Rarely does a film integrate a social and political message within a forceful drama as masterfully as Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem. The impossibility, for a woman, of obtaining a divorce without her husband’s consent in today’s Israel is portrayed with chilling power in a story that follows a case that lasts for five years. It will shock many people to learn that Israel, despite being a secular state, has no civil procedure for marriage and divorce, except when the two people differ in their religious affiliations.

Released in Israel to widespread acclaim and box-office success in September, the film has since been released theatrically in France and Italy. In Britain, despite well-received screenings at the London Film Festival and the U.K. Jewish Film Festival, it missed a distribution window and was instead released in November on DVD. Though it failed to earn an Academy Award nomination, Gett is in the running for Best Foreign Language Film at this year’s Golden Globes.

Its star, Ronit Elkabetz, has been described as “the face of Israeli cinema” by the U.K.’s Jewish Chronicle. She also co-wrote and co-directed this film with her younger brother Shlomi, as well as two earlier features in a trilogy of thematically-related tales, To Take a Wife (2005) and 7 Days (2008). “In the first film,” Ronit explains, “the issue is Viviane’s freedom in the face of her family, in the second film it is her freedom in the face of society, and in the third it is her freedom before the law.” In each film, the French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian plays the role of her husband, Elisha.

Under halacha (Jewish law), a “get” (also spelled gett) is the name for the bill of divorcement that a husband may give to his wife. Any woman who decides to end her marriage and yet has not received a get from her husband is deemed to be an agunah– a chained woman. Even in those countries in which she might obtain a civil divorce, she remains an agunah until she is granted a get.

The consequences are immense. If she remarries under a civil procedure she remains an agunah, and any subsequent children she might have are deemed to be mamzerim (illegitimate).

Once a mamzerim, always a mamzerim. If a person labelled as such, male or female, remains an Orthodox Jew, they may only marry converts or other illegitimates. The stain is passed down from one generation to the next in perpetuity.

It is not only female spouses who may suffer from this process. If a woman refuses to accept a get from her husband, for whatever reason, he has to invoke the Heter Meher Rabbonim, or the permission of 100 rabbis. No woman, though, has access even to that remedy if her husband chooses to withhold a get.

It is the same for all Israeli Jews – the Ashkenhazi and Sephardi, the secular and the religious. “In Israel you have to encounter the rabbinical authorities at three stages: birth, marriage and death,” Ronit says. “A lot of people who are secular do not want to marry in front of rabbinical authorities. Some Israelis go to Cyprus to get married. But in Israel you have to go in front of the rabbinical courts to obtain a get.”

Ronit Elkabetz, who also co-directed the film, as Viviane Amsallem, and Israeli woman who spends five years trying to obtain a divorce. Amit Berlowitz

According to the film’s Paris-based producer, Sandrine Brauer, this is not a phenomenon that is confined to Israel. “Last May in France there was an incident in which a woman who had obtained a divorce in the civil courts wanted to remarry within the orthodox community, so she needed a get,” she explains. “The rabbinical court told her, we might consider your case if you help the community. They blackmailed her for €100,000.”

Ronit Elkabetz gives her character a luminous presence on-screen, but nonetheless Viviane seems to carry her troubles in her facial features. Off-screen, those same features, still without any make-up, seem unrecognisable in their delicacy.

“This was a story of our mother,” Elkabetz explains. “In my childhood I always felt my mother’s very strong will for something better in her life. As a girl this was very important to me. When I got bigger, without knowing it, I felt there was a very heavy weight on her shoulders.

“It was very simply that my mother wanted a better life with her husband, she wanted to be his companion in public. It was a simple demand, but it was very hard for him, even though the request was very light.

“My father gave my mother freedom to do whatever she wanted – she had more freedom than most women had – and on top of that he was religious. But my mother didn’t want to do things on her own, she wanted to share them with him. In spite of being a joyful and independent woman, she would wake up every morning with a heavy burden.

But she never gave up on herself. Thirty years later I woke up and told the story of this woman who seeks her liberty and wants to leave her husband but he won’t let her go.”

Apart from one shot, the entire film takes place within the claustral atmosphere of a rabbinical court building, with its austere, drab decor.

Still, there is not one of the film’s 115 minutes in which the screen is not fraught with tension, sometimes inviting the audience’s disbelief at the absurdity of Viviane’s predicament. Nor is the mood always downbeat: there are moments of absurdist comedy, and at one point even Viviane is impelled to laugh.

Viviane radiates a dignified stillness, remaining silent for much of the film’s duration, dressing in a sombre and modest way and appearing to show respect for the presiding rabbis. In two scenes, though, she unleashes her emotions: first in a display of furious scorn and second in a moment of imploring desperation.

Gett belongs to the well-established cinematic genre of courtroom drama, and therefore its theatricality seems natural, yet resolution comes in a moment of tenderness between the adversaries in a waiting room.

Ronit Elkabetz was born in 1964 in Beersheba, the “capital” of Israel’s Negev desert, to working-class Moroccan parents from Essaouira. Her father was a postal worker and her mother a hairdresser. Later, the family moved to Kiryat Yam, a suburb of Haifa.

As an adult, she was contemplating a career as a fashion designer when she began modelling and appearing in commercials. “I always loved being on set, but I didn’t think I would be an actress. I didn’t learn acting. It all started when I was 24. Someone saw me in a commercial.” When she auditioned for her first film, The Appointed (1990), she thought she was just auditioning for another commercial, not for a leading  role in a film. “My entire life changed completely after that,” she says. In 1997 she moved to study with Ariane Mnouchkine of Le Théâtre du Soleil, and made her first French film, Made in France, soon afterwards.

Yet acting was not enough. She yearned to write and direct, to tell a story. “I like the process of creating a character,” she says. “Until the age of 20 or 21, I would not talk very much, but I was always making up stories and I was convinced they would become films.”

But how did she make the transition from being an actress to co-writing and co-directing with her brother? “Shlomi and I were so close that when I was 18 and he was 10 I already felt that one day we would be working together. In 2000 he was living in New York and I was living in Paris. I called him and said, ‘I’m ready to do something with you.’ The day after that, I took the plane. Another day later I told him, ‘I have three stories about a woman – our mother – and I want to do them with you.’ ”

In Late Marriage (2001), another Israeli film in which she starred, Ronit played not an agunah but a divorced woman who is rejected by the Russian immigrant family of the man who loves her. “Israeli society is very ambivalent about things,” she says. “A lot of things change but there is a lot of conservatism. In the same street in Tel Aviv girls can walk half-naked but if they want to get a divorce they have to seek this remedy through the religious courts.”

Although Ronit expected Gett to have an impact in Israel, the scale of it took her by surprise. “We thought we would let the film have its life and then deal with the politics later, but it was taken up so quickly,” she says. “All the female ministers in the government, including Tipi Livni, the minister of justice, Facebooked about the film. Some think we have won already, with everyone speaking about change. If so, it will be the first time ever that a film has changed something in Israel.”

In some liberal Jewish communities in America and Europe, when a marriage contract is issued there is a clause that says that if a civil court grants the woman a divorce, her husband will not refuse her a get. Perhaps a similar solution could be found in Israel and for Orthodox Jews around the world.

Ronit has been married to an architect for four years and together they have twin sons. She confesses that she is very happily married, but she knows that her freedom is circumscribed by a legal disadvantage: “Any Jewish Israeli woman who says yes to marriage knows that she is becoming a possible agunah.” 

Delphine Meillet, a French lawyer and mother of two whose Jewish family roots in France stretch back to the 16th century, watched the attacks this month in her country with trepidation. But she remained resolute: Meillet says she is never going to leave France.

“All my family are in Israel now,” she says from her small office in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank, just behind the Panthéon. “My father, sister and brother are there. But I am not going. I am Jewish, but I am French first. The identity of a French Jew is like a cake—a slice of each. It’s not a mélange—a mix. It’s an important slice of each that you retain separately: Juif and French.”

France has the largest Jewish community in Europe and the third largest in the world (after Israel and the U.S.), but the community has changed dramatically since World War II. For centuries, France has had a totally assimilated Jewish population, and there are now an estimated 500,000-600,000 Jews in France. Their history stretches back to the Middle Ages. Once the center of Jewish learning, France was the first country to emancipate Jews, during the French revolution. Later, Napoleon liberated Jews from the ghettos and established a “relative” equality.

During World War II, one-quarter of the French Jews were sent to the death camps—sometimes with the collaboration of the French. After the war, around 40,000 Jewish refugees who had been forced from their European homes arrived here seeking a safe haven. In the 1950s and '60s, the rapidly expanding community was joined by North African Jews who were escaping persecution. They made their mark on French society by building more Jewish schools and institutions, and spreading out into suburbs beyond Toulouse, Strasbourg, Nice, Marseilles, Lyon, Paris and other cities. By the time of Algerian independence in 1962, most of the Jewish population had moved to France.

But this proud and long-standing community is now visibly shaken. According to Roger Cukierman, president of the CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France), an umbrella group that represents France’s Jewish organizations, around 10,000-15,000 French Jews are expected to leave for Israel in 2015, to make aliya. More might leave for the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Their fear of rising anti-Semitism and terrorist strikes, Jewish leaders here in France say, is “palpable.”

A general view outside the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher as Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, pays his respect to victims of an attack by armed gunmen on the grocery store. The gunmen, who days prior had killed 12 people outside of a newspaper office, were killed by police after a long stand off.Aurelien Meunier/Getty

In 2014, the Jewish Agency, which is responsible for immigration to Israel, reported that around 6,900 Jews left France for Israel. In 2013, it was around half that figure—3,300 people. Rabbis here are concerned that Jews will abandon France and their rightful cultural heritage, but they are equally concerned about future attacks.

Even before the attack on the Hyper Cacher supermarket outside of Paris on January 9, two days after the massacre at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, anti-Semitism has been a problem. In 2012, an attack in the southwestern city of Toulouse, which has a sizable Jewish population, killed a rabbi and three schoolchildren.

Nine years ago, in January 2006, another incident shook the Jewish community to its core. A group who called themselves “The Barbarians” kidnapped Ilan Halimi, a young French Jew of Moroccan descent, from his workplace.

The Halimi story dominated the French press for weeks. He was held, brutally tortured, and later died from his wounds on the way to hospital. But what was so chilling was the way Halimi was lured to his death by the gang (who used an attractive female Muslim as bait) and the motives and language The Barbarians used—they demanded money for ransom from Halimi’s family, but at the core of the attack was anti-Semitism.

