Spoiler

Months ago, The Intercept reported that "nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group." Citing classified documents, Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux went on to report that "Obama has boosted the number of people on the no fly list more than ten-fold, to an all-time high of 47,000—surpassing the number of people barred from flying under George W. Bush." Several experts were quoted questioning the effectiveness of a watch list so expansive, echoing concerns expressed by the Associated Press the previous month as well as the ACLU.

The Intercept article offered a long overdue look at one of the most troubling parts of the War on Terrorism. Being labeled a suspected terrorist can roil or destroy a person's life—yet Team Obama kept adding people to the list using opaque standards that were never subject to democratic debate. Americans were denied due process. Innocent people were also put on a no-fly list with no clear way to get off.

As the ACLU put it, "The uncontroversial contention that Osama bin Laden and a handful of other known terrorists should not be allowed on an aircraft is being used to create a monster that goes far beyond what ordinary Americans think of when they think about a 'terrorist watch list.' If the government is going to rely on these kinds of lists, they need checks and balances to ensure that innocent people are protected." The status quo made the War on Terror resemble a Franz Kafka novel.

On Tuesday, Michael Isikoff reported that the FBI has identified a federal contractor suspected of leaking the classified documents The Intercept cited in its story:

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The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect's home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said. But the case has also generated concerns among some within the U.S. intelligence community that top Justice Department officials—stung by criticism that they have been overzealous in pursuing leak cases—may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media, the sources said. One source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said there was concern "there is no longer an appetite at Justice for these cases."

That quote is hard to parse. Was anonymity granted to government sources so that they could offer unauthorized leaks complaining about disinterest in prosecuting unauthorized leaks? Or was this an authorized leak from an intelligence community trying to pressure the Justice Department using the cover of anonymity? Either way, the concerns of these intelligence sources should be ignored. If the DOJ is reluctant to prosecute here, it's absolutely right to be.

The information revealed by The Intercept should never have been treated as a state secret. Federal authorities are trying to figure out who leaked a classified document, but they ought to be identifying whoever was responsible for wrongly classifying it in the first place. Its contents do not threaten national security. Suppressing them was an affront to democracy that undermined accountability in government.

The bad actors are the ones who kept it secret.

The opaque watch lists of the Bush and Obama administrations are flagrant examples of the over-classification long thought to be endemic in Washington, D.C. Exposing them as such served the public interest. As with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and FBI persecution of anti-Vietnam protestors, whistleblowers and journalists have once again proved better than government at judging how best to navigate the tension between state secrets and democracy.

Most self-described advocates of law and order who insists on the need to prosecute Edward Snowden and this second leaker ignore a key feature of their civil disobedience: These whistleblowers leaked in part to expose more serious lawbreaking.

It is perverse to target them while ignoring the lawbreakers they exposed.

The only reasonable argument for prosecuting the whistleblower who leaked this watch-list document is that, regardless of the salutary consequences, a duly enacted law was broken. Some people maintain that the rule of law is threatened if any lawbreaking goes unpunished, regardless of context. But that is not an argument that the intelligence community or its apologists can credibly make until they also begin advocating for the punishment of all perjurers, torturers, and civil-rights violators in their midst, as well as leakers who talk to reporters while advancing an establishment line. Does anyone take that internally consistent position? Anyone who surveys lawbreaking in the national-security bureaucracy and insists on legal consequences only for its whistleblowers makes a mockery of the rule of law.

AMBERG, Germany--The next front in Germany's effort to keep up with the digital revolution lies in a factory in this sleepy industrial town.

At stake isn't what the Siemens AG plant produces--in this case, automated machines to be used in other industrial factories--but how its 1,000 manufacturing units communicate through the Web.

As a result, most units in this 100,000-plus square-foot factory are able to fetch and assemble components without further human input.

The Amberg plant is an early-stage example of a concerted effort by the German government, companies, universities and research institutions to develop fully automated, Internet-based "smart" factories.

Such factories would make products fully customizable while on the shop floor: An incomplete product on the assembly line would tell "the machine itself what services it needs" and the final product would immediately be put together, said Wolfgang Wahlster, a co-chairman of Industrie 4.0, as the collective project is known.

