India's Catholic Church has led a chorus of protest over a demand to ban the sacrament of reconciliation from the chairwoman of the National Commission for Women.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke about ongoing threats to religious freedom and what can be done to halt them at a conference held July 30 at the Department of Justice.

In a July 25 ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit agreed with the lower court that the Adorers of the Blood of Christ had not made their religious objections known during the federal administrative process that led to Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approval of the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline.

Farr cited repeated cases in which diplomats ignored or overlooked the importance of faith and religion in dealing with sensitive matters, leading to decades of stumbles in diplomacy.

The church has tried to play a mediating role between Ortega's Sandinista government and protesters who have increasingly demanded his ouster amid demonstrations and clashes in which about 450 people — most of them protesters — have been slain.

For a website with a quantitative bent, FiveThirtyEight is surprisingly willing in this case to use statistics to obscure the truth.