A day or two ago Russian publisher Novaya Gazeta reported that Russian intel officer Sergei Mikhailov was arrested, dragged out of a meeting with a bag over his head, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reported or passed along that Mikhailov was charged with treason.

It’s also come out that Ruslan Stoyanov, a cybersecurity official with a private firm, was recently arrested on “suspicion of treason.”

Yesterday I tweeted and Facebook-posted a Telegraph story, written by Robert Medick and Robert Verkaik, that said a British asset who may have leaked to Christopher Steele the existence of Donald Trump’s alleged pee-pee blackmail video is now dead, apparently murdered.

Look at the face of PBS News Hour interviewer Jeffrey Brown during this Manchester By The Sea piece, which posted three days ago. He’s really, really fascinated by director-writer Kenneth Lonergan, which seems to indicate that Brown has only recently gotten into the film. Who waits this long to pay attention to a great movie? From my perspective Manchester, which has earned $41 million domestic, is over a year old and by any measure enjoyed its movie-culture peak during the Telluride-Toronto-New York film festival cycle, which was four months ago, and again when it opened last month. And yet two out of three moviegoers will tell you it’s depressing. No — it’s called sad, and the morons refuse to get or accept that. Best description ever, from Boston Globe critic Ty Burr: “A ghost story about a man who’s still alive.”

The psychology behind Donald Trumps’s Muslim immmigration ban “is not just limited to the United States,” Iranian director Asghar Farhadi has said in a statement. “In my country hardliners are the same. For years on both sides of the ocean, groups of hardliners have tried to present to their people unrealistic and fearful images of various nations and cultures in order to turn their differences into disagreements, their disagreements into enmities and their enmities into fears. Instilling fear in the people is an important tool used to justify extremist and fanatic behavior by narrow-minded individuals.

“However, I believe that the similarities among the human beings on this earth and its various lands, and among its cultures and its faiths, far outweigh their differences. I believe that the root cause of many of the hostilities among nations in the world today must be searched for in their reciprocal humiliation carried out in its past and no doubt the current humiliation of other nations are the seeds of tomorrow’s hostilities.

I’ve said over and over since Roman Polanski’s September ’09 Zurich bust and all the other ludicrous harassments that followed that the now 83-year-old director is an Art God who gets a pass, at least from this quarter. The man has been lashed and bruised for over 40 years because of a single selfish incident**, one that he did 70something days in prison for before hightailing it when the presiding judge reneged on a plea deal (the whole sordid saga was recounted in Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired). Samantha Geimer, the victim in the mid ’70s rape case, said two years ago that Polanski “said he did it, he pled guilty, he went to jail…I don’t know what people want from him.”

But there’s no stopping the SJW pitchforkers. When RoPo was recently nominated to serve as president of the 2017 Cesar Awards French feminists (including the webmasters of Osezlefeminisme pushed back strongly enough to cause Polanski to withdraw. In a 1.26.17 Le Figaro interview the 81 year-old Alain Delon said that Polanski should be praised, not trashed. “If I were asked to preside over the Caesars in his place, I would not go, in solidarity with Polanski,” Delon added. “Every time he goes across the street, [are] we going to talk to him about 1970?”

The only problem with Delon’s support, of course, is that he’s a rabid right-winger.

Snowstorms are wonderful and cold weather builds character, but warm weather is really nice to come back to. What a balmy feeling as I emerged from my Las Vegas-to-Burbank Southwest flight and stepped onto the tarmac…the late afternoon sun about to set, inhaling that familiar Los Angeles stink, that soft olfactory caress of healthy flora, soot, car fumes, terra firma and Del Taco dumpsters. It actually became a little cool as the sun went down, but I felt so comforted by the hometown vibe that the first thing I did after dropping my bags was to hop on the bike and just feel the breeze as I wove my way through traffic. I get around, and a lot faster than anyone in a car. I’m Neal Casady, the young Alain Delon, Ray Hicks, Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller…a free man in Paris.

Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil to Hollywood Elsewhere‘s Jeffrey Wells: “CONGRATS to Kevin Polowy for reaping 100% perfect score predicting the PGA awards! CONGRATS also to Tariq Khan, Joyce Eng and Sasha Stone for Best Scores predicting ACE Eddies: 100%. SAG Awards are TONIGHT — Please make sure we’ve got YOUR predix! Competition is FIERCE!”

Wells to O’Neil: What about the Muslim immigration ban protest at LAX? I’m not trying to be an asshole — I really feel that the Muslim protest thing is the only thing that matters now.

Sidenote: On top of which the competition isn’t fierce. SAG’s ensemble award will go to either Moonlight or the surging Hidden Figures. Manchester‘s Casey Affleck will naturally land the Outstanding Male Performance award and La La‘s Emma Stone will take the Outstanding Female Performance honor, Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali will take Best Supporting Male and Fences’ Viola Davis will win the Best Supporting Actress prize.

Maybe O’Neil was referring to “fierce” competition on the TV side.