The initiative seeks to help German industrial manufacturing--the backbone of Europe's largest economy--keep its competitive edge against the labor-cost advantages of developing countries and a resurgence in U.S. manufacturing.

Underpinning the effort is the Internet of Things, where the Web meets real-world equipment. Google Inc. made a big push on the consumer front this year with its $3.2 billion purchase of Nest Labs Inc., which makes thermostats that can be remotely controlled by smartphones and other connected devices.

Full-fledged smart manufacturing is still in the pilot phase. But the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence has worked with German industrial companies to engineer some of the most advanced demonstrations in the field.

At the center's pilot smart factory in Kaiserslautern, chemicals giant BASF SE produced fully customized shampoos and liquid soaps. As a test order was placed online, radio identification tags attached to empty soap bottles on an assembly line simultaneously communicated to production machines what kind of soap, fragrance, bottle cap color, and labeling it required. Each bottle had the potential to be entirely different from the one next to it on the conveyor belt.

The experiment relied on a wireless network through which the machines and products did all the talking, with the only human input coming from the person placing the sample order.

Siemens's Amberg facility shows what is possible in an operational factory at this point. The plant, which builds automated machines for the factories of German industrial companies like BASF, Bayer AG, Daimler AG and BMW AG--and many of their rivals abroad--has been digitizing gradually for 25 years. Today it is about 75% on autopilot, with 1,150 employees mostly operating computers and monitoring the production process.

Designing a self-operating intelligent manufacturing system over an Internet network could still be a decade away. "We have the building blocks," said Siemens board member Siegfried Russwurm.

Besides Amberg, other German factories on the road to intelligent manufacturing include one operated by electronic motors producer Wittenstein AG, and Robert Bosch GmbH's nascent adaptive assembly line for hydraulic equipment, set to be operational in Homburg this fall.

Germany's foray into the industrial Internet comes amid widespread unease here about U.S. domination of the Internet. Google currently handles 95% of all German Internet searches, according to online statistics portal Statista, and its pervasiveness could pose a challenge for German industrial companies trying to harness the Internet to adopt a more service-oriented business model.

Günther Schuh, a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering, which helped launch Industrie 4.0, said he has noted "genuine concern in German industry about the monopoly position of companies like Amazon or Google" because they control the interface between consumers and companies.

Google could potentially use its dominant position as a search engine to push its own products and services, while expanding beyond simply providing email, word processing and cloud computing software. For example, the tech company is in the early stages of producing technology for a self-driving car.

Amazon hasn't just stuck to online retailing, but has moved into consumer electronics with its tablet device Kindle Fire and its Fire Phone smartphone.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that German companies need to do more to stay competitive in the digital economy, while German economics minister Sigmar Gabriel sees dangers in allowing American companies like Google to dominate the so-called Internet data business.

"The big data necessary for Industrie 4.0 to work isn't being collected by German companies, but by four big firms in Silicon Valley. That's our worry," Mr. Gabriel said at a public debate with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt earlier this month.

German executives appear less worried.

Peter Herweck, chief executive of Siemens's division handling motorized equipment, said he doesn't see Google's Internet dominance as a threat to Siemens's digital-manufacturing efforts. "Maybe they can become a partner," he said, by someday helping engineers find tools or parts needing repair inside factories.

"When it comes to the connected world, one needs more than just software" for smart manufacturing, said Werner Struth, a Bosch board member. "One needs products one can touch."

German companies have been at the cutting edge of production technology for years--and now they are getting government help to stay on top.

Industrie 4.0 is the kind of public-private program Germany does well. The government doesn't pick winners through subsidies, but is giving EUR200 million ($253 million) for research to create new technologies and networking opportunities for companies to develop common standards--harnessing a vast system of public research institutes that help companies carry out research and development.

In the U.S., the Obama administration is trying to emulate that research network, having earmarked over $2.2 billion in 2013 for a nationwide manufacturing initiative.

Concurrently, U.S. industrial and tech giants including General Electric Co., AT&T Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp., and International Business Machines Corp. have joined forces in March to create the Industrial Internet Consortium. Like Industrie 4.0, the nonprofit consortium seeks to create a framework for companies and university researchers to establish standards and best practices for industrial applications of the Internet.

The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared.

Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.

