They called him “the Italian” because he spoke Spanish with an Italian accent. It was only after he was spirited out of the country, the boys say, his picture splashed all over the local news media, that they learned his real identity: Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, the Vatican’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic.

The case is the first time that a top Vatican ambassador, or nuncio — who serves as a personal envoy of the pope — has been accused of sexual abuse of minors. It has sent shock waves through the Vatican and two predominantly Catholic countries that have only begun to grapple with clergy sexual abuse: the Dominican Republic and Poland, where Mr Wesolowski was ordained by the Polish prelate who later became Pope John Paul II.

It has also created a test for Pope Francis, who has called child sexual abuse “such an ugly crime” and pledged to move the Roman Catholic Church into an era of “zero tolerance.” For priests and bishops who have violated children, he told reporters in May, “There are no privileges.” Mr Wesolowski has already faced the harshest penalty possible under the church’s canon law, short of excommunication: on June 27, he was defrocked by the Vatican, reducing him to the status of a layman.

"Many of us have received death threats toward ourselves and our families," the speaker said, wearing sunglasses, paint beneath her eyes and a baseball cap. "We will not hide. We will no longer live in fear … If you support Darren Wilson, make your voices heard." She refused to give the media her name, saying "You want my name? I am Darren Wilson. We are Darren Wilson."

The speaker said the media has shown a strong bias against Wilson supporters, drawing loud applause from the crowd. "We share the united belief that officer Wilson's actions on August 9 were warranted and justified and he has our unwavering support," the woman said. Another rally was planned for Sunday. A crowd-funding page created for Wilson raised $235,010 from 5,902 people before organizers stopped accepting donations Friday after surpassing their goal of $100,000 in four days.

“This is an opportunity for me to say we are against the killing of any civilians, any journalists,” he told Isikoff. Claiming that it was Israel who was killing civilians and journalists in an IS-esque fashion, not Hamas, Mashaal said that Hamas would, in the future, take measures to warn Israeli civilians of impending attacks, just as Israel does in the Gaza Strip. He admitted, however, that Hamas has a “problem” directing its strikes at military targets only.

“We do not have sophisticated weapons. We do not have the weapons available to our enemy … so aiming is difficult … We promise that if we get more precise weapons, we will only target military targets,” he said. Mashaal was keen to distinguish Hamas from IS, which was the target of an outpouring of criticism this week after releasing a video showing the beheading of American journalist James Foley.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to point out the similarities between the tactics and objectives of the two organizations, stating that “Hamas is like ISIS, ISIS is like Hamas.” Mashaal, however, took issue with the comparison, calling it a “lie” concocted to “trick” the US public.

According to the report, during the course of its recent terror war on Israel, Hamas has fired over 1,600 rockets from civilian sites, cynically using UN facilities, schools, graveyards, mosques and power plants, among others. The IDF has already documented Hamas's rampant usage of human shields, a phenomenon that has also been caught on film by foreign journalists.

An Indian TV report during the operation exposed terrorists setting up and launching a rocket just meters away from a Gaza hotel where members of the international media were staying, in the middle of a crowded residential area. A France 24 TV journalist - who famously ducked for cover during a live interview when a Hamas rocket was fired right next to him - has also gone on the record to report how the rocket which caught him off guard was launched in a crowded civilian area and right in front of a UN building.

Hagel's assessment of Islamic State, which gained strength during Syria's civil war and swept into northern Iraq earlier this summer, sounded a note of alarm several days after the group posted a video on social media showing one of its fighters beheading an American hostage kidnapped in Syria.

Asked if the hardline Sunni Muslim organization posed a threat to the United States comparable to that of the attacks of September 11, 2001, Hagel said it was "as sophisticated and well-funded as any group we have seen." "They are beyond just a terrorist group. They marry ideology, a sophistication of ... military prowess. They are tremendously well-funded. This is beyond anything we've seen."

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said officials were worried about the possibility that European or US nationals, radicalized after fighting in Iraq or Syria, would return to their home countries. Dempsey suggested Islamic State would remain a danger until it could no longer count on safe havens in areas of Syria under militant control. "This is an organization that has an apocalyptic, end-of- days strategic vision and which will eventually have to be defeated," Dempsey said. "To your question, can they be defeated without addressing that part of their organization which resides in Syria? The answer is no. That will have to be addressed on both sides of what is essentially at this point a non-existent border."

For those who resist, who dare to act independently, think for themselves, march to the beat of a different drummer, the consequences are invariably a one-way trip to the local jail or death. What Americans must understand, what we have chosen to ignore, what we have fearfully turned a blind eye to lest the reality prove too jarring is the fact that we no longer live in the “city on the hill,” a beacon of freedom for all the world.

We live in a state of undeclared martial law. We have become the enemy. In a war zone, there are no police — only soldiers. Thus, there is no more Posse Comitatus prohibiting the government from using the military in a law enforcement capacity. Not when the local police have, for all intents and purposes, already become the military. In a war zone, the soldiers shoot to kill, as American police have now been trained to do. Whether the perceived “threat” is armed or unarmed no longer matters when police are authorized to shoot first and ask questions later.

In a war zone, you have no rights. When you are staring down the end of a police rifle, there can be no free speech. When you’re being held at bay by a militarized, weaponized mine-resistant tank, there can be no freedom of assembly. When you’re being surveilled with thermal imaging devices, facial recognition software and full-body scanners and the like, there can be no privacy. When you’re charged with disorderly conduct simply for daring to question or photograph or document the injustices you see, with the blessing of the courts no less, there can be no freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances. And when you’re a prisoner in your own town, unable to move freely, kept off the streets, issued a curfew at night, there can be no mistaking the prison walls closing in.

So if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, by all means, stand down. Cower in the face of the police, turn your eyes away from injustice, find any excuse to suggest that the so-called victims of the police state deserved what they got. But remember, when that rifle finally gets pointed in your direction — and it will — when there’s no one left to stand up for you or speak up for you, remember that you were warned.

The United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine — beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 — were critical elements, too.

Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president — which he rightly labeled a “coup” — was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine.

The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant — and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. US and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.