Pompeo's stain slur sticks to the US

In an international conference on religious freedom he hosted in Washington from Tuesday to Thursday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again showed how freely his tongue can wag in an effort to portray the United States as a beacon of freedom in a world that he painted as pitch-black.

Alleging that "83 percent of the world's population live in countries where religious freedom is either threatened or denied entirely", the evangelical Christian even helpfully proffered a list of those countries he considers culpable.

Not surprisingly, given his past lambastings of it, China came in for a tongue-lashing with Pompeo asserting it is "home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time".