The French prime minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin, declared that the killing was an "odious crime…anti-Semitic, and that anti-Semitism is not acceptable in France.”

“I know from the moment of the Toulouse attack, Jews began thinking of leaving,” says Rabbi Moshe Lewin, the executive director of the Council of European Rabbis, and a special adviser to the Grand Rabbi of France, Haim Korsia. “But many needed to get organized—leaving a country and your roots is a big step.”

Lewin said that French authorities owed the Jewish community explanations about the measures being taken to guarantee its security. “If the means being used are not sufficient, the efforts of the Chief Rabbi to convince French Jews not to leave the country will be in vain,” he warned.

Lewin, who lives in Le Raincy, an eastern Paris suburb that has what he described as “security issues” for Jews, is focused on multi-culturalism. He has been working with a local Imam and a priest to try to reconcile the community after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. On a rainy January morning, the trio rose early and began visiting schools, mosques and synagogues in their area in an attempt to heal the wounds, and soothe the fears.

For many French Jews, who are willing to speak but afraid to give their names or locations, there is a growing sense of resurgence of the fears their parents and grandparents experienced in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“We feel it, we are afraid,” said one 82-year old rabbi living in a northern Paris suburb (because of security, he asked not to be identified, and for his neighborhood not to be named). “I live surrounded by Muslims—Turks, Pakistanis, Algerians, Moroccans. It’s not that they are bad neighbors—at the moment we have good relations. It’s just that we live in a small circle, Jews surrounded. At my synagogue, there were once 1,000 people who attended Shabbat (Friday night) services. Now there are about 25 who come—and they are all the old people.”

“I am afraid. After last week, I am more afraid.”

But his wife, who is 76, says she and her husband emigrated from Algeria in 1962, and made their home here. She insists they will never leave France. “We take precautions. We installed close-circuit TV in the synagogue, but my husband is more afraid than me. My children are here, my grandchildren are here—we are Jews, but we are French first. I won’t leave. I won’t give in and be afraid.”

Rabbi Moshe Lewin says, “Most synagogues have closed circuit TV now for protection. And the French Army is protecting the Jewish schools. But what kind of message does this send? It sends one of fear.”

Cukierman, the head of CRIF, says, “My personal guess is that it is very worrisome for Jews today in France. If you are the parent of a Jewish child, for instance, you have the choice of sending your child to a public school—which is where we all went 20 years ago, but now there are more attacks on Jewish children—or to pay to go to a private one.”

French Police officers cycle down a street as the French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve meets police officers after a visit to a Jewish school in the Jewish quarter of the Marais district on January 12, 2015 in Paris, France. Cazeneuve visited the area to inspect the deployment of thousands of troops and police to bolster security at 'sensitive' sites. Paris is home to an estimated 500,000- 600,000 Jewish people, one of the largest populations outside of Israel.Dan Kitwood/Getty

He says one third of Jewish children in France go to a Christian school.

“Why? If they go to a public school, they get attacked by the Muslim population.”

“If you send your child to a public school, they are at risk. But now, if you send them to a Jewish school, the Army protects them. This is not a very attractive option.”

“I am not leaving, but I think about it, “ says one Parisian doctor who works in the 17th arrondissement around the corner from a Kosher deli. “We hear so many stories of attacks against Jews, jumped on the street for just wearing a kippa,” she says, adding that while she herself has not experienced a personal attack, she hears about it often from the community.

The doctor, whose parents emigrated from Tunisia to France, has just returned from a trip to Jaffa, Israel, with her family where she was looking at apartments. Back in Paris, she sends her youngest son to a Catholic school.

Even though he has to sit through catechism classes, she says: “It’s safer, it’s better than the public schools… Even if we are Jews, I’d rather he sit through the Catholic doctrine than get beat up in a public school.”

In 2013, the Jewish Community Security Service, a joint body that works with France’s main Jewish organizations, compiled crimes against Jews. The figure was 423 incidents. That is up from 82 incidents in 1999.

“The decision to stay or leave is very personal,” says Cukierman from CRIF. “We don’t tell people to leave or to stay. But Jews have been in France for 2,000 years. We have given five Prime Ministers, big writers like Montaigne and Proust. Many Nobel Prize winners and even a Cardinal!”

“How do we get through this dark period?” he asks. “We have to educate people. We are all human beings. We have to live together.”

Delphine Meillet, the lawyer, agrees. “People have to learn to be more tolerant,” she says, adding she is determined not to let fear force her family to abandon a centuries-old identity.

Norman Lebrecht, a writer in London whose family are French Jews who have lived in France since 1727, says of the French-Jewish community, “Peacetime or war, our loyalty to France was absolute.”

Two women drag an emaciated female corpse along the ground, its head bouncing on the dirt. When they reach a large pit, they stop, give the naked body a quick tug backward to pick up momentum, then hurl it into the hole. The corpse, which looks like a skeleton covered in a thin film of skin, flops onto a mound of decomposing bodies.

The scene, shot at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II, might never have been seen by the public had a decommissioned film, boasting Alfred Hitchcock as a supervising director and British film pioneer Sidney Bernstein as producer, not been resurrected. Authorized in the spring of 1945 by the Allied forces, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey captured the monstrous realities found during the liberation of Nazi death camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.

Yet by August of that year, the film was shelved by British authorities. Everything—reels of footage, the script, the cameramen’s notes—was boxed up and buried in the archives of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in London. A new HBO documentary, Night Will Fall (January 26), directed by André Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and Jasper Britton, tells the story of how, 70 years later, this lost film came back to life.

In the spring of 1945, British, American and Soviet troops were headed toward Berlin in the final days of the war. Along with them were soldiers who’d been trained as cameramen—young, brawny men with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and large, boxy cameras hoisted up on their shoulders, who arrived at concentration camps during their liberation to record the harrowing aftermath of the atrocities there.

It took a while for details about the concentration camps to get out. On April 19, 1945, BBC Radio aired a controversial report by Richard Dimbleby about his experience at Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. Initially, the BBC refused to air the report; the broadcaster simply couldn’t believe Dimbleby hadn’t embellished the details. “I found myself in the world of a nightmare,” he said. “Dead bodies, some of them in decay, lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks. On each side of the road were brown wooden huts. There were faces at the windows. The bony, emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside, propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died. And they were dying, every hour and every minute.”

The report was so stunning that, a couple of days later, Bernstein, then a leading film producer and head of film for Britain’s psychological war department, made his way to the camp. What he found there inspired his next endeavor: a full-length documentary that would portray the Nazis’ horrific crimes so vividly it would be impossible to deny they ever took place.

‘The Most Appalling Hell Possible’

After the American and British governments approved his film, Bernstein handpicked a powerhouse team, including editor Stewart McAllistar, writers Richard Crossman and Colin Willis, and a famous movie director, Alfred Hitchcock. They had just three months to complete the documentary from reels and reels of footage captured by those British, American and Russian cameramen.

Night Will Fall shows many of these scenes, and they are rife with unspeakable details: Dead bodies are strewn across plots of land, some in heaps and others lined up like a carpet of human carcasses. When the camera zooms in, we see limbs, as thin as bones, tangled together like pretzels. Skulls cracked open by puncture wounds. Gaunt, hollow eyes and gaping mouths frozen in silent screams. Shoulders, thighs and legs marked by burns, cuts and filth.

We see soldiers slinging the dead over their shoulders as they hurl them into dump trucks. We watch the twins who survived Dr. Josef Mengele’s grotesque human experiments at Auschwitz walk through a narrow corridor of barbed wire. And we look into the eyes of the dead and dying at Dachau, which John Krish, an editor on the film, said “was like looking into the most appalling hell possible.” All the while, German locals stood on the sidelines, bearing witness to a genocide they claimed they didn’t know about.

The images will make you want to look away, but don’t. As Raye Farr, a director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 2003, says in the documentary, “The films shot at Bergen-Belsen by the British cameramen reveal every level of humanity to a much greater extent than any other of the film evidence.”

Helping us make sense of this heart- and gut-wrenching footage are interviews with concentration camp survivors, the soldiers who saved them and the cameramen who were there to record the slaughter.

“You couldn’t tell if they were dead or alive,” Benjamin Ferencz, a sergeant with the U.S. Third Army, recalls in the documentary. “You’d step over a body and it would suddenly wave at you, raise a hand. Total chaos. Dysentery, typhoid, all kinds of diseases in the camp. Putrid. The smell of the camps, the crematorium was still going, the dead bodies piled up like cordwood in front of the crematorium. It’s hard to imagine for a normal human mind. I had peered into hell and that’s—” Ferencz, who later served as chief prosecutor during the Nuremberg Trials, tries to stop himself from crying. “It’s not something you quickly forget.”

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is Hitchcock’s only known documentary feature. Though his tenure on the film lasted just one month, he made lasting contributions, helping to outline the story and emphasizing the importance of showing just how close the concentration camps were to picturesque villages where German civilians lived during the war. He wanted the film to be as believable and irrefutable as possible to ensure that the massacre of 11 million people, including 6 million Jews, would never be forgotten.

In the summer of 1945, plans forGerman Concentration Camps Factual Survey began to unravel. The American government grew impatient with Bernstein’s slow, meticulous process and pulled its footage, hiring its own director, Billy Wilder, to create a shorter film. Wilder’s Death Mills premiered in Wurzberg following an operetta with Lillian Harvey. Of the 500-odd people in the audience at the beginning of the screening, less than 100 were in their seats at the end.

Bernstein’s work had also become a political headache for American and British officials. The consensus was that the film was no longer necessary. “Policy at the moment in Germany is entirely in the direction of encouraging, stimulating and interesting the Germans out of their apathy, and there are people around the Commander-in-Chief who will say ‘No atrocity film,’” read a memo Bernstein received on August 4, 1945, from the British Foreign Office. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was shelved in September 1945, though its footage was key evidence in the trials of Nazi war criminals.

Four years ago, the IWM began restoring and completing Bernstein and Hitchcock’s film, as they had originally envisioned it, including the sixth reel, which was unfinished when the project was shut down. Night Will Fall ends with a scene from the now-completed documentary. A large group of civilians (it’s unclear who) walk through one of the camps, passing by decaying bodies on both sides of the road. As the camera zooms in on the grotesque faces of the dead, the narrator speaks: “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God’s grace, we who live will learn.”