He added: “He created human beings and let them develop according to the internal laws that he gave to each one so they would reach their fulfilment.

“The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

The Catholic Church has long had a reputation for being anti-science – most famously when Galileo faced the inquisition and was forced to retract his “heretic” theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

But Pope Francis’s comments were more in keeping with the progressive work of Pope Pius XII, who opened the door to the idea of evolution and actively welcomed the Big Bang theory. In 1996, John Paul II went further and suggested evolution was “more than a hypothesis” and “effectively proven fact”.

Yet more recently, Benedict XVI and his close advisors have apparently endorsed the idea that intelligent design underpins evolution – the idea that natural selection on its own is insufficient to explain the complexity of the world. In 2005, his close associate Cardinal Schoenborn wrote an article saying “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process – is not”.

Giovanni Bignami, a professor and president of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, told the Italian news agency Adnkronos: “The pope’s statement is significant. We are the direct descendents from the Big Bang that created the universe. Evolution came from creation.”

Giulio Giorello, professor of the philosophy of science at Milan’s University degli Studi, told reporters that he believed Francis was “trying to reduce the emotion of dispute or presumed disputes” with science.

Despite the huge gulf in theological stance between his tenure and that of his predecessor, Francis praised Benedict XVI as he unveiled a bronze bust of him at the academy's headquarters in the Vatican Gardens.

“No one could ever say of him that study and science made him and his love for God and his neighbour wither,” Francis said, according to a translation by the Catholic News Service.

“On the contrary, knowledge, wisdom and prayer enlarged his heart and his spirit. Let us thank God for the gift that he gave the church and the world with the existence and the pontificate of Pope Benedict.”

Our empirical analysis shows that female executives have different backgrounds and experience from male executives and that women are paid more and have higher pay-for-performance sensitivity than men conditional on rank, background, and experience. We also find that women are promoted more quickly internally but display similar rates of external promotion to men; however, women and men have similar demotion rates. The higher rate of promotion results in female executives at the upper levels of the hierarchy having significantly less job experience than male executives. Female executives, however, have a higher exit rate than men and the probability of a female executive becoming CEO is less than half that of male executives at every age. Our decomposition shows that the male executive survival rate is twice that of female executives. The gender differences in career length are accounted for completely by the difference in exit rates, and, conditional on survival as an executive at any age, women have a higher probability of becoming a CEO. The average career compensation of female executives is lower than that of male executives, but it is higher than male executives if female executives are assigned the male initial experience, the male initial rank assignment, or the male career experience distribution

An expedition to the Amazon by a group of Yale researchers has led to the discovery of a fungus that can break down plastic, possibly solving the world's rampant waste problem.

The fungus, pestalotiopsis microspora, can survive on a diet of only polyurethane, one of the most common, and pollutant, industrial plastics used by humans. What's even more amazing is that the plastic-eating fungus can feast on polyurethane in an anaerobic (oxygen-free) environment - the perfect match for chowing down on trash at the bottom of a landfill.

A group of Yale students made the breakthrough discovery in 2012, as part of the university's annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory with molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel. Venturing into the jungles of Ecuador, the mission was to allow "students to experience the scientific inquiry process in a comprehensive and creative way," according to the course's website.

The group searched for plants within the Amazon, which is home to more species than almost anywhere else on Earth, and then cultured the microorganisms within the plant tissue.

What they ended up finding was pestalotiopsis, which can effectively degrade one of the most destructive synthetic substances for the planet.

Polyurethane, according to Co.Exist, is used for everything from garden hoses to shoes and truck seats. And once it becomes part of a heaping landfill, it stays there for generations.

The world's waste problem is not going to go away on its own, and manufacture and consumption of plastics over recent decades is only raising more concerns. About 32 million tons of plastic was thrown away in the United States in 2012 alone - only nine percent of it was recycled. The Yale team fears that this plastic problem poses a major threat to natural ecological systems.

The fungal findings were reported in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology in 2012, concluding the microbe is "a promising source of biodiversity from which to screen for metabolic properties useful for bioremediation."

In 2000, health care experts for the World Health Organization tried to do a statistical ranking of the world's health care systems. They studied 191 countries and ranked them on things like the number of years people lived in good health and whether everyone had access to good health care. France came in first. The United States ranked 37th.

