AP

There are a lot of puzzled expressions on people's faces when it comes to the subject of Osama Bin Laden and why the White House has not authorized the release of any pictures of his body.

Photographs and video were released of Saddam Hussein's hanging, as were post-mortem pictures of his criminal sons, Uday and Qusay, after Delta Force took them out.

Why not release a few pictures of Public Enemy No. 1 to prove that he is dead and show the world what happens when you take on the US?

Matt Bissonnette, one of the SEAL Team Six operators on the raid, partially outs the reason in his book, "No Easy Day." The book reads, "In his death throes, he was still twitching and convulsing."

Department of DefenseAn aerial view shows the compound that Osama bin Laden was killed in, in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

But this is perhaps the most measured and polite description that one could give of how operator after operator took turns dumping magazines' worth of ammunition into bin Laden's body, two confidential sources within the community have told us. When all was said and done, UBL had over a hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate.

But was it illegal? Under the Laws of Land Warfare, a soldier is fully authorized to put a few insurance rounds into his target after he goes down. Provided the enemy is not surrendering, it is morally, legally, and ethically appropriate to shoot the body a few times to ensure that he is really dead and no longer a threat. What happened on the bin Laden raid, however, is beyond excessive. The level of excess shown was not about making sure that bin Laden was no longer a threat. The excess was pure self-indulgence.

You may not care whether bin Laden got some extra holes punched in him — few of us do, but what should concern you is a trend within certain special-operations units to engage in this type of self-indulgent, and ultimately criminal, behavior. Gone unchecked, these actions get worse over time.

The real issue is not that bin Laden was turned into Swiss cheese, but rather that this type of behavior has become a Standard Operating Procedure in this unit. Of course, these attitudes and behaviors do not come out of nowhere. Endless back-to-back combat deployments, PTSD, broken families, and war itself all play into it.

Now you know the real reason that the Obama administration has not released pictures of Osama Bin Laden's corpse. To do so would show the world a body filled with a ridiculous number of gunshot wounds.

The picture itself would most likely cause an international scandal, and investigations would be conducted that could uncover other operations, activities that many will do anything to keep buried.

(businessinsider.com)

"This is a tragedy. We should not tolerate the abuse of minors," Francis said, departing from prepared remarks at his weekly Sunday message and blessing to tens of thousands of people in St. Peter's Square.

"We must protect minors and severely punish abusers," he said.

Though the Catholic Church itself has been rocked by its own abuse scandals, he did not mention them on Sunday as he has in the past.

Italians have been shocked as details emerged in the case of 6-year-old Fortuna who died in June 2014 after a fall from an eighth-story balcony in Naples.

After re-opening the case, police charged a 43-year-old-man with having thrown the girl to her death in a housing block in a rough area of the city after raping her. Police said they suspected he killed her so she would not talk.

The man, who has also been accused of molesting other children and is now in prison in Rome, has denied the charges.

On Saturday, Italian President Sergio Mattarella called for an "ample, rapid and severe" judicial process concerning the case, which has dominated newspapers' front pages for days.

Child abuse by priests has plagued the Roman Catholic Church itself for decades.

While some cases of sexual abuse in the Church were exposed piecemeal, such as in the U.S. state of Louisiana in the 1980s, the scandal exploded in 2002, when it was discovered that U.S. bishops in the Boston area moved abusers from parish to parish instead of defrocking them.

Similar scandals have since been discovered around the world and tens of millions of dollars have been paid in compensation.

While the pope has vowed "zero tolerance" for abusers in the Church, victims groups have accused him of not doing enough. They say he should do much more to make bishops more accountable for covering up abuse or not preventing it.

A commission he set up to advise him on how to root out abuse in the Church has struggled to find its stride.

In February, Peter Saunders of Britain, a prominent and outspoken member, stepped down in protest.

In March, Cardinal George Pell, under fire for his handling of sexual abuse of children by priests in Australia decades ago, gave four days of evidence to an Australian government commission, which again put the Church's problem with abuse on the world stage.

(Newsweek)