With grace and masterful storytelling, Night Will Fall reveals the carnage the Allied troops found in the concentration camps and reminds us of just how powerful bearing witness can be. The film is a poignant, potent addition to the canon of Holocaust history. As Bernstein said in an interview in 1984, “My instructions were to film everything which would prove one day that this had actually happened. It’d be a lesson to all mankind as well. As to the Germans, for whom the film that we were putting together was designed…it would be the evidence we could show them…. I wanted to prove that they had seen it, so there was evidence, because I guessed rightly, and most people would deny that it happened.”

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnership here.

Answer from Tim Dees, Retired cop and criminal justice professor, Reno Police Department, Reno Municipal Court, and Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribal Police Department.

Certainly, people have a right to expect their police to live exemplary lives, on and off duty. Ideally, police will adhere to a similar high standard by not tolerating misconduct by their colleagues, by reporting it when they come to know of it, and God forbid, not engaging in misconduct themselves. Identifying people who will actually conform to this standard is an extremely difficult task. Humans are morally imperfect creatures, and police agencies have to recruit from that population.

I can't think of any group, occupational or otherwise, that has attained this standard of perfection. Priests, who molested children for generations with the knowledge of their peers, haven't done it. Physicians cover for one another, because they know they're going to screw up sooner or later, and they will want the same benefit.

There are at least three reasons people don't inform on one another. The first is compassion, the "there, but for the grace of God, go I" problem.  Second is the quid pro quo. The potential informer may need the same courtesy some day. The third is the maintenance of your reputation. How one is perceived, within and without his peer group, is usually important. If you inform on a fellow accountant, the worst consequence might be that you have to eat lunch alone. Among cops, informing might mean you don't get the help you need to save your life when you call for it. What proportion of each reason drives an individual depends on the individual.

There is a criminological theory called "labeling." It says that criminal labels usually supersede any others, and thus force the person so labeled into further crime. We all acquire labels in life: high school or college graduate, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, atheist, athlete, Nobel laureate, journeyman carpenter, etc. If you acquire the label of "felon,""sex offender," or "murderer," it generally supplants all the others. It doesn't matter what you might have done before or since, that criminal label is how everyone knows you.

The label of "informer" is almost as bad. We were taught this as children: "Nobody likes a tattletale." We all knew of fellow students who had cheated on tests, had played a nasty prank at school, had been caught sucking face under the stadium bleachers during assembly. With rare exceptions, we kept our mouths shut. If you didn't, your social life at school was likely over with.

Perhaps the best-known police informer of all time is Frank Serpico. He may have been a national hero for revealing a widespread pattern of corruption and graft in the NYPD, but his fellow cops shunned him, and possibly set him up to be killed. He left the force on a medical retirement after being shot in the face. Ten years or so later, Robert Leuci (in the movie Prince of the City, his character was renamed Danny Ciello) did something similar. He didn't get shot or killed, but his name wasn't exactly gold during the rest of his NYPD career. He did better as a novelist and lecturer. Most recently, Adrian Schoolcraft has challenged the status quo at NYPD. His reward was to be taken off the street, forcibly committed to a mental ward for a week, and to be virtually unemployed while his lawsuit against the NYPD makes it way through the courts. I hope very much that he wins and gets huge barrels of money, but I think it's safe to say that his cop days are over. If a cop--especially one at the NYPD--considered informing on another cop, those legacies would certainly influence his decision.

In a perfect world, cops would simply not engage in misconduct, and those who did would not be allowed to hide behind the blue wall of silence (and, without question, it does exist). I'm not sure where to tell you to go to recruit people like this, however. Our military academies are among the most selective institutions in the country, where you have to be very smart, a high academic achiever, an athlete, and a leader in your community, and that's just to get in. About 17% of that elite group fail to graduate. Some don't do well enough academically, some fail as military men and women, and some are thrown out for misconduct, such as honor code violations. This is the only group I know of that mandates informing on one another through the "toleration clause" in their honor code: I will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor will I tolerate anyone who does. They still experience the occasional cheating, rape, or other sex scandal. Further, their graduates easily and gladly leave the honor code behind, and engage in all sorts of misconduct like, well, like everyone else in positions of power and responsibility. I'm not saying that all military officers are bad people, only that they suffer from the same foibles and missteps that every other group does.

I think you should also consider how such a morally perfect cop would behave. He pulls you over for a speeding violation:

"How about a break, officer?"
"Think again, citizen. I am here to enforce the laws, not to excuse those who violate them."

Or, he finds a paper bindle,containing a white powder, that fell out of your pocket:

"Hey, it's just a little blow for personal use."
"You are in possession of a controlled substance that is manufactured and imported into this country by ruthless criminal cartels. Cocaine is addictive and potentially poisonous. Having such a thing in your possession is a serious felony."

If you are willing to cut him zero slack, don't expect him to be too compassionate about your misbehaving.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't aspire to that standard. We should do what we can to encourage cops to follow the rules, and not to tolerate wrongdoing by their peers. This is best achieved through better training, and by ensuring that law enforcement is a desirable job that carries favorable social status and respect. Shouting "HANDS UP! DON'T SHOOT!" at cops as they try to go about their duties, or threatening triple penalties and public shaming for any law violations is not going to do that. Everyone makes mistakes, and if you choose to punish even the smallest violation of work rules with draconian penalties and immediate dismissal with loss of all benefits, you won't get any recruits to make any of those mistakes--or do anything else.

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A man armed with "several pockets full of ammunition" opened fire at a Florida shopping mall on Saturday, injuring his wife and killing another man before fatally shooting himself, police said.

Investigators believe a domestic dispute triggered the shooting just as stores at Melbourne Square mall onFlorida's east coast were preparing to open for the day, said Melbourne police commander Vince Pryce.

Police who responded to the scene after receiving calls about a shooting could still hear gunfire when they arrived, Pryce said at a televised news conference.

Inside by the food court, they found the suspected gunman, Jose Garcia-Rodriguez, 57, of Palm Bay; his wife, Idanerys Garcia-Rodriguez, 33; and an unidentified male victim.

The unidentified man died as a result of the shooting, and the gunman was killed by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Pryce said.

Idanerys Garcia-Rodriguez, who appeared to be the target, was in good condition at a hospital Saturday afternoon, Pryce said.

Pryce said reports that the unidentified man had tried to wrestle the gun away from Jose Garcia-Rodriguezwere unconfirmed. The man's connection to the married couple was being investigated.

About 100 people were inside the mall at the time of the shooting, and police quickly evacuated them and closed the shopping center for the day.

"It was crazy," local resident Donna Evans said in a videotaped interview with the Florida Todaynewspaper. "All of a sudden, you just hear the 'pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'."

Pryce said three handguns were found at the scene, as well as the ammunition Jose Garcia-Rodriguez was carrying.

The mall is expected to reopen on Sunday.

Call this: Revenge of the Suits.

In technology circles, everybody knows startups are da bomb. They’re the disruptors, the innovators, the stuff of investor fantasies. We thank heaven entrepreneurs bless us with their zeal and lead the world into the future.

And what about the large, established tech companies like General Electric, IBM or LG? They’re often perceived like the parents in a Peanuts TV special, with nothing important to say: “Wa-wa wa-wa-wa wa.” They move like Mick Jagger—in his 70s. They’re basically piñatas for the startups to whack.

But in this hyperconnected age, big companies are gaining an interesting new advantage. They have two things startups increasingly hunger for: data and time.  

The data virtue was on display at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which just drew 160,000 attendees to Las Vegas. All around the floor, giants such as LG, Samsung, Sharp and Sony set up booths the size of Downton Abbey to show off their curved 4K TVs and bendable phones. Common to almost all of these crowd-pleasing products are recent breakthroughs in the technology of glass—breakthroughs that came out of Corning, a corporate giant born in 1851.

At Corning’s modest booth, tucked toward the back of the CES floor near an Indian food cart, Senior Vice President Jeffrey Evenson talked about the company’s approach to research and development. Corning invented fiber optics and the Gorilla Glass that covers most of our smartphones, so it already has a great store of data about glass chemical properties and manufacturing processes. But now Corning can arm factories and labs with swarms of networked sensors that constantly generate data about glass-making—data never before captured.

That data is now Corning’s competitive advantage, feeding powerful computers that can model new glass compositions and predict how they’ll perform, so the lab can experiment rapidly. A decade ago, almost all of Corning’s R&D was aimed at 10 or 15 years out. Now, if a customer articulates a problem—like needing radically thinner glass for a TV the thickness of a magazine or a phone that can fold like a wallet—the computer models help Corning respond quickly. “That’s why you’re seeing such fast cycles in TVs,” Evenson said. “We’re doing fast R&D.” The data makes it possible.

That conversation reminded me of one I had months earlier with Michael Idelchik, GE’s vice president of advanced technology programs. GE builds jet engines for most of the airlines. These days, the engines are loaded with sensors that gather a terabyte of data on every flight. The data is getting so detailed, and the computer models of engines so good, GE can understand the different ways jets perform in cities that have different altitudes, pollutants, winds and so on.

The company then uses the computer models to constantly tweak engines and tune them based on the primary routes they fly. If a startup even dreamed of competing in jet engines, it would take decades to catch up to GE’s trove of data and match the sophistication GE can build into the technology.

This same kind of thing is happening throughout industry. In the emerging Internet of Everything, smart companies are turning activity in the physical world into data, and they are turning that data into models that let them understand more and react faster than competitors. The best data wins. And a big retailer, airline, food company or steelmaker has more ways to collect better data than any upstart.

And what about time? Every kind of company has less of a time window than it used to, but startups now have to run like the Road-Runner on meth. A recent research project (which I helped write) looked at one measure of the pace for startups—called Time to Market Cap—and found that the speed at which a startup needs to grow is three times faster than it was just a dozen years ago. Startups have no time to develop deep, complex technology.

Yet society badly needs deep, complex technology. On January 14, IBM unveiled its latest System z mainframe computer, a monster of new technology that took five years to develop. Mainframes might seem dull as wire hangers compared with new stuff like Uber or Slack, but every major bank in the world relies on IBM mainframes, as do thousands of companies from Priceline to Kenya Power.