Some researchers, however, said that study was flawed, arguing that there might be things other than a country's health care system that determined factors like longevity. So this year, two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured something called the "amenable mortality." Basically, it's a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care. The researchers looked at health care in 19 industrialized nations. Again, France came in first. The United States was last.

French Lessons

Now some American experts say there's a lot Americans can learn from the French.

For starters, the French system is not what most Americans imagine, says historian Paul Dutton at Northern Arizona University, author of Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France.

"Americans assume that if it's in Europe, which France is, that it's socialized medicine," he says. "The French don't consider their system socialized. In fact, they detest socialized medicine. For the French, that's the British, that's the Canadians. It's not the French system."

France, like the United States, relies on both private insurance and government insurance. Also, just like in America, people generally get their insurance through their employer.

In France, everyone has health care. However, unlike in Britain and Canada, there are no waiting lists to get elective surgery or see a specialist, Dutton says.

He says the French want pretty much the same thing as Americans: choice and more choice.

Universal Coverage, Not At Expense Of Choice

Dutton says these shared values come out of a shared history. Both countries are products of Enlightenment-era revolutions.

"The French hold individual liberty and social equality very dear ... 'liberty, equality, and fraternity' — of course the slogan of their revolution," he says. "And in this country, of course, we have similar ideals: individual liberty, social equality — equal chances for everyone."

But the French have done a better job of protecting those values in health care, Dutton says.

Americans often assume that when people get universal coverage, they give up their choice in doctors, hospitals and care. That's not the case in France, Dutton says. The system is set up both to ensure that patients have lots of choice in picking doctors and specialists and to ensure that doctors are not constrained in making medical decisions.

In France, the national insurance program is funded mostly by payroll and income taxes. Those payments go to several quasi-public insurance funds that then negotiate with medical unions to set doctors' fees. (Doctors can choose to work outside this system, and a growing minority now charge what patients are willing to pay out of pocket.) The government regulates most hospital fees. This system works collectively to keep costs down.

When someone goes to see a doctor, the national insurance program pays 70 percent of the bill. Most of the other 30 percent gets picked up by supplemental private insurance, which almost everyone has. It's affordable, and much of it gets paid for by a person's employer.

"There are no uninsured in France," says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. "That's completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles."

Treating The Sickest

In France, the sicker you are, the more coverage you get. For people with one of 30 long-term and expensive illnesses — such as diabetes, mental illness and cancer — the government picks up 100 percent of their health care costs, including surgeries, therapies and drugs.

France has made an unusual guarantee that every cancer patient can get any drug, including the most expensive and even experimental ones that are still being tested, says Dr. Fabian Calvo, deputy director of France's National Cancer Institute. This kind of access is why the French — unlike Americans — say they are highly satisfied with their health care system, he says.

"It's a feeling of safety — that if you have a big problem, you could have access to the good therapy," Calvo says.

When compared with people in other countries, the French live longer and healthier lives. Rodwin says that's because good care starts at birth. There are months of paid job leave for mothers who work. New mothers get a child allowance. There are neighborhood health clinics for new mothers and their babies, home visits from nurses and subsidized day care.

The Cost Of Care

It's expensive to provide this kind of health care and social support. France's health care system is one of the most expensive in the world.

But it is not as expensive as the U.S. system, which is the world's most costly. The United States spends about twice as much as France on health care. In 2005, U.S. spending came to $6,400 per person. In France, it was $3,300.

To fund universal health care in France, workers are required to pay about 21 percent of their income into the national health care system. Employers pick up a little more than half of that. (French employers say these high taxes constrain their ability to hire more people.)

Americans don't pay as much in taxes. Nonetheless, they end up paying more for health care when one adds in the costs of buying insurance and the higher out-of-pocket expenses for medicine, doctors and hospitals.

France, like all countries, faces rising costs for health care. In a country that's so generous, it's even harder to get those expenses under control.

Last year, the national health system ran nearly $9 billion in debt. Although it is a smaller deficit than in previous years, it forced the government of President Nicolas Sarkozy to start charging patients more for some drugs, ambulance costs and other services. Debates over cost-cutting have become an expected part of the national dialogue on health care.