At least four people were shot Friday morning during a commercial robbery near the Empire State Building, an NYPD spokesman said. The Associated Press reported the shooter was dead. Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said details of the shooting are still emerging. The FBI said it was on the scene. The shooting occurred in the area of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, but the NYPD.

CNN: Several shot at Empire State Building, authorities say
USA Today: 3 or 4 hurt in shooting near Empire State Bldg; gunman dead
Chicago Tribune: 19 people shot in overnight shootings across Chicago

At least 15 people have been killed in US assassination drone strikes carried out in Pakistan’s North Waziristan. - The attacks targeted three residential compounds in the village of Tundar in North Waziristan on Friday. A Pakistani security official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the terror drones “fired six missiles, two each” on the compounds. The strikes also destroyed many houses inside the compounds. Local residents rushed to the site for rescue following the attacks. About 35 people have been killed in such attacks in the region since August 18. On August 21, two drones targeted a vehicle in Datakhel Tehsi in North Waziristan, leaving seven people dead. More than 200 people have lost their lives in similar strikes so far this year.

Jason Ditz: US Drones Pound North Waziristan, Killing 18

The Lions of Tawhid: Life With CIA's Syrian Rebels in a Cold and Cunning War - The Times's C.J. Chivers travels with an antigovernment fighting group in and near Aleppo, where the war for Syria's future has hardened all involved. TAL RIFAAT, Syria — Abdul Hakim Yasin, the commander of a Syrian antigovernment fighting group, lurched his pickup truck to a stop inside the captured residential compound he uses as his guerrilla base.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has claimed that the media climate in Sweden has become so "hostile" against him that it may now jeopardize his right to a fair trial. These allegations have been strongly rejected by several Swedish officials, but a brief glance at recent Swedish media coverage on Assange seems to show that they are not entirely without ground. - In a controversial statement last week, Swedish Minister of Social Affairs Göran Hägglund called Assange a ”coward” and a ”pitiful wretch” for taking refuge at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Hägglund also alleged that Assange was afraid of having ”his case tried by the court”, even though Assange has not been charged with any crime and has not been summoned to court. He added that Assange was a ”scumbag” if the accusations against him were true. Another official reaction came from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in an angry attempt to explain why Assange cannot be questioned in London: ”You do not dictate the terms if you are a suspect. Get it?”, the Ministry declared via its official Twitter channel. The bulk of the attacks on Assange, however, do not come from government officials, but from journalists and prominent intellectuals. The four major Swedish newspapers – Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet and Expressen – have all roundly condemned the Wikileaks founder, using very strong language. A number of examples are provided below to illustrate the general tone of Swedish media opinion on Assange.

Julie Hyland: UK media lines up behind campaign to extradite Assange and silence WikiLeaks
Glenn Greenwald: The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange

Secret Police Documents Reveal WikiLeaks Founder To Be Arrested In Any Attempt To Leave. Lewis Whyld of the Press Association took the pictures of the documents on a clipboard carried by a police standing outside the building. The document appears to read:

"Brief - EQ. Embassy Brief Summery of current position Re: Assange. Action required Assange to be arrested under all circumstances. He comes out with dip immun as dip bag in dip bag in dip vehicle ARRESTED. "Discuss possibilities of distraction SS10 to liaise...provide additional support."

The police document appears to suggest that investigators were expecting Assange to attempt to escape from the embassy. Foreign secretary William Hague has said categorically that Assange will not be given safe passage from Britain to Ecuador, despite being granted political asylum by the country last week.

On the basis that there was zero reason to detain a retired Marine and commit him to a medical facility for psychiatric evaluation, a Virginia judge has demanded that Brandon Raub be released from custody immediately.

Raub, 26, had his home visited one week earlier by FBI, Secret Service and local law enforcement agents who expressed concern over a series of Facebook posts he had made on his public social networking profile. They detained him without charge and admitted him to a local hospital for evaluation. "The petition is so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy," reads a signed statement by Circuit Judge W. Allan Sharrett, which was provided to the Richmond Times-Dispatch Thursday afternoon. Judge Sharrett adds that he was shocked to find that a magistrate did not include any grounds at all for holding Raub, who was placed in custody for a full week without any charges being pressed. Earlier in the week, attorneys representing Raub from the Rutherford Institute attacked the mishandling of the case by suggesting that the entire ordeal was a war on their client’s constitutional rights.