When competing with young companies, time is on IBM’s side. Established companies “often have essential and very valuable assets such as expertise, intellectual property, supply chain relationships and strong customer loyalty,” says Larry Downes, co-author of Big Bang Disruption. These things, together, buy time. At startups, such assets are rare. Yet because no balance sheet includes a column for time. “It’s very hard in [big] public companies for managers to recognize that’s where the value is,” Downes adds.

In fact, a lot of corporate executives try to make their companies operate more like startups. But it’s usually not a good idea to try to be something you’re not. Corporations can’t compete head-on against the agility and fervor of a small band of believers. They should, instead, embrace their unique advantage.

Nobody is suggesting that big players are going to suddenly steal the show from startups. But over the past 20 or 30 years, the big players have often been on the run, staring down “disruption” from freewheeling small companies. What’s new is that big companies can deploy data and time to make themselves important and relevant in technology. After all these years of hoodies and Birkenstocks, suits are coming back in style.

Out past Pluto, in a galaxy not that far, far away (ours, in fact), may lie two planets larger than Earth. Astrophysicists studying “extreme trans-Neptunian objects” (ETNOs) now believe that a “Planet X” and a “Planet Y” are ripe for discovery, reports Space.com. If proven to be true, it will significantly alter what we currently believe about the solar system.

The research, published this week via two papers in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters journal, was conducted by astronomers at the University of Cambridge and the Complutense University of Madrid. In calculating the orbits of 13 ETNOs around Pluto, whose unique gravitational pull influences orbits of objects beyond Neptune, the scientist came to believe the orbit patterns indicate that another force is also acting upon the ETNOs. Perhaps, they said, it could even be an “icy super-Earth” that is 10 times larger than our Blue Marble.

Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, an astrophysicist at the UCM and co-author of the study, said: "The exact number is uncertain, given that the data that we have is limited, but our calculations suggest that there are at least two planets, and probably more, within the confines of our solar system.”

This discovery could very well change the face of astronomy as we know it, as the data contradicts our contemporary solar models, which don’t account for planets past Neptune. But the paper’s authors were careful to mention that their research was conducted on only a handful of space bodies, and said they expect to examine a larger area in the coming months.

Critics of the discovery have also commented on the data’s small sample size, as well as a lack of concrete observations of the theoretical new planets, X and Y. So while there may be more planets out there, the data isn’t there to fully support such claims just yet. 

At least five people were killed on Saturday in protests in Niger against Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, authorities said, bringing the death toll from two days of violence in the country to 10.

Police fired tear gas at crowds of stone-throwing Muslim youths who set fire to churches and looted shops in the capital Niamey after authorities banned a meeting called by local Islamic leaders. A police station was attacked and at least two police cars burned.

"They offended our Prophet Muhammad, that's what we didn't like," said Amadou Abdoul Ouahab, who took part in the demonstrations.

President Mahamadou Issoufou said all five of the dead were civilians, with four of them killed inside burned churches or bars. He said an enquiry would be opened and those responsible for organising the violence would be punished.

"Those who pillage religious sites and profane them, those who persecute and kill their Christian compatriots or foreigners who live on our soil, have understood nothing of Islam," he said in a televised address.

The president added, however, that he shared the disgust of Muslims who felt offended by the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and that freedom of expression should not mean liberty to insult religious beliefs.

Issoufou joined a march in Paris last weekend alongside French president Francois Hollande, in the wake of a gun attack that killed 12 people at the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which had angered many Muslims by printing cartoons of Muhammad in the past.

But Issoufou said on Saturday he had wanted to demonstrate his opposition to terrorism and not support for the newspaper itself.

Calm returned to the streets of Niamey on Saturday afternoon but a demonstration called for on Sunday by opposition groups could revive the tension. Authorities on Saturday banned the march but opposition leaders said they would proceed anyway.

Demonstrations were also reported in regional towns, including Maradi, 600 km (375 miles) east of Niamey, where two churches were burned. Another church and a residence of the foreign minister were burned in the eastern town of Goure.

Niger's 17 million people are almost all Muslims, though its government remains secular.

With the influence of moderate Sufi brotherhoods, Niger has avoided the armed Islamist uprisings that have shaken neighbouring Nigeria and Mali, but there have been growing protests by hardline Muslim associations over social issues.

The attack by two gunmen on Charlie Hebdo's offices in Paris sparked massive demand for the next issue of the weekly, which put an image of the Prophet on its front page to mark the bloodbath.

That again outraged many in the Muslim world, triggering violent demonstrations in Algeria, Niger and Pakistan on Friday.

French foreign minister Laurent Fabius condemned the violence in Niger, a former French colony in West Africa where it stations troops as part of a regional counter-terrorism operation. "France expresses its solidarity with the authorities in Niger," he said.

Four Muslim preachers who had convened the meeting in Niamey were arrested, police sources said. The French embassy warned its citizens not to go out on the streets.

The death toll from Friday's clashes in Niger's second largest city of Zinder rose to five after emergency services discovered a burned body inside a Catholic Church.

Residents said churches were burned, Christian homes looted and the French cultural centre attacked. A police officer and three civilians had already been confirmed killed in the demonstrations, police sources said.

Peaceful marches took place after Friday prayers in the capitals of other West African countries, Mali, Senegal and Mauritania, and in Algeria in North Africa, all former French colonies. In Algiers, several police were injured in clashes with protesters.

The recent early morning clash between a Saudi border patrol and extremists trying to enter Saudi Arabia from Iraq appears to be the latest indicator of the Islamic State’s (ISIS) intent to expand its influence and control from its stronghold in Syria and Iraq south into Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the rest of the Arab Gulf where there is oil and what ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his followers would consider the ultimate prizes: the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The armed engagement dovetails with al-Baghdadi’s call for increased attacks inside the Saudi Kingdom. It is likely he realizes that no one can claim to be the Islamic State without controlling the holy sites in and around Mecca and Medina and the wealth that comes with them.

In recent months, al-Baghdadi has issued calls for attacks inside Saudi Arabia. Violence against Shia residents in the Eastern Province town of al-Awamiya in Saudi Arabia confirms that Sunni extremists in this area have heard al-Baghdadi’s message. The Eastern Province is home to the majority of Saudi Shia and most of the Saudi Kingdom’s oil.

Kuwait and the other Gulf states, particularly Bahrain, also have large Shia populations, which are prime targets for ISIS to attack. The enmity between Sunnis and Shia in these areas is likely to draw more radically inclined Sunnis to al-Baghdadi’s virulent form of Islam.

The governments in the Gulf may have a hard time maintaining control if they cannot tamp down these sectarian tensions and instill solidarity within their borders—something that so far has eluded both the Saudis and Bahrainis.

The more time ISIS has to build, establish itself and govern, the harder it will be to dislodge its troops from the region and its ideology from the minds of the people, especially the young. The conflict has hardened the minds of people in Syria and Iraq and these radicalized attitudes will likely spread with the passage of time.

The geography of the region already has been reshaped, perhaps forever, by the conflict. But the trust between communities that has been lost could be regained—given enough time and effective leadership now.

To help re-instill trust throughout the region and to protect its allies from the instability, the United States, NATO and others should consider providing significant equipment and know-how to shore up the border defenses of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and others. Although the Saudis and other governments in the region have much to do to bolster the sense of loyalty and community among their citizens, both Sunni and Shia, a show of overwhelming military strength and solidarity within the region might be enough to deter further outside aggression.

Muslim pilgrims gather around the door of the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque on the first day of Eid al-Adha in the holy city of Mecca October 4, 2014.Muhammad Hamed/Reuters

Short of direct, on-the-ground military involvement by the United States and NATO, a more intensive bombing campaign against strategic Islamic State military and infrastructure targets in Syria, particularly in and around its capital Raqqa, and Western Iraq would help degrade al-Baghdadi’s operational planning and ability to govern. This would go a long way toward taming the Islamic State’s ambitions and perhaps force it to surrender some of the territory it has taken over the past year.

The current U.S. plan to focus on training more capable units within the Iraqi Armed Forces over the next two years, however, is likely to be inadequate by itself—too little too late to contain and push back the gains made by the Islamic State.

The faster the Muslim world can be shown that ISIS is not invincible and does not have a divine mandate to rule the Islamic world, the quicker young Muslims and others will stop listening to its messaging.

Al-Baghdadi’s messages have resonated with Sunnis in the region, North Africa, Europe and the United States primarily because he appears successful. He looks powerful. No amount of warning or counterargument will suffice if he continues to take and hold territory.

As he suffers repeated defeats and is unable to govern, however, it will be clear to his audiences that his path is misguided and that they would do better following a different one.

William Young is a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan Rand Corporation.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is planning to lead one of the first trade missions to Cuba since the Obama administration loosened travel and trade restrictions on the Communist-ruled Caribbean island, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Quoting a person familiar with his plans, the paper said the Democratic governor, who will be among the first high-profile U.S. politicians to visit Cuba since last month's policy shift, would announce his plan on Wednesday and take the trip in coming months. It gave no further details.

Cuomo's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The report came as Vermont Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy set off on the first congressional mission to Cuba following President Barack Obama's announcement on Dec. 17 that Washington would start normalizing ties with its old Cold War foe.

Leahy is heading a group of four Democratic senators and two Democratic representatives, all of whom have visited Cuba in the past and who strongly support Obama's policy, a statement from his office said. Their three-day trip aims to get an idea from Cuban government officials how they see they normalization process, and convey a sense of what Americans expect.

Separately, the United States and Cuba are holding high-level talks in Havana next week on normalizing ties.

A package of new rules came into effect on Friday implementing Obama's policy shift by opening up the island to expanded U.S. travel, trade and financial activities.

The U.S. embargo on Cuba, in place for 54 years, remains in place, however, as only the U.S. Congresscan lift it.

While Cuban President Raul Castro has welcomed last month's deal, he has made clear that Havana does not intend to abandon single-party rule or the state-controlled economy. Congressional critics of Obama's shift say that Washington should not be rewarding Cuba.

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, is a very lucky man. If it hadn't been for the appalling events in Paris last week, he would still be all over the front pages.

Perhaps you've already forgotten why. It's because of a lawsuit brought in Florida by a woman who alleges that she was forced to have sex with him while she was still, under Florida law, a minor. (She was 17 at the time of the alleged encounters -- in Florida, the age of consent is set at 18. In the U.K., it's 16.)

The woman claims that she was ordered to have sex with him by the financier Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender who was at the time a friend of the prince's. (Epstein served 13 months of an 18-month jail sentence for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.)

