The Entertainment Software Association will head to the White House on Thursday to discuss violent video games.

The image of unshakable peacefulness and tolerance is a Western stereotype that defies history and simplifies human nature.

It's a story that sounds impossible. Lightning never strikes twice, so they say. Except when it does."I want our story to remain shocking forever - but I'm worried that already we're not alone," Celia Randolph says. On the surface they are a normal family - mum, dad, four kids. They've lived in small towns in America that seemed safe.

The deadly school shooting this month in Parkland, Florida, has ignited national outrage and calls for action on gun reform. But while certain policies may help decrease gun violence in general, it’s unlikely that any of them will prevent mass school shootings, according to James Alan Fox, the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy at Northeastern.

The U.S. should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights by restricting gun ownership, China’s Global Times, the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper, wrote on Friday. The state-run Chinese newspaper published a critical editorial following the shooting last week at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff were killed. The massacre reignited a long-running debate about gun control in the United States and abroad.

After suggesting Hollywood is to blame for shootings, Trump offered up a system that already exists as a way to curb violent films. He then proposed paying armed teachers a bonus.

Matt Taibbi on Parkland, Florida school shooting:

Why did it take a full week for Russian authorities to reveal the brutal murder, on Jan. 26, of 53-year-old St. Petersburg political activist Konstantin Sinitsyn? To give it a little time before shock waves emerged? In fact, there were few shock waves, even among Russia’s community of democratic oppositionists, because Sinitsyn’s murder was just another in a growing list of violent attacks against members of that community that have occurred in the past several months, with the March presidential elections approaching.

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.” By Maria Popova.

On Monday morning, 4-year-old Tahjir Smith spilled his breakfast cereal. He stuttered, his mother would later tell police, as he told her what he had done. Then, authorities said, his punishment began. Using hands and a shoe, his mother, Lisa, and her boyfriend, Keiff King, would later strike the little boy over and over again, in the head and torso, authorities said. By the time Abington Township Police arrived that evening, Tahjir was limp and unresponsive.

The 30-year-old was arrested by police at Bukit Tengah, Penang in Malaysia, Malaysiakini reported. He is believed to be the man who was caught on video slapping a female Indonesian worker at a bus stop as she had not been wearing a headscarf. The video, which quickly went viral, shows a man asking some women at the bus stop what their religion was.

It doesn’t work, and it teaches all the wrong lessons.

2017 was Mexico's most violent year in two decades, with 23,101 murders carried out between January and November, according to official figures released Friday. The number of murders in the first 11 months of this year surpassed the previous record of 22,409 killings during the whole of 2011.

It’s time for Congress to fix loopholes in a gun control law meant to save women’s lives.

For six hours he hid in an upstairs room, listening to the crackle of gunfire and the screams of people being slaughtered outside his Myanmar home. With every footstep that drew near, every cry that pierced the air, 52-year-old Bodru Duza braced for the soldiers to find him, to kill him like all the others who had fled to his compound that morning seeking a safe place to shelter. They were being blindfolded and bound, marched away in small groups, then butchered and shot as they begged for their lives.

Lebanese security forces have fired tear gas and water canons at protesters near the US Embassy in Beirut during a demonstration against Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Demonstrators waved the Palestinian flag as they lit fires in the street and threw projectiles towards the security forces, who had barricaded the main road leading to the embassy in the Awkar area of the capital's north-east.

A senior Iranian cleric called during Friday prayers for Palestinians to “rage” against Israel after US President Donald Trump declared Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state. Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, an ultra-conservative and a key leader of the main weekly Muslim prayers, said Trump had drawn a line on years of peace efforts by recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

A leading Mexican presidential candidate has been accused of wanting to explore a deal with the devil in an attempt to bring peace to the country. Speaking in the violence-wracked southern state of Guerrero this weekend, Andrés Manuel López Obrador floated the idea of an amnesty for drug cartel kingpins, saying he wanted a dialogue on the drug war that has cost the country an estimated 200,000 lives over the last decade.

Shelling killed three people in the last major rebel stronghold near Damascus on Tuesday, a war monitor said, shortly before the UN Syria envoy said the government had agreed a ceasefire there.

Perpetrators of violence, we’re told, dehumanize their victims. The truth is worse. By Paul Bloom.