The assassination in Kuala Lumpur of Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of the North Korean dictator, just took a very unusual turn. Malaysian police now say that one of the two alleged assailants was an unwitting dupe who was fooled into thinking she was carrying out a comedic prank. The Guardian reports:

An Indonesian woman arrested for suspected involvement in the killing of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un’s half-brother in Malaysia was duped into thinking she was part of a comedy show prank, Indonesia’s national police chief has said, citing information received from Malaysian authorities.

Tito Karnavian told reporters in Indonesia’s Aceh province that Siti Aisyah, 25, was paid to be involved in pranks.

He said she and another woman performed stunts which involved convincing men to close their eyes and then spraying them with water.

“Such an action was done three or four times and they were given a few dollars for it, and with the last target, Kim Jong-nam, allegedly there were dangerous materials in the sprayer,” Karnavian said. “She was not aware that it was an assassination attempt by alleged foreign agents.”

Aisyah emerges from the story as not only a patsy but a figure of genuine pathos, a single mother who was trying to support her family and got caught up in an international murder plot, likely ordered by an insane despot.

One of the few delights to be found in the Trump era is the way the president constantly humiliates Christie, one of his early Republican supporters. Most of these humiliations seem to revolve around food. A New Yorker article from last June reported a story (which the governor’s office denied) that Trump sent Christie on an errand to pick up Big Macs from McDonald’s. That same month Trump, at a rally, mocked Christie (who was on stage with him) by saying, “You’re not eating Oreos anymore. No more Oreos. For either of us, Chris. Don’t feel bad.”

Now Christie himself has an eyebrow-raising story about dining with Trump at the White House last Tuesday. ‘‘This is what it’s like to be with Trump,’’ Christie said in a radio interview. ‘‘He says, ‘There’s the menu, you guys order whatever you want.’ And then he says, ‘Chris, you and I are going to have the meatloaf.’’’

Trump is a generally joyless figure, but he seems to take genuine pleasure in humbling his fellow politicians. And apparently no one has a greater appetite for being debased than Christie.

Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, a professor at Canada’s Laval University, has claimed to have found the only known film footage of the author, who died in 1922. Blink and you might miss him—a young man in a bowler hat descending the stairs, his head twitching from side to side like a small bird. The footage, from 1904, comes from the wedding of Élaine Greffulhe, daughter of Comtesse Élisabeth Greffulhe, whom Proust immortalized as Oriane de Guermantes in In Search of Lost Time. Proustians are ecstatic at the discovery. William Carter, a Proust biographer, told the Times, “It would be very important that we have this brief image of Proust in motion.” Luc Fraisse, director of the Review of Proustian Studies, told Le Point, “It’s moving to say to ourselves that we are the first to see Proust since his contemporaries ... even if it would be better if he was descending the steps a little less quickly!”

Proust at the time had not begun the monumental work that would establish his place in the literary firmament. A year earlier he had published a translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens, an important step in developing his own writing style, but to the rest of the world he was a “frivolous social snob,” as William Gass once put it. He was a sickening flatterer when it came to the nobility, and his obsequiousness reached full fever in the rarefied company of the Comtesse Grefullhe, “every snob’s highest goal,” as Benjamin Taylor wrote in Proust: The Search. “Beyond Élisabeth Greffulhe there was simply nowhere to climb.” As Proust once gushed to Robert de Montesquiou, later immortalized as the Baron de Charlus, “I have never met such a beautiful woman.”

If the man in this grainy footage is indeed Proust, then what we are seeing isn’t the acknowledged genius famously captured on his deathbed by Man Ray in 1922. This is the ladder-climber, the hanger-on, the courtier, though he possessed a deeply felt ambition that would one day justify the intense superficiality of his existence as a young man. When his head flits to the side, is he seeking a famous face in the crowd? Or is he absorbing the scene and the people, reserving what he sees for his great purpose, part of that mysterious transformation that will elevate all this pettiness into something improbably noble? This could be Proust, yes, in the flesh; but what Proust teaches us is that life is like this footage—unremarkable, disorderly, finished in a flash—and that its essence is regained elsewhere.

GreenvilleOnline.com reports that the fundamentalist Christian college, has finally regained its non-profit status 34 years after losing it:

Bob Jones University lost its tax exemption after a 13-year battle with the IRS over whether the university’s policies against interracial dating precluded it as a non-taxable religious educational institution. The university didn’t admit any black students until 1971, 17 years after Brown vs. Board of Education. It then wouldn’t admit any students who were in a mixed-race marriage and created rules to prohibit students from interracial dating.

Bob Jones, in Greenville, South Carolina, is a niche school. Indeed, you may have only heard of it if you’re from a Christian fundamentalist background or follow that subculture closely. But the story of how Bob Jones lost its non-profit status offers timely insight into the contemporary religious right.

Bob Jones didn’t lose non-profit status overnight. Nor was it an outlier at the time. Although its discriminatory policies preceded desegregation, historian Randall Balmer has noted that it lost its non-profit status due to President Nixon’s crackdown on so-called “segregation academies.” (Among those segregation academies: Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg Christian School.) Bob Jones received numerous warnings from the federal government and ignored each of them, but when the IRS finally rescinded its status the religious right reacted with outrage, as Balmer recounts:

As Elmer L. Rumminger, longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview, the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference” in the affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue that got us all involved.”

Bob Jones ended its ban a mere 17 years ago—right before then-President George W. Bush visited campus. The Lord moves in not-so-mysterious ways.

