Top story: Did Britain wiretap Trump? Uh, no …

Britain’s GCHQ surveillance agency has made a rare foray into public commentary after becoming part of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wiretapped Donald Trump.

Sean Spicer, seeking to bolster the president’s unsupported allegation, has repeated a claim (made on Fox News, attributed to shadowy people) that Britain carried out the bugging so there were “no American fingerprints on this”.

GCHQ – the electronic spying agency usually not seen or heard from by normal people unless, say, they come knocking to shred your laptop – went public to say the idea is “utterly ridiculous and should be ignored”.

US senate intelligence chiefs on both sides of the political spectrum have also declared there is no evidence Obama listened in on Trump’s calls.

Fate of the union – Nicola Sturgeon is stepping up her row with Theresa May, thundering that the PM has made the breakup of the United Kingdom inevitable. Refusing to allow a referendum before Brexit is “undemocratic” and leaves Scotland no viable choice in the end but independence, says the first minister at Holyrood.

Martin Kettle says we used to think Theresa May was a “safe pair of hands” for the UK but now she might have dropped and broken it. May’s budget headache isn’t going away either – abandoning Philip Hammond over national insurance contributions has been variously condemned by her own MPs as “vengeful”, “very shabby” and “completely unnecessary”.

Amazing escape – Harrowing to watch but undeniably miraculous. A woman has been filmed scrambling free of a vast mudslide as it swept through the outskirts of Lima.

Evangelina Chamorro Díaz, 32, escaped with no serious injuries, but dozens have died in Peru amid havoc caused by days of heavy rain. After her house was hit, she grabbed on to wood and tree branches while being swept along. Cows and pigs belonging to Díaz were also rescued from the muddy torrent.

Deadly strike on Syria mosque – More than 40 people were killed when warplanes bombed a mosque west of Aleppo during worship last night, observers said. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said another 100 people were injured. Israeli jets, meanwhile, have come under fire from pro-Assad forces during a sortie over Syria. Air defence systems shot down an anti-aircraft missile near Jerusalem, said the Israeli Defence Force, in a rare acknowledgment of its clandestine campaign targeting Hezbollah in Syria.

Haddock’s had it – One of Britain’s favourite fish has lots its favourable ecological status. The Marine Conservation Society will no longer classify haddock as “green” if it is caught in three North Sea and west of Scotland fisheries. Iceland and north-east Arctic haddock is still OK. Scottish fishers insist they are on the hook for no good reason – “it’s silly, it’s unhelpful and the public should ignore it”.

Lunchtime read: ‘Terrorists are just people’

“To declare war on terror is to incite more terror.” You may feel that says it all, but counter-terror expert Nicholas Searle has much more to offer about the “doomed prospectus” of meeting terrorism with bullish aggression.

Terrorism stems from ordinary human motivations, Nichola Searle argues. Illustration: Nate Kitch

Searle depicts a teenager, perhaps from a background of disadvantage or oppression, fuelled with hormones and with little going for him, and asks, why wouldn’t he pursue what seems a meaningful path? “A key component if we are to come to terms with this form of terrorism will be to discover, and feel, what it is that compels a young man to give up his life for it.”

Sport



In football, Wayne Rooney has lost his place in Gareth Southgate’s 26-man England squad to face Germany and with it the national captaincy; and José Mourinho has hit out at English fixture scheduling after losing Paul Pogba to a hamstring injury.

Mercedes could lose Lewis Hamilton if they are not careful, warns Damon Hill.

The British cyclist Josh Edmondson has confessed to breaking the sport’s “no needle” rule by self-injecting vitamins while at Team Sky. And in rugby, buoyant England are not yet ready to win the World Cup, warns coach Eddie Jones.

Business

The markets were looking up in Asia and, according to Reuters, “set for their best week since July”. The US dollar continued its downward path after the Federal Reserve indicated this week there was unlikely to be a speeding-up of monetary tightening (ie, not much more in the way of interest rate rises this year).

And this is not strictly business BUT ... Venezuela is combating its economic woes by banning bakers from making brownies.



Overnight the pound was trading at US$1.24 and €1.15.



The papers

The Sun has the story of GCHQ ridiculing the White House’s suggestion that it wiretapped Donald Trump on behalf of Obama.

Guardian front page, 17 March 2017 Photograph: The Guardian

The FT leads on Theresa May dismissing the call for a second Scottish independence referendum saying “now is not the time”. The Telegraph meanwhile says there will be no new referendum for at least six years.

The Mail reports the number of patients having to stay in mixed-sex wards has trebled in just two years – with 8,000 suffering the “humiliation” in 2016.

The Times continues its investigation of online advertising, saying the government is to summon Google to explain why taxpayers’ money is being spent on ads that end up being placed next to extremist material on YouTube. The Mirror has a splash picture of the former Manchester United footballer Gary Neville holding what appears to be a phone while (allegedly) driving his car.



Sign up

If you would like to receive the Guardian Morning Briefing by email every weekday at 7am, sign up here.