It is important to note that Buckingham Palace has emphatically denied that Prince Andrew had any sexual contact with the woman who filed the lawsuit, and says her claims are "without any foundation." It remains to be seen whether the claims, and the prince's denials, will ever be tested in a court of law.

Does it matter? Well, for a start, we have learned over the past couple of years not to dismiss out of hand allegations of the sexual abuse of minors. They need to be taken seriously, and they need to be investigated.

We also need to recognize that members of the royal family are not above the law. As the Times pointed out in a notably unfriendly editorial, King Juan Carlos of Spain abdicated last year amid serious allegations against members of his family, and his daughter could face trial for fraud. (Juan Carlos is now also facing a paternity suit in the Spanish supreme court.) "No royal family," thundered The Thunderer, "is indispensable, or permanent." Windsors, watch out.

As it happens, I don't think Prince Andrew is a serious threat to the survival of the House of Windsor. Even as the queen's second son, he's pretty low down the succession pecking order, below Charles, William, the infant Prince George and Harry. And after all, our history is littered with princes behaving badly.

The real threat to the family firm is Andrew's big brother. To put it bluntly, it seems that Charles has no intention of shutting up even after he is enthroned. Admittedly, that may not be any time soon. The queen, now age 88, is still in apparently excellent health and well on the way to exceeding Queen Victoria's record as Britain's longest-reigning monarch. And her mother, you'll remember, made it to 101.

For Charles to sound off about his various pet obsessions (architecture, education, farming, alternative medicine) might be just about OK as long as he's a mere prince of Wales, but it'll be very different once he's king. We've grown to like our monarchs as the Victorians liked their children: seen, but not heard. If they're going to be figureheads, symbols of unity not division, the less they say, the better. "Have you been here long?" and "Isn't that lovely?" have served the queen perfectly well for more than 60 years.

(I'm told, by the way, that she's a great deal more outspoken in private -- but everyone who meets her seems to take a voluntary vow of perpetual silence. I've never understood why.)

Charles, it seems, has different ideas. A report in The Guardian a couple of months ago quoted unidentified sources close to him as saying he intends to reshape the monarch’s role when he becomes king and to make “heartfelt interventions” in national life. He is, said the sources, "set to continue to express concerns and ask questions about issues that matter to him…."

This does not bode well. We know he's already in the habit of sending lengthy handwritten notes to various government ministers, drawing their attention to whatever is uppermost in his mind. I fail to understand why ministers consider that they need to reply in any detail: I would have thought, "The minister thanks you for your comments, which have been noted," would do perfectly well. But that's not Whitehall's way, apparently.

Unless Charles learns to bite his lip, he's going to find himself -- and the monarchy -- in trouble. It's already possible that the queen will find herself in a tricky position after the next election, if it doesn't provide a nice clear result.

What should she do, for example, if the party that wins the most seats isn't the one that wins the most votes? Whom should she invite to form a new government: the leader of the party with the most votes, or the one with the most seats? If it were Charles in her place, he might be tempted to suggest that he take over instead.

By happy coincidence, a play currently showing in London's West End ("King Charles III" by Mike Bartlett) imagines what might happen if Charles does indeed carry out his threat to become an activist monarch. Written in Shakespearian blank verse, the play has Charles refusing to sign an act of parliament with which he disagrees, because he fears that unless he makes a stand, he would "possess not mouth nor tongue nor brain, instead I am an empty vessel, waiting for instruction, soulless and uncorporate."

The play builds to a thrilling climax, when William and an unexpectedly forceful Kate compel Charles to abdicate in their favour. It's dramatic licence, of course...

From 1989 to 2012, Robin Lustig presented Newshour on BBC World Service and The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4. His award-winning blog can be read here.

The truth is out there: On Saturday, two Fox TV executives confirmed that the network is in early conversations about ramping up the cult science fiction series The X-Files, which was a smash hit during its nine-year run between 1993 and 2002. Entertainment Weekly reports that Dana Walden and Gary Newman, Fox TV Group co-chairs and CEOs, have been chatting with Chris Carter, the brains behind the series. Carter had hinted last summer that a reboot was not outside the realm of possibility, according to Deadline.

Walden was careful to say that the talks thus far have been “logistical” in nature, as the program’s return hinges on whether its two stars, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, would be willing and available to pick it up again. Newman said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he was “hopeful” the fledgling plans would work out.

Anderson, who played skeptic Agent Dana Scully on The X-Files, is currently starring in Netflix and BBC’s crime drama The Fall. She also has a pivotal recurring role as Hannibal Lecter’s psychiatrist in NBC’s Hannibal, and has picked up several other projects in addition to writing a science fiction series of her own. Duchovny, whose role as Agent Fox “Spooky” Mulder inspired extraterrestrial believers across the globe, is kicking off a new show on NBC this spring titled Aquarius, about the Charles Manson murders in 1969 Los Angeles.

While the X-Files talks are in the very early stages, perhaps the negotiators will be inspired by the recent resurgence of another cult ’90s series, Twin Peaks, which was recently picked up by Showtime for a third season in 2016, 25 years after its 1991 cancellation. But regardless of whether X-Files will end up returning, we want to believe. 

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is headed over to Riyadh soon to deliver a keynote address at Saudi Arabia’s eighth annual Global Competitiveness Forum. Schmidt headlines a list of 50 speakers from 22 countries appearing at the Four Seasons Hotel January 25-27. According to the event’s website, they are scheduled to discuss global and regional trends in governmental competitiveness and developing a world-class infrastructure in Saudi Arabia — a notorious cradle of online freedom and tolerance.

Kidding.

It’s not unusual for American businessmen to fly over and shake hands with America’s closest Arab ally. But the spectacle of the chief executive of America’s largest Internet search engine promoting his business inside a country where online freedom of expression brings down public lashings, terrorism court and jail time –- if not much worse -- is slightly surreal. 

The timing of the event is especially awkward, as Saudi authorities have been carrying out the court-ordered public lashing of a young human rights activist. Raif Badawi’s crime was setting up a website and criticizing the national religious leadership online. Translations indicate he had been writing in support of secularism.

In 2012, Saudi authorities arrested and charged Badawi, who turned 31 last week, with “insulting Islam through electronic channels” and “setting up a website that undermines general security.” He was also convicted of apostasy, which carries a sentence of death, but that was overturned. 

Badawi was scheduled to be lashed 50 times every Friday for 20 weeks, in a public square outside a mosque in Jeddah. After the first lashing session, a week ago Friday, yesterday’s punishment was canceled “for medical reasons.” The lashing had attracted global condemnation and a rare thumbs-down signal from the U.S. State Department, whose spokeswoman urged Saudi authorities to “cancel this brutal punishment.”  

The U.N. and human rights groups have also followed and condemned the Badawi case, but his is only the most high profile of ongoing crackdowns on young dissenters. On Christmas Day, while the Western world’s attention was diverted, Saudi judges tossed two young women who had defied the ban on female driving into a special “terrorism court.” 

Loujain al-Hathloul, 25, and Maysa al-Amoudi, 33, had already been in jail for a month, longer than any women arrested for violating the ban. They are not being charged for defying the driving ban but for voicing opinions online. When they were arrested, the women had a combined Twitter following of more than 355,000 and had been actively promoting a campaign opposing the ban on women driving.

The terrorism court was created to try terrorism cases but, according to The Guardian, which reported on the women’s case last week, it has also been used to try peaceful dissidents and activists. 

Mr. Schmidt has been to the Kingdom before. During a 2010 visit, he was quoted as saying he was optimistic about the Internet and communications in Saudi Arabia. 

Setting up websites, voicing opinions online: Precisely the  activities Google and its algorithms implicitly support.
 
Saudi Arabia welcomes Google, but the government routinely blocks individual sites. Outside Saudi Arabia, you can still search for the various amateur Youtube videos posted last week of Badawi silently being thwacked with what appears to be a thin stick before a clapping, whistling crowd of several hundred people shouting Allahu Akbar.

Google corporate communications officers did not respond to emails Saturday inquiring whether Schmidt planned to mention the human rights issues during his visit. 

“I would say Mr Schmidthas a clear moral obligation to feature the plight of Raif Badawi and other Saudi bloggers and call on Saudi authorities to release him unconditionally and without delay,” said Joe Stork, head of the Middle East North Africa office of Human Rights Watch. “He should make the same point in any private meetings he has with Saudi officials.”

Nina Burleigh is Newsweek's National Politics correspondent. 

Behold the bladderwort. These plucky little plants — 200-plus species strong — are found worldwide, live in moist soil or within lakes, streams and wetlands, and have pretty flowers that resemble orchids, at least to an untrained eye like mine. They also possess a hidden superpower: tiny underwater traps that can catch anything from a microscopic worm to a small minnow in a fraction of a second.  

The traps of these carnivorous plants are set off when an animal comes by, tripping sensitive hair cells that trigger an influx of water — along with the plant’s new meal.

Until recently it was thought that the bladderwort feasted almost entirely on animal prey, as the label “carnivorous” implies. But new research shows that some of these plants, and other so-called carnivores, are actually primarily vegetarians.

In a study published in the Annals of Botany, Marianne Koller-Peroutka, Wolfram Adlassnig and others from the University of Vienna showed that three species of Utricularia (the genus, or taxonomic grouping above species, that comprises bladderworts) mostly eat algae and other non-animal matter.

The team analyzed the contents of these plants’ little traps, and then measured how well the plants were growing, as quantified by the number of branches they contained. They found that the more vegetable matter a plant caught, the larger it grew. In one species, 90 percent of the trapped material was made up of algae and pollen, the pair wrote in an email.

“Thus, to the great satisfaction of any biologist, the bladderwort has evolved not to waste energy and resources but to utilize any source of nutrients,” they noted.

This adds to recent work showing that a type of carnivorous pitcher plant (Nepenthes ampullaria) uses “its cone-shaped trap leaves to collect dead leaves falling from the canopy instead of trapping animals,” they wrote. And another species, called a butterwort, has sticky leaves that, besides ensnaring unsuspecting insect visitors, also collects and digests pollen, and uses this flower power to increase it’s own blossom production.

Quora Questions are part of a partnership between Newsweek and Quora, through which we'll be posting relevant and interesting answers from Quora contributors throughout the week. Read more about the partnership here.

Answer from Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor and forgiveness advocate.