Although Bob Jones’s ban is history, it left a significant imprimatur on the religious right. Evangelicals still fear secular interference with sacred affairs. It’s embedded deep into the movement’s rhetoric and political priorities. It motivates their opposition to anti-discrimination provisions and their ongoing fear-mongering about the First Amendment rights of Christian schools. Just yesterday, the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Casey Mattox urged the House Judiciary Committee to remove Christian colleges from a public Department of Education list of institutions that have received exemptions from Title IX. And who can forget that 80 percent of white evangelicals just voted for the openly racist Donald Trump?

Bob Jones’s crusade to discriminate still haunts the religious right, even if the movement’s contemporary leaders are unwilling to admit it.

The Associated Press reports that the Trump administration is considering a radical militarization of immigration policy. The plan is to use the National Guard to round up undocumented immigrants in 11 states:

The Trump administration is considering a proposal to mobilize as many as 100,000 National Guard troops to round up unauthorized immigrants, including millions living nowhere near the Mexico border, according to a draft memo obtained by The Associated Press.

The 11-page document calls for the unprecedented militarization of immigration enforcement as far north as Portland, Oregon, and as far east as New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Trump administration immediately and categorically denied these reports. “This is 100 percent not true,” Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters. Notably, Spicer has yet to deny the particulars of the story. Furthermore, the Associated Press has a draft memo authored by Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, and received no answer from the White House or DHS when it requested comment.

What is going on here? It’s possible that this proposal was a trial balloon to test public opinion (reminiscent of a draft executive order rescinding certain LGBT rights in the workplace, which was never signed). It’s also possible that a government staffer leaked this alarming memo to the press to head off the White House, whose supposedly saner cabinet officials, like Kelly, billed themselves as moderating influences on the president. Or, as is always the case with this administration, this draft memo could just be the result of pure incompetence and stupidity.

President Donald Trump’s education secretary talked to Axios on Friday, attempting to do more damage control after her widely panned appearance before the Senate last month, in which she seemed to lack basic knowledge about America’s public education system and said that schools might need guns to fend off “potential grizzlies.” But in her latest comments, DeVos doubled down on that bizarre statement. “It was a valid illustration,” she told Axios. “It just probably wasn’t the best illustration I could have given.”

DeVos said she regretted not firmly agreeing that “K-12 schools receiving federal funding should be required to meet the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act,” but then gave a muddled response on whether the federal government should have a role in schools. “It would be fine with me to have myself worked out of a job,” she said, “but I’m not sure that—I’m not sure that there will be a champion movement in Congress to do that.”

The statement suggested she agrees with many conservatives who favor abolishing the Department of Education. But then DeVos walked it back:

She said that a lot of people are asking that question but that she hasn’t reached a conclusion. “I think in some of the areas around protecting students and ensuring safe environments for them, there is a role to play ... I mean, when we had segregated schools and when we had a time when, you know, girls weren’t allowed to have the same kind of sports teams — I mean, there have been important inflection points for the federal government to get involved.” But are there any remaining issues like that where the federal government should intervene? “I can’t think of any now,” she replied.

Since her confirmation, DeVos has largely limited her media exposure to the cozy confines of the conservative press. Perhaps this interview explains why. After more than a week on the job, she’s still fumbling for coherent answers to basic questions.

In what the New York Times is calling “a remarkable display of activism and defiance,” current employees of the Environmental Protection Agency are calling their senators to urge them to vote against Trump’s controversial choice to lead the agency. Pruitt, who has waged war on the EPA as Oklahoma’s attorney general, is expected to be confirmed later today.

The calls—while unlikely to make much of a difference in the final outcome of Pruitt’s confirmation—are unprecedented, insofar as they represent a looming and public clash between the EPA’s future leader and the people he’s supposed to lead. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University, told the Times.

The internal opposition to Pruitt will likely make for a rocky tenure. “It could get ugly,” Christine Todd Whitman, the former EPA administrator under George W. Bush, told me this week. “EPA career staff have ways of getting information out if they don’t like what the administrator is doing. They have friends on the hill they can go to. They can slow things down. They can make things really uncomfortable.” Whitman said she’s already hearing about more so-called “uncomfortable” acts. “The unions are organizing their members to protest in the street,” she said. (EPA employees held an anti-Pruitt protest in Chicago last week.)

Christopher Sellers, who interviews current and former EPA employees for the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, expressed similar worries. His interviews are currently confidential, but he was able to identify at least one emerging theme. “Clearly the agency is in a stage of high alert right now,” he said. “And frankly, that it is an understatement.”

The president has decided he wants input from the public about media coverage of his administration. To that end, his administration has created an online poll, which any citizen can fill out. As you would expect, the questions are completely neutral, done in the best traditions of scientific attempts to register public opinion.

Here are a few questions:

Do you believe that the mainstream media has reported unfairly on our movement?

Do you believe that the media unfairly reported on President Trump’s executive order temporarily restricting people entering our country from nations compromised by radical Islamic terrorism?

Were you aware that a poll was released revealing that a majority of Americans actually supported President Trump’s temporary restriction executive order?

Do you believe that contrary to what the media says, raising taxes does not create jobs?

Do you believe that the media has been far too quick to spread false stories about our movement?

Do you believe that the media uses slurs rather than facts to attack conservative stances on issues like border control, religious liberties, and ObamaCare?

Do you believe that the media purposely tries to divide Republicans against each other in order to help elect Democrats

Do you believe that our Party should spend more time and resources holding the mainstream media accountable?

With questions like these, we can finally have an impartial discussion of media coverage of Donald Trump.

Late last night, the official @POTUS Twitter account—which is distinct from the account President Trump normally uses, @realDonaldTrump—tweeted the following photo of the president surrounded by a phalanx of hella creepy plastic dolls. It is now nearly 8 a.m. and the internet is still screaming.