Maybe this is old news to some, but I hadn’t seen it mentioned here previously. Assuming the parties involved are found guilty, this is about themost appalling abuse of privilege and public trust I’ve heard of in a long while.
Basically, several well-known people, including a television presenter and a former ambassador, are standing trial for dozens of counts of sexual abuse of minors who were plucked from one of Portugal’s “best-known networks of homes for troubled or orphaned children”, probably facilitated by a former head of the state-run homes network. This apparently went on for years if not decades, and the article mentions that there is widespread public suspicion that the government actively tried to cover up the case before it broke.
The mind boggles, words do not express, etc. Save the location, this sounds like something out of Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien’s lunatic (and so far as I know, entirely imaginary) ‘exposé’, Trance Formation of America.
:eek: (repeat once for each count of abuse)