d think the weirdness of many of the charges would hint that the others might be unreliable too.

Anyway they’re out now, because the doctor who testified at their trial recanted his testimony.

The Keller case is typical of the satanic ritual abuse panic and the dozens of cases that popped up in breathless media reports. The trouble started when Christy Chaviers, a 3-year-old girl who was an infrequent visitor to the day care during the summer of 1991, told her mother that Dan had spanked her. With coaxing from her mother and her therapist, Donna David-Campbell, whom Christy had been seeing to deal with acting-out issues, an incident of spanking turned into something much worse—Dan Keller, the little girl said, had defecated on her head and raped her with a pen. From there, the stories Christy told David-Campbell became wilder: The Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” they made her smoke a cigarette, they “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” David-Campbell concluded not that Christy was an imaginative child having trouble with her parents’ divorce, but that she was the victim of ritual abuse.

Hm. Doesn’t law enforcement normally recognize that very young children can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality?

The panic began in earnest with the McMartin Preschool trial, an investigation that began 30 years ago. The owners of a California preschool and several teachers were accused of molesting a 2½-year-old boy; before it was over, hundreds of children, usually after lengthy sessions with coercive therapists, came forward to say that they, too, had been taken to a church to watch the beheading of a baby, then forced to drink its blood or flown by plane to random cities for sexual abuse, or countless other bizarre stories.

While that investigation and trial unfolded, other cases surfaced. Media poured attention on the claims, which made great fodder for a newly created 24-hour news cycle (CNN Headline News launched in 1982). As televangelists prayed for deliverance from Satan’s scourge, talk show “experts” claimed that every imaginable form of abuse was happening on a massive scale in America and that networks of Satanists had infiltrated schools, the police, and local government.

Maryam on Facebook:

Facebook
You suspended my account when I was campaigning against the stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in Iran; now you have suspended A Gilani’s account for campaigning against blasphemy laws in Pakistan. Doing the dirty work for Islamist states and organisations? Whilst freethinkers are being killed. Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.

Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.

Via the BBC:

A journalist has been shot dead in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the third to be killed in the country this month.

Miroslava Breach was shot eight times in her car outside her home in the state capital, Chihuahua.

One of her children was in the vehicle but was not hurt.

Not physically hurt.

Mrs Breach had reported on organised crime, drug-trafficking and corruption for a national newspaper, La Jornada, and a regional newspaper, Norte de Juarez.

The gunmen left a note saying: “For being a loud-mouth.”

Thanks for the explanation.

Devin Nunes doesn’t get it.

House Intelligence Committee Democrats said Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized to them Thursday during a closed-door meeting for his handling of revelations about surveillance that potentially could have been collected about President Trump and his associates during the transition period.

Nunes’s apology was “generic,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CNN, adding that it was “not clear” precisely which actions his apology covered.

Nunes came under heavy fire from Democrats on Wednesday after going first to the press, then to the White House, and then to the press again before consulting with committee colleagues about what he said was fresh intelligence about the president and his campaign aides.

That might sound like no big deal until you remember that the committee is investigating the White House and therefore the committee chairman should not be toddling over there to share new information at all, let alone before sharing it with the rest of the committee. Imagine a committee investigating malfeasance at Speedigo Car Corporation. Imagine the committee chair getting new information and immediately dashing off to Detroit to share it with Speedigo, without consulting the rest of the committee. What would that look like? It would look as if the chair had been bought and paid for, that’s what.

On Thursday, Nunes said it was a “judgment call” to personally brief Trump before speaking with his Intelligence Committee colleagues, who are actively investigating allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections and suspected links between Trump aides and the Kremlin.

But Trump is the subject of investigation.

This is just bonkers. This isn’t a government, it’s a madhouse.

Nunes told reporters that the identities of the individuals in the report were “very clear to me,” and that they were members of the Trump team.

That has sparked charges that if anybody is revealing more than they should, it is Nunes — for potentially telling the public that hidden names in surveillance reports referred to the president and his advisers, something that is likely classified information.

Nunes said the information was classified, but he argued that disclosing the existence of the report and the nature of it did not reveal any classified information.

Nunes’s own staff were not aware of the chairman’s decision to go public and brief the president and were dismayed by his actions, said several individuals familiar with the matter.

Because the chair of the investigating committee isn’t supposed to go blabbing to Speedigo.

He can’t get even this right.

A great American, Kurt Cochran, was killed in the London terror attack. My prayers and condolences are with his family and friends.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 23, 2017

Two other people were killed – but they weren’t American, so Donald “the Boor” Trump ignores them.

One was Keith Palmer.

PC Keith Palmer, 48, was stabbed as he tried to stop the attacker in a courtyard outside the Houses of Parliament.

He was an unarmed member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Squad who had served for 15 years.

…

“Keith was a genuinely nice person; nobody had a bad word to say about him. When I heard what had happened I knew it would be him because that’s just the sort of guy he was, to step straight in when others might step back,” said PC James Aitkenhead, who worked alongside Keith in the TSG.

Conservative MP and former colleague James Cleverly tweeted: “A lovely man, a friend. I’m heartbroken.” Mr Cleverly said the two had served together in the Royal Artillery before PC Palmer joined the police.

In an emotional tribute in the Commons, he later described him as a “strong, professional public servant”.

The other was Aysha Frade.

Aysha Frade, who worked at DLD College London, close to Westminster Bridge, also died in the attack.

She was a British national whose mother was Spanish, the Spanish foreign ministry said.

Ms Frade lived in London with her two young daughters and husband, according to Spanish media reports.

Her father was of Cypriot origin, while her mother was from the Galician town of Betanzos, where her two sisters run an English school, the Voz de Galicia reports.

The principal of the independent sixth form college said she worked in the administration team and described her as “a highly regarded and loved” member of staff.

“She will be deeply missed by all of us,” Rachel Borland added.

But Trump, I suppose in the interests of Making America Great Again, didn’t bother to mention them. Somehow I don’t feel greater.