AWIP: No rights, no charge: US extends ex-marine’s Facebook psych-ward term

Reactions continue after a Texas leader issued a public warning for what he calls a ‘civil war’ and possible invasion of United Nations troops if President Barack Obama is re-elected. - Lubbock County Judge Tom Head is convinced that Mr. Obama winning a second term would lead to a revolt by the American people and he’s is pushing a tax increase for the district attorney’s office and the Lubbock County Sheriff’s Office. He says the money is needed to “beef up” its resources in case President Obama wins the November election.

The Presidential campaign of Mitt Romney was rocked again yesterday as his private wealth came under fresh and unfriendly scrutiny in the media even as Democrats continued to exploit embarrassment created by comments from a conservative congressman in Missouri on rape and abortion. - The publication by the website Gawker of some 950 pages of documents offering glimpses into Mr Romney's web of holdings, some in overseas territories like Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, was a reminder of the candidate's reticence fully to describe a fortune estimated at $250m and the taxes he pays on his income. The papers, some of which have been seen before, included letters and audits. They are likely to fuel demands by Democrats that Mr Romney release tax filings far beyond the two years worth (one provisional) that he has made public so far. Some of what the papers detail also appears to cast fresh doubt on claims he has made that he left Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, in 1999 before it embarked on a firm-shuttering spree that cost thousands of American jobs.

The Catholic Church has pressed charges against a trio of Pussy Riot copycats who disrupted a service in Cologne Cathedral on Sunday – if charged and convicted they could be jailed for longer than their heroines. - The three young activists carried a banner reading "Free Pussy Riot and all prisoners" into the cathedral, distributed flyers and shouted "Free Pussy Riot." The two men, aged 23 and 25, and a 20-year-old woman were dressed as the all-female punk band Pussy Riot, three of whom were sentenced to two years in prison in Russia last week for staging a similar demonstration inside a cathedral in Moscow in February. "The peace of Cologne Cathedral was disturbed - we can't and won't accept this," said the cathedral's dean Robert Kleine in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. "The right to demonstration cannot be set above the right to religious freedom and the religious feelings of the congregation." The three unnamed activists could now be prosecuted for breach of the peace and disrupting the free practice of religion. The latter carries a maximum prison sentence of up to three years, or a fine.

Don't blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street's at fault for the spiraling cost of food.

Demand and supply certainly matter. But there's another reason why food across the world has become so expensive: Wall Street greed. It took the brilliant minds of Goldman Sachs to realize the simple truth that nothing is more valuable than our daily bread. And where there's value, there's money to be made. In 1991, Goldman bankers, led by their prescient president Gary Cohn, came up with a new kind of investment product, a derivative that tracked 24 raw materials, from precious metals and energy to coffee, cocoa, cattle, corn, hogs, soy, and wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation, to be known henceforth as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index (GSCI). For just under a decade, the GSCI remained a relatively static investment vehicle, as bankers remained more interested in risk and collateralized debt than in anything that could be literally sowed or reaped. Then, in 1999, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission deregulated futures markets. All of a sudden, bankers could take as large a position in grains as they liked, an opportunity that had, since the Great Depression, only been available to those who actually had something to do with the production of our food. [...] The speculator neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat, and wouldn't have a place to put the 20 tons of cereal he might buy at any given moment if ever it were delivered. Speculators make money through traditional market behavior, the arbitrage of buying low and selling high. And the physical stakeholders in grain futures have as a general rule welcomed traditional speculators to their market, for their endless stream of buy and sell orders gives the market its liquidity and provides bona fide hedgers a way to manage risk by allowing them to sell and buy just as they pleased. But Goldman's index perverted the symmetry of this system.

Corporations criticised for refusing to reveal what data they hold. - A senior Cabinet minister has launched a strong attack on public bodies – including the BBC and the Royal Mail –that have powers to carry out secret surveillance on members of the public but are refusing to say how they're using them. Under controversial legislation, a range of public bodies have the authority to demand that phone companies hand over records of calls, secretly follow people without their knowledge and record their movements. But despite an attempt by ministers to clamp down on misuse of the powers, seven well-known organisations refused to provide details of their activities under the controversial Regulation of Investigative Powers Act (Ripa), dubbed the "snoopers charter".

The United States has made plans to create a missile defense shield in Asia, and is reportedly in talks with Japan about its implementation. Experts warn such a measure may anger China.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the most prominent development would be the installation of a powerful early-warning radar, ‘X-band’, described by its manufacturer, Raytheon Co, as “a large, phased-array fire control sensor, featuring precision discrimination and interceptor support,” designed to counter threats from “rogue states.” It would be installed on an unnamed southern Japanese island.