That's an interesting question. When I was tattooed at Auschwitz, I was stunned. But it was a day when I had lost my whole family. I had lost everything I knew up to that point. I thought at the time, If there is hell on Earth, this is probably it. The tattooing was at the end of our first day at Auschwitz. I was the second to last person in our group of 26 people to get a tattoo. My twin sister Miriam was the last. I noticed what was happening to the other twins when they got their tattoos, and I decided I was going to fight. I was not going to let them touch me. I didn't really know how much it would hurt, but it wasn't the tattoo that bothered me as much as my thought, What right do they have to do anything to me physically? And maybe it was my only way to make a stand against what had been happening to me all day long.
 
When it was my turn, I began to really carry on. I don't know how I had the chutzpah. I don't really understand it. I just thought, I am going to have to take a stand. There were four people trying to pin me down on a bench because I started screaming, kicking, and even punching people who started to come close to me. You might say I went berserk, but I did it on purpose to stand up against what was happening to me. The women were holding me down by my head and legs and arms and one of the Nazis grabbed my arm. The only thing I could do was bite. I don't even know how I managed to do that because they tried to keep me flat. But I snapped up and bit his arm. I vaguely remember deciding to do that, but I don't actually rememberdoing it. From the way I was raised, to bite someone was so crude that I had to block it out of my mind to preserve who I thought I was. I only remembered it when Miriam reminded me in 1985. She said, “Not only did you create a general confusion, but nobody knew what to do when you bit the Nazi holding your arm.” Miriam remembered it better than I did.
 
As I am thinking back on it now, something is clear in my mind: When I decided to give them trouble, I thought I needed an excuse to misbehave. I was going to be a nice girl. I was not going to misbehave, even in that crazy place. So I said, "I will let you do to me whatever you want to, but I won't let you touch me unless you bring my mother here." I knew as I was saying that at age ten that there was not a prayer in the world I would see my mother. The way we were ripped apart earlier in the day, it did not seem like we were going to be reunited. (See my answer to this question: What was it like to be a Jewish prisoner traveling in 'cattle cars' to Nazi concentration camps?) But it is amazing to me that even under those circumstances, I felt I needed some good excuse to act the way I did. Carrying on like I did – that did not seem proper to me. Now I think, How on Earth could you expect to be proper in Auschwitz? I often tell people, I was raised to be a nice girl, and we all know nice girls don't bite. That idea did not fit into my idea of being a nice girl, so I had to block it out of my mind. I must have been raised to be a very nice girl. Whatever we learn as little children, it stays with us forever. (That is why early childhood is so important.)
 
The actual tattooing was very, very painful from what I remember. They heated a pen-like gadget with a long needle over the flame of a lamp, which I watched before it happened to me. When it got hot, they dipped it into ink, and burned into my left arm, dot by dot, the capital letter “A,” followed by a dash, then the numbers 7-0-6-3. “A-7063” became my number, which was never clear on my skin. Some people think it has faded or become blurry over time, but it always looked like this:
 

I am trying desperately to remember how Miriam's number looked, because I only became interested in the tattooing process and results after she died. Unfortunately, I never took a picture of her tattoo. I wanted to see if all of this lady's tattooing was unclear or if it was only mine.
 
Three weeks after they tattooed me, they came back to repair it because you couldn’t read it at all. I wasn't any more cooperative. All it created was a few more holes in my skin and a few more screams, but that was the only way I could stand up for myself and I felt justified in doing it. Many survivors, when they read my account, they say there is no way anyone could get away with biting a Nazi. That was probably true. But I was not a regular prisoner - I was a "Mengele Twin.” As long as Mengele wanted us alive, no one dared harm us. (See my answer to this question: What was Josef Mengele like as a person?)

People ask me, “Did you ever consider getting it removed?” Never. That thought has never entered my mind. I was always proud of my tattoo. I have never covered it except for one time. The only time was in 1984 when I was in Vienna, flying to Auschwitz, because then I was scared that there might be too many Nazis around and they would see my tattoo and harm me. I never covered it any other time. When people asked, I unemotionally told them I was in Auschwitz and they put a tattoo on my arm. Some people still ask me today if I would remove it, and my answer is always the same: By removing my tattoo, will that remove all the tragedy that happened to me? Unfortunately the answer is no. So why should I submit myself to additional pain just so I do not have to see that tattoo? It is kind of like my badge of courage. I actually like looking at it, even though it's not very clear. That's okay - I know why it's not clear.
 
Some people ask me what I think of young people getting tattoos today. Personally, I am very much against mutilating your beautiful skin with tattoos. You have beautiful skin - why inject ink into it? I do not understand the fad. Someone said, “I do it because I want to be unique.” Well you have a weird tattoo, but that doesn't make you unique. Uniqueness does not come from external things that people do to themselves or other things like what they wear. So you like designer clothes. Well that’s all right, there is no harm in it I guess. But it doesn't make you unique inside. All the uniqueness that radiates to the world comes from how you deal with the world, your best inner strengths. It never comes from a tattoo or a designer outfit. There is no merit or value to that. What’s on your skin doesn't change who you are inside. And isn't it who we are inside that really matters?
 
Sometimes I tell young people, “What if I offered you a trade: I will give you the most expensive diamond in the world, and in return you have to give me your mind, your heart, and your soul?” Unfortunately, many will still take the diamond. I tell them the diamond shining inside me, you cannot buy at any price because I feel good about who I am, what I do, how I try to treat other people, and what I teach.
 
Many young people are confused, trying to figure out how they fit into this big mixed-up world. I want them to do something that makes them feel proud of themselves. Do something that gives you inner strength. Every single person can become someone worthwhile, and you don't have to have a lot of money to do it. You can start reading more, for example. That opens you up to a whole world of knowledge and ideas, and that builds your best characteristics. Or you can learn to help people, even in small ways. Or if you have a bad habit, start working on your bad habit to solve it and get rid of it. That builds strength of character. Just like I said in one of my other answers (What gives you hope during tough times?) - once you win one battle, you can build on that and become a stronger person.

What do Holocaust survivors think of their tattoos?: originally appeared on Quora: The best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and

Two weeks before Christmas, in a serene Pacific inlet north of San Francisco, a small mountain of fresh oysters sat rotting in the rain. Kevin Lunny, the owner of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, watched a yellow mini-dozer chug back from the waterfront, tip its shovel and, in a great clattering of shells, dump hundreds more onto the heap.

After seven years of political and legal battles that have grown into one of the ugliest environmental fights in the country, this was the end of the line for Lunny’s oyster farm. "It's been a terrible time," said Lunny, who still lives on the nearby cattle ranch where he grew up and where his grandfather started a dairy farm in 1947. The forced closure of the oyster company marks the end, after almost 80 years, of modern shellfish farming in Drakes Estero, the tidal estuary that lies at the center of the dispute.

In 1935, an oyster farm was established in the estuary’s innermost harbor, run for a few decades by a rotating crop of shellfish farmers, and from 1961 on it was called the Johnson Oyster Company. The estero was a generous sea garden, eventually becoming a source of about 500,000 pounds of oyster meat a year, all grown with nothing more than seawater and sunshine. “It was a resource for a lot of people," Lunny said.

But Drakes Estero is also an environmental sanctuary. It's home to one of the state's largest harbor seal colonies and significant numbers of shorebirds, and is prized by naturalists as the ecological heart of the Point Reyes National Seashore, public land managed by the National Park Service. In November 1972, the Johnson family sold their five acres of shoreline to the federal government for $79,200 and signed a 40-year lease that permitted a narrow range of business options, such as “the interpretation of oyster cultivation to the visiting public,” and was renewable as long as any future permit was “in accordance with National Park Service Regulations in effect at the time the reservation expires.” In 2005, Johnson sold that permit to Lunny, who cleaned up and rebranded the old farm and dubbed it the Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

Shutting down the farm this winter was a harsh blow for Lunny and his employees, some of whom worked here for over 25 years, but a critical victory for environmental lobbying groups. For the past few years, advocacy organizations coordinated by two leads, the local Environmental Action Committee of West Marin (EAC) and the National Parks Conservation Association, fought to have the estuary converted to “full wilderness,” a sacrosanct designation that prohibits oystering, along with any other mechanized or motorized interference with the subtler designs of nature.

"At last, we get to restore Drakes Estero to its native splendor," wrote Amy Trainer, executive director of the EAC, in a late-December column. "The harbor seals that come to Drakes Estero to give birth and raise their young will finally be free from disturbance."

The idea that Lunny's farm was a heavy industry that imperiled the park's wildlife was, for a while at least, the core reason for evicting him. But for the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), the only agency with the power to enforce full wilderness protection, there was one problem with this argument: proving it.

To the bewilderment and eventual outrage of Lunny's advocates in California and Washington, D.C.—U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein chief among them—the DOI and its National Park Service spent much of the past decade using scientifically unsound, and at times bizarre, tactics to prove the oyster farm had to go. "The Park Service has falsified and misrepresented data, hidden science and even promoted employees who knew about the falsehoods, all in an effort to advance a predetermined outcome against the oyster farm," Feinstein wrote to then-secretary of the interior Ken Salazar in March 2012. "It is my belief that the case against Drakes Bay Oyster Company is deceptive and potentially fraudulent.”

After Lunny accepted some legal aid from a libertarian group in Washington, D.C., the rhetoric from environmentalists turned apocalyptic. Amid howls of Koch brothers lurking and baby seals dying, the oyster farm’s request for a 10-year lease extension was described as “a precedent-setting land-grab effort” and a step toward privatizing the entire National Park System. In the face of this escalation, Feinstein’s coalition drew in Republican congressmen, former California lawmakers and dissenting Bay Area progressives, including the chef Alice Waters and the writer Michael Pollan.

“I firmly believe that renewal of the permit is the only way for the Park Service to send an unmistakable signal that the [Obama] administration’s commitment to scientific integrity is real,” Feinstein told Salazar.

In November 2012, Salazar ruled against the farm, citing simple reasons: The lease was up; he had no obligation to renew it; and, he argued, the farm violated park policies for commercial activities within the National Park System.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, left, talks with Drakes Bay Oyster Company owner Kevin Lunny, during a tour of the oyster farm in Point Reyes National Seashore, Calif.Eric Risberg/AP

Findings Altered

“I'm not interested in being a whistle-blower," Brent Stewart said. But documents he recently shared with Newsweek reveal how a federal science agency ignored norms of academic research in an apparent effort to justify policy and shut down a private business.