WSJ has quoted Steven Hildreth, a missile-defense expert with the Congressional Research Service, as saying the U.S. was "laying the foundations" for a region-wide missile defense system that would be constituted by US ballistic missile defenses and those of regional powers, particularly Japan, South Korea and Australia. Although supposedly aimed at containing threats from North Korea, Hildreth also told WSJ "the reality is that we're also looking longer term at the elephant in the room, which is China." The WSJ goes on to say that the X-band arc would allow the US to ‘peer deeper’ into China, as well as North Korea.

Wall Street Journal: U.S. Plans New Asia Missile Defenses

Lord Rothschild has taken a near-£130m bet against the euro as fears continue to grow that the single currency will break up. - The member of the banking dynasty has taken the position through RIT Capital Partners, the £1.9bn investment trust of which he is executive chairman. The fact that the former investment banker, a senior member of the Rothschild family, has taken such a view will be seen as a further negative for the currency. The latest omen follows news in The Daily Telegraph late last week that the government of Finland is already preparing for the euro’s break-up. RIT, which Lord Rothschild has led since 1988, had a -7pc net short position in terms of principal currency exposures on the euro at the end of July, up from -3pc at the end of January. Given a net asset value of £1.836bn at the end of July, the position is worth £128m. Sources close to RIT suggested that the position was not a dogmatic negative view on the euro as a currency, but rather a realistic approach on a currency that remains relatively weak.

A Swiss radiology lab said Friday it has received the go-ahead from the widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to test his remains for poisoning by polonium, a highly radioactive element. - "We are waiting for a formal, written letter from the lawyer before travelling to Ramallah" to carry out the probe, a spokesman for the lab at the Lausanne University Hospital Centre, Darcy Christen, told AFP. "Time is of the essence, you could say it's a question of weeks, not months, because the traceability of polonium diminishes by half every 138 days," Christen said, noting that this has occurred 20 times since Arafat died aged 75 on November 11, 2004. The Palestinian Authority also approved the probe, which was requested by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas after a media investigation found elevated levels of polonium on some of Arafat's belongings, including clothing he wore before he died at a military hospital outside Paris. French doctors had offered no explanation for Arafat's death, and many Palestinians believe he was poisoned by Israel, which denies the allegations.

0808 GMT: The ruling is unanimous, says AFP's Pierre-Henry Deshayes who is in the courtroom.
Breivik listened with a smile on his face as judge Wenche Elizabeth Artnzen spoke.
0806 GMT: BREIVIK GETS 21-YEAR JAIL TERM, SUBJECT TO EXTENSION
0804 GMT: BREIVIK MAKES FAR-RIGHT SALUTE AFTER HANDCUFFS RELEASED
0802 GMT: The five judges have also arrived in the courtroom, as cameras from the many media covering the event flash.
0800 GMT: BREIVIK ARRIVES IN COURT FOR SENTENCING
0759 GMT: More from that survey -- 62 percent of people asked said they thought Breivik should never be released.
0757 GMT: Tabloid Verdens Gang (VG) has published a survey today showing that 72 percent of Norwegians believe Breivik is sane enough to go to prison.

A solid 53.6 percent of Norwegians believe that his detention conditions at the moment are too comfortable. His quarters include three small rooms -- one for sleeping, one for exercise and one for work -- and a laptop not connected to the Internet. The key question was whether he would be detained in a jail cell or a mental ward for killing 77 people, many of them teenagers at an island summer camp, in Norway last year. Far-right extremist Breivik, who has admitted the killings, has said he would accept a prison sentence but would appeal against treatment in a closed psychiatric ward. A first medical assessment found him criminally insane but a second judged him sane. Polls suggest most Norwegians believe he is of sound mind. Now the court has delivered its verdict.

Read the judicial decision HERE (.pdf)(in Norwegian)

El País: El tribunal noruego condena a 21 años de cárcel al terrorista de Utøya
Le Monde: Anders Behring Breivik reconnu sain d'esprit et condamné à la peine maximale
New York Times: Norway Killer Is Ruled Sane and Given 21 Years in Prison
Los Angeles Times: Norway mass killer Anders Behring Breivik is found guilty, declared sane
The Guardian: Anders Behring Breivik declared sane and sentenced to 21 years - VIDEO
Reuters: Norway declares Breivik sane in mass murder trial
Irish Examiner: Court sentences Breivik to minimum of 21 years in jail
AWIP: Anders Breivik: I would have done it again (04/17/12)
Jordan Shilton: Fascist Anders Breivik defends mass killings as trial opens in Norway (04/18/12 )
Prableen Kaur: Helvete på Utøya / Hell on Utøya Island