Stewart is a marine biologist and seal behavior expert with the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute in San Diego. In May 2012, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recruited him to evaluate photos taken by “remotely operated wildlife monitoring cameras” that a Park Service scientist had secretly installed around the estero in May 2007, and that over the years became the focal point of the controversy.

When the conflict between the Park Service and the Lunny family first erupted in 2007, the Marin County Board of Supervisors reached out to two people: Feinstein and Corey Goodman, a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) member and a former University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford biology professor who lives near Point Reyes. They discovered a Park Service outpost whose scientists had published dubious environmental reports that, for example, erroneously attributed one seal colony’s 80 percent decline to the oyster farm. The disappearing seals, Goodman later learned, had merely relocated closer to the farm.

Feinstein called on the NAS to conduct an external review of the Park Service’s environmental studies. The resulting report concluded that Park Service scientists, in setting out to prove the farm was causing environmental harm, had "selectively presented, over-interpreted, or misrepresented the available scientific information" and “exaggerated the negative and overlooked potentially beneficial effects of the oyster culture operation.”

For example, when they saw seal numbers dropping, scientists made targeted assumptions about the oyster farm that ignored critical variables, such as nosy kayakers and shifting sandbars. Such limited data, the NAS said, “cannot be used to infer cause and effect.” Ultimately, the NAS “conclude[d] that there is a lack of strong scientific evidence that shellfish farming has major adverse ecological effects on Drakes Estero.”

Throughout the battle, environmental groups had labeled the farm, as one brochure put it, “an ecological disaster.” But after the NAS report diffused the urgency over issues like eelgrass (coverage had actually doubled from 1991 to 2007), fish (healthy) and invasive tunicates (problematic, but also epidemic worldwide), attention once again turned to the estero’s marquee wildlife: those seals.   

Harbor seals are prevalent along the California coast, and according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, populations are stabilizing. But with the seals a protected species under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act, the NAS called for more and better research on them in Drakes Estero and specifically suggested “a data collection system that could be independently verified, such as time- and date-stamped photographs.” What the NAS did not know, because Park Service scientists had not told it, was that such a trove of evidence already existed—roughly 250,000 archived photographs, snapped once a minute by an automatic Reconyx Silent Image game camera, every day from sunup to sundown during the seals’ spring pupping season, for more than three years. The photos documented oyster boats passing the seals at a distance of about 700 yards, or a little under a half-mile, with a large noise-buffering sandbar between them and no clear evidence that either man or beast had ever noticed the other.  

When Feinstein learned that the Park Service had concealed these photos, she went into full boil. Park Service scientists, she said, “acted as if they were advocates with no responsibility to fairly evaluate the scientific data.” She told Salazar the integrity of his agency was on the line. “Whether it was intentional or because of personal bias, these practices must not be tolerated nor allowed to continue,” the senator said.

Goodman filed a formal scientific-misconduct complaint, which in turn triggered an internal investigation by a DOI field solicitor named Gavin Frost, who was no more charitable in his assessment. Park Service scientists, Frost wrote, had “intentionally omitted the photographic research, in an effort to manipulate the outcome of [the NAS] report,” and were “blurring the line between exploration and advocacy.” Frost’s report ultimately charged Park Service employees with the lesser crimes of “scholarly” and “administrative” misconduct and let them carry on with their seal studies undeterred.

In 2012, with the end of the farm’s lease approaching, the DOI ordered the USGS to complete a definitive study of the seal photographs. Stewart, a respected 37-year veteran in the field, was called in as an independent authority to determine whether the photos were sufficient for scientific research and whether, after years of internal recrimination at DOI and the Park Service over the issue,  Lunny's boats had disturbed the creatures.  

On May 3, 2012, Stewart filed his reports, determining there were no disturbances attributable to the oyster farm's boats. (There was one case, however, where a curious kayaker caused several seals to flush into the water.) But when the USGS published its final report that November, Stewart discovered that his findings had been altered and that the study reached conclusions his research directly contradicted. "It's clear that what I provided to them and what they produced were different conclusions and different values," says Stewart. "In science, you shouldn’t do that."

For example, the USGS had deleted his words “no evidence of disturbance” for one date, and in its analysis stated that two disturbances “were associated with boat activity”—despite Stewart’s study that showed otherwise. Strangely, USGS went back to Stewart months later and asked him to double-check his work on two dates in particular. He did as requested and reiterated his findings, but even this did not alter the final report’s inaccuracies. In its Final Environmental Impact Statement, the Park Service took this alteration one step further by implying causation between the boats and the seals, something Stewart had explicitly ruled out. Eventually, this Impact Statement would be usedby Department of Justice lawyers in their arguments against Lunny before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Stewart told his contacts at the USGS that their report had errors and asked if he could correct them. “The response I got was, ‘No, it's done. It can’t be changed.’ That was a bit shocking.”

This wasn’t the first time a DOI agency was caught making fraudulent claims. Two years ago, Feinstein and Goodman uncovered an attempt to by the Park Service to use sound measurements from a 1995 study on New Jersey jet skis in order to show that Lunny's boats were distressing the seals. “I am frankly stunned,” by the patterns of abuse, Feinstein wrote in her final letter on the matter to Salazar.

Goodman, a professor who peppers his conversations with sayings like “facts are our friends,” emerged as a fierce advocate for the farm and against what he sees as the misuse of science. In May 2013, he filed another scientific misconduct complaint against the USGS where he reiterated  how the agency had twisted Stewart’s facts. “[It] is so absurd,” he told Newsweek, "you could show it to grammar school students and they would immediately understand it was ridiculous.”

This past November, the USGS dismissed Goodman's 160-page complaint with a one-page letter. The agency's Scientific Integrity Office did not address the specifics of Goodman’s report in either their letter or in a brief overview published on the DOI website. In the latter, the USGS stated that “no evidence was provided by the complainant, nor found during the inquiry of any significant departure from accepted practices...nor was there any evidence of intent to deceive or misrepresent work.” When pressed for explanation of their decision, the USGS did not respond.

Since 2007, three Park Service employees that Frost charged with scholarly or administrative misconduct have been promoted within the agency. The USGS and DOI declined to comment on this story. U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, whose 2nd congressional district includes Point Reyes (and whose office has had copies of Stewart’s reports since May 2013), also declined comment on this story, as did Marcia McNutt, who served as USGS director from 2009 to 2013 and is now editor-in-chief of the journal Science. None of Stewart’s co-authors on the 2012 USGS report responded to requests for comment.

Kevin Lunny holds a Pacific oyster at the Drake's Bay Oyster Co. in Point Reyes National Seashore, Calif., Dec. 2011.Eric Risberg/AP

An ‘All or Nothing’ Ethic

Since it was designated as a national seashore by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, Point Reyes has been an ambitious social and environmental experiment. Historic working farms coexist with the park's protected elk, egrets and elephant seals, and Western ranchers live in close and peaceful proximity to environmentalists. The two communities united in their shared wariness of development and suburbanization, and they collaborated on visionary legislative compromises that made Point Reyes an exceptional preserve close to a major metropolis. But the honeymoon was short-lived.

“There are deep roots to the hostility of environmentalism toward agriculture,” Michael Pollan wrote to Feinstein in 2012. “An ‘all or nothing’ ethic that pits man against nature, wilderness against agriculture, may be useful in some places, under some circumstances, but surely not in this place at this time.” Lunny’s oyster farm, he wrote, “stands as a model for how we might heal these divisions.”

In Northern California, where local food borders on an obsession for many, the agricultural community supported the farm, in both spirit and in court. Alice Waters filed a joint brief in the farm's defense with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, joining the California Farm Bureau, Food Democracy Now and several restaurateurs and retailers. Along the winding roads that carry weekenders north from the city to graze on grass-fed burgers and aged goat gouda, dozens of hand-painted signs went up on barns, gas stations and storefront windows, pleading, “Save Our Drakes Bay Oysters.”   

But to wilderness advocates, the state’s only oyster cannery, with its salt-crusted boats and front-end loaders and plastic oyster bags, was a dirty business in a sacred place. Jerry Meral, a respected conservationist who served as deputy secretary of California's Natural Resources Agency from 2011 to 2013 and sits on the board of the EAC, which led the fight against the farm, isn’t persuaded by the sustainable seafood argument. “It's not the only oyster farm,” he told Newsweek. “If there’s a big demand for oysters, it will probably be filled, even if we have to bring them in from China…. I’m not sure you make a decision on the use of a national park on that kind of basis.”

You’ve Been Shucked

The Park Service and wilderness advocates now say that the issue in Drakes Estero was environmental policy, not environmental science. “Science will always be debated, like climate change,” said Melanie Gunn, outreach coordinator for Point Reyes National Seashore. “But the law and policy of the Wilderness Act is very clear,” she said in defense of Salazar’s decision to shut down the farm.

Lunny lost in his circuit court appeal, and this past June, when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, he ran out of legal options.

To Meral and his EAC, the controversy over bad science is overblown. "I think [Lunny] was treated fairly," he says. The Park Service, he said, “intended to close him down, they did everything they could to close him down, and eventually they did close him down.” Trainer, who heads the West Marin EAC, wrote that "good government prevailed.”

Goodman hasn’t given up the fight for good science, but he is discouraged by the politics. “The environmental movement has lost its way,” he said. “And I say that as an environmentalist and a lifelong Democrat." After seven years, Lunny is no longer surprised. The changes to Stewart’s science “is not the first fraud," he said.

Before Christmas at Drakes Estero, as gulls stalked the perimeter of the rising oyster pile and the farm's workers hauled out about $2.5 million in unsold oysters, Lunny reached into an exposed dirt hillside about 100 feet from the water and pulled out a small, white shell. “This is a confirmed Oly,” he said, using the nickname for the native Olympia oysters that once filled every bay and estuary on the Pacific Coast. The hillside was part of a midden, an ancient shell pile left behind by earlier seafood-eating peoples, in this case California's indigenous coastal Miwok tribe, and carbon-dated to over 1,000 years old. Behind Lunny, the yellow mini-dozer coughed black smoke into the air, lifted its shovel and dumped more fresh oysters onto the rotting heap.

“This thing,” Lunny said without turning to look, “could drive me crazy if I let it.”

Pope Francis on Sunday closed out his trip to southeast Asia on a jubilant note: by holding an open-air Mass in Manila’s Rizal Park. Both the Vatican and the Philippines government said the event drew more than 7 million people who prayed together with the Catholic Church’s leader despite torrential downpours.

Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesmsn, said in an interview with NBC News that the Mass, which lasted three hours, was the “largest event in the history of the popes,” even bigger than Pope John Paul II’s Mass in 1995 at the same spot that was estimated to have drawn more than 5 million people.

Roughly 80 percent of the population identifies as Catholic in the Philippines, according to AFP.

Francis, 78, made several appearances in Asia throughout the week, notably in Sri Lanka and the Philippines, where he blessed children and religious statues. Donning a yellow poncho to protect his white robes against the rain, he drove through Manila on Sunday in his “Popemobile” as hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic onlookers shouted, cheered and waved, reports Reuters.

Speaking to millions of people on Sunday, he advocated for the safety of children. The homily he read from urged people to help keep children safe and off the streets so as to not be “robbed of hope” or pulled in by the “promises of ephemeral pleasures, superficial pastimes.” The United Nations estimates that 1.2 million children currently reside on the streets in the Philippines.

At a youth event in Manila several hours earlier, Francis had been moved to tears after an abandoned 12-year-old girl, Glyzelle Iris Palomar, asked him why God allowed children to suffer even if it wasn’t their fault. She burst into tears, unable to finish her question.

Francis hugged Palomar, and said he didn’t have a concrete answer to her question. "Why do children suffer so much? Why? We need to learn to cry just like you did,” he said in his native Spanish. “Because tears clear the way to the truth."

Gun shots rang out from a passing vehicle near U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's residence in Delaware on Saturday night, but the vice president and his wife were not at home, theU.S. Secret Service said on Sunday.

The shots were fired on a public road several hundred yards from the house, outside a security perimeter, at about 8:25 p.m. EST. Secret Service personnel at the residence heard the reports and saw the vehicle speeding away.

Biden and his wife, Jill, were in Delaware when the shooting occurred but were out for the evening, the Secret Service said. The home, near Wilmington, is not visible from the road, and it was not clear whether the gunfire was random or aimed in the direction of the residence.

The incident occurred as the Secret Service tries to recover from a series of security lapses, including an incident in September when a knife-carrying man jumped the White House fence and ran into the president's official residence.

Biden, 72, who served as a U.S. senator from Delaware for more than three decades, has residences in New Castle County and in Washington, D.C.

The Bidens, and President Barack Obama, were briefed about the incident on Saturday night.

Officials declined to discuss the Bidens' location on Sunday for security reasons.

Authorities said they would search the area to determine whether the Biden home or other nearby residences were hit by bullets.

About half an hour after the shooting, local police arrested an individual in a vehicle that attempted to pass an officer who was securing the area. The individual is not currently tied to the incident but the Secret Service said the person would be questioned about the shooting.

The Secret Service is charged with protecting the president and vice president. The agency announced last week it would remove four senior officials from their jobs and retire a fifth, as part of a shake-up intended to address problems in the organization.

Suspected Boko Haram Islamist fighters from Nigeria kidnapped around 80 people, many of them children, and killed three others on Sunday in a cross-border attack on villages in northern Cameroon, army and government officials said.

The kidnappings, among the largest abductions on Cameroonian soil since the militants began expanding their zone of operations across the border last year, came as neighboring Chad deployed troops to supportCameroon's forces in the area.

"According to our initial information, around 30 adults, most of them herders, and 50 young girls and boys aged between 10 and 15 years were abducted," a senior army officer deployed to northern Cameroon told Reuters.

He said the early-morning attack had targeted the village of Mabass and several other villages along the porous border with Nigeria. Soldiers intervened and exchanged fire with the raiders for around two hours, he added.

Government spokesman Issa Tchiroma confirmed the attack, in which he said three people had been killed, as well as the kidnappings, but was not able to say with certainty how many people had been taken in the raid. Around 80 homes were destroyed, he said.

School shootings have pervaded the news and the national conversation in recent years, casting a shadow on what should be safe spaces devoted to learning. Scenes from Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook are etched into collective memory as clearly as the questions they conjured: Who are these shooters? Why do shootings happen? How can they be prevented?

Peter Langman, a psychologist who has evaluated potential school shooters and studied incidents across the country and around the world, maintains a trove of resources online and published his first book on the topic, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters, in 2010.

In his new book, School Shooters: Understanding High School, College and Adult Perpetrators, released Friday, Langman presents four dozen brief sketches of shooters. He covers cases ranging from Charles Whitman’s 1966 rampage at the University of Texas through Adam Lanza’s 2012 massacre of first graders and staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, before parsing out themes and addressing prevention.

In a Q&A, Langman discusses patterns that emerged from years of research into school shooters, common misconceptions and warning signs. Edited excerpts follow:

What spurred your research interest in school shooters?

Back in 1999 I was doing my doctoral internship in a hospital for children and adolescents with psychiatric problems. On April 20, 1999 the attack on Columbine High School occurred. Just 10 days later, April 30, a 15-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric hospital because he was seen as a risk for going on a Columbine-type ramage. He was the first potential school shooter I had to evaluate but he was not the last. Over the 12 years I was at that organization, each year there’d be one to two kids, sometimes more, coming through the hospital who presented a serious risk of mass violence in schools. So my interest in the topic began kind of out of necessity, because I was dealing with this population of potential shooters.

Originally people were looking for the profile: Who are these kids? What are their characteristics? Can we create a checklist so we recognize them when we see them? But what struck me in the early years of my research was not how similar but how different they were.

What do you think are some of the most common misconceptions or stereotypes about school shooters that you wanted to address, dispel or add nuance to?

One is that the perpetrators are always isolated loners. I think that perception comes from certain cases in which that may have been true, for example Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook. He was profoundly isolated. But most shooters have some level of social connection. If people think they know what a school shooter looks like and they see a kid playing on the football team and socializing with friends and going out with girls, they may assume that kid cannot be a danger. And that would be a dangerous assumption to make.

Another big misconception is that school shooters are virtually always the victims of horrendous bullying that is so bad it drives them to seek retaliation against their tormentors. School shooters have been picked on, but not all of them.

In almost no case has a school shooter specifically targeted a kid who has picked on them. When there are specific targets—and in over half the cases I’ve studied, there are specific people the perpetrators are seeking to kill—the most common targets are school personnel. Teachers who have given them an unacceptable grade, teachers who’ve failed them for a class, administrators who disciplined them with suspension or expulsion. And the second most common target of school shooters are girls or women, either specific girls that have broken up with them or targeting females as a general population.

Can you describe the three populations of shooters you look at in your book?

As I say in the book, if you just look at the total spectrum of school shooters it’s hard to make sense of anything because there’s just so much variation. But when you break them down into specific groups, you start to see patterns emerge. So one grouping I look at is what I call the population, and I divide them into three populations: secondary school shooters, college shooters and what I call aberrant adult shooters.

What about the three psychological types?

Psychopathic shooters are profoundly narcissistic. It means they’re willing to meet their own needs at the expense of other people, that they don’t experience empathy, guilt or remorse like most people do. [They think] that they’re essentially above the law and that they ought to be able to do whatever they like. So they’re very entitled, and when the world doesn’t give them the gratification they think they’re entitled to they can react with rage.

The second type I present is the psychotic shooter, and psychosis refers to being out of touch with reality. Most commonly it means shooters have experienced the onset of schizophrenia and their psychotic symptoms may take the form of hallucinations, most commonly hearing voices, and/or delusions.The psychotic shooters typically struggle socially and emotionally. They often know there’s something wrong with them, they don’t understand what is going on inside their minds, and they’re full of anguish.

The third type of shooter is the traumatized shooter and unlike the first two—the psychotic and the psychopathic shooters typically come from more or less intact, stable families—the traumatized shooters come from highly dysfunctional families. There’s almost always one parent, if not two, that has drug or alcohol problems; there’s often a criminal history among the parents; there’s often financial stress and poverty; the kids grow up with violence in the home; they’re victims of physical abuse and emotional abuse and sometimes they are also victims of sexual abuse either from within the home or someone outside the home.

Why was it important for you to present brief profiles of a few dozen actual shooters in your book?

To me it’s important to know each case as an individual perpetrator. I could have just presented group data about the different categories, but that would feel kind of disembodied. I think it’s very powerful to read the stories and really get a sense of who these people were and what their lives were like. And then step back and look at them more broadly and compare similarities and differences.

In your book you talk about shifting the conversation from emergency response procedures to prevention. Can you explain?

My impression is that schools across the country have instituted crisis response or emergency response protocols involving lockdown drills and so on. That’s important to minimize damage if there’s an armed intruder in the building, but that is not prevention. Prevention means early detection of potential danger. And to do that you need to know what the warning signs are and schools need to have a team of people trained in threat assessment procedures so when they do become aware of potential warning signs, they know how to investigate and evaluate that threat.

What are the warning signs?

Perhaps the most important one to look out for is what’s called leakage, in which the perpetrators leak their intentions. That can take various forms: Sometimes kids try to recruit a peer to join them in the attack; other times they warn their friends to stay away from school on a certain day because they’re going to commit a shooting; they may ask kids to help them get bombs and firearms; they may brag about what they’re going to do. In many cases, especially among the secondary school shooters, the younger perpetrators, there is a long trail of leakage and if people recognize that and respond promptly, they may be able to prevent attacks.

Why are these often missed before the rampages?

If you know the person or you know the family you might just find it impossible to believe that that particular person is capable of committing mass murder. That is a huge hurdle for people to get past, especially if there is no history of violence. They may say, "I’ve known him all his life, he’s always been a good kid, lots of kids say things they don’t mean." It’s easy to rationalize it. In other cases parents might not want to get their kids in trouble, friends might not want to get kids in trouble. Schools may underreact because don’t want bad publicity, or they’re afraid parents might sue them for having stigmatized their kid who hasn’t done anything wrong yet, maybe just made a comment or two.

So what can we do?

I think the most important thing is to train school personnel and students in the warning signs of potential violence, and have mechanisms in place where students can easily come forward, anonymously, and make their reports. When school shootings have been prevented, most commonly it’s because students reported what they knew. That’s probably the best first line of defense, getting students involved in school safety.

What do you hope readers can take away?

The ultimate goal of the book is to help schools and society be safer. And my hope is that by shedding light on the lives of perpetrators and the warning signs they’ve left, people will be more sensitive to behaviors and know better what to do if they do encounter warning signs.