A novice police officer has fatally shot a black teenager in the Bronx, New York City alleging that the 14-year-old boy did not drop his weapon, police officials said.

Shaaliver Douse was shot in the lower left jaw early on Sunday morning and was pronounced dead at the scene, CBS News reported. The incident happened when two rookie officers on foot patrol heard gunfire in the area of Cortlandt Avenue and East 151st Street in the Melrose section of the Bronx after 3 a.m. They rushed to the scene to find that Douse was carrying a 9mm semiautomatic handgun chasing another male. The officers ordered him to drop the gun, but one of the cops fired a shot killing Douse after the teenager refused to comply.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly defended the cops for the action they took. “I think they did what we would expect officers of any experience level to do.” Asked if Douse could have been shot in the legs, Kelly said it is not how officers are trained. “That is absolutely a myth. You can’t do that. We train all of our officers to shoot for body mass, because we shoot to stop,” he said.

US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki has announced that the country’s embassies and consulates in 19 cities will remain closed until Saturday. ● “This is not an indication of a new threat stream, merely an indication of our commitment to exercise caution and take appropriate steps to protect our employees including local employees and visitors to our facilities,” Psaki said on Sunday. The United States closed 21 embassies and consulates in the Middle East and North Africa on Sunday and issued a global travel alert due to a possible "terror attack by al-Qaeda" [CIA].

Stephen Lendman: Fake Washington Terror Threat ● They're in various forms. They repeat with disturbing regularity. America's war on terror targets Islam. At issue is duplicitous scaremongering. It advances Washington's imperium. Wars of aggression follow. False arrests target innocent victims. Terror threats repeat. They're strategically timed. They change the subject. They divert attention. They fool most Americans. They do so most of the time. Here we go again. Media scoundrels march in lockstep. They regurgitate Big Lies.

CNET has learned the FBI has developed custom "port reader" software to intercept Internet metadata in real time. And, in some cases, it wants to force Internet providers to use the software. ● The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts. ● ● FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams. The FBI's legal position during these discussions is that the software's real-time interception of metadata is authorized under the Patriot Act.

Andre Damon: As Dow hits new record - Dismal jobs report exposes claims of US recovery ■ The US economy added 162,000 net jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, the worst jobs figure in four months. The jobs total was lower than economists’ projections and well below the number needed to have an impact on mass unemployment. The report underscored the fact that, five years after the 2008 financial crash, the US remains mired in a deep economic slump. Over the past four months, the US economy averaged only 173,000 new jobs per month, even though the working-age population is growing by a monthly average of 184,000. The official unemployment rate dropped by 0.2 percent in July to 7.4 percent, mainly because 240,000 people left the labor force.

When the payroll report was released last month, the world finally noticed what we had been saying for nearly three years: that the US was slowly being converted to a part-time worker society. This slow conversion accelerated drastically in the last few months, and especially in June, when part time jobs exploded higher by 360K while full time jobs dropped by 240K. In July we are sad to report that America's conversation to a part-time worker society is not "tapering": according to the Household Survey, of the 266K jobs created (note this number differs from the establishment survey), only 35% of jobs, or 92K, were full time. The rest were... not.

US regulators have reportedly been handed evidence that traders at some of the world’s biggest banks manipulated a key rate for derivatives, pocketing millions at the expense of pension funds in the process. ● The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is probing 15 banks over allegations that they instructed brokers to carry out trades that would move ISDAfix, the leading benchmark rate for interest rate swaps. Pension funds and companies who invest in interest rate derivatives often deal with banks to insure against big movements in the ISDAfix rate or to speculate on changes to interest rate swaps. ISDAfix is published each morning after banks submit bids for swaps via Icap, the inter-dealer broker, in a number of currencies. The CFTC has been investigating suggestions that the banks deliberately moved the rate in order to profit on these deals. Given the hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of interest rate derivatives trades that occur annually, even the slightest manipulation can have a substantial effect.

● Two weeks after Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager Kevyn Orr filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history, Orr’s former law firm, Jones Day, has announced it will file an official “restructuring plan” by the end of 2013. As details of the plan emerge, Detroit workers have expressed outrage at the proposals.
● Even as Orr claims there “is no money” to fund constitutionally-protected pensions of some 31,000 current and retired city workers, plans are moving forward to provide hundreds of millions of public tax dollars to fund a new Red Wings hockey arena and surrounding entertainment district owned by billionaire tycoon Mike Ilitch.
● Orr unveiled a plan Friday to increase city employee health care deductibles three-and-a-half times, from $200 to $750. He is also soliciting about two dozen companies for the lowest bids on privatized garbage collection and recycling.

(Image: William D'Andrea / Brown University)

■ Greenland's early Viking settlers were subjected to rapidly changing climate. Temperatures plunged several degrees in a span of decades, according to research from Brown University. A reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from lakes near the Norse settlement in western Greenland also shows how climate affected the Dorset and Saqqaq cultures. Results appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
■ The end of the Norse settlements on Greenland likely will remain shrouded in mystery. While there is scant written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th centuries, archaeological remains can fill some of the blanks, but not all.
■ What climate scientists have been able to ascertain is that an extended cold snap, called the Little Ice Age, gripped Greenland beginning in the 1400s. This has been cited as a major cause of the Norse's disappearance. Now researchers led by Brown University show the climate turned colder in an earlier span of several decades, setting in motion the end of the Greenland Norse. Their findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
■ The Brown scientists' finding comes from the first reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history from two lakes in Kangerlussuaq, near the Norse "Western Settlement." Unlike ice cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet hundreds of miles inland, the new lake core measurements reflect air temperatures where the Vikings lived, as well as those experienced by the Saqqaq and the Dorset, Stone Age cultures that preceded them.

The United States is able to destroy the Syrian air forces with the help of only three warships and 24 drones, a member of the US Institute for the Study of War, Christopher Harmer, says. ● This will prevent the Syrian air forces from being used against civilians and the rebels. According to the expert a limited strike will disable the Syrian air forces, while a large-scale military operation will guarantee that the forces will not recover from the strike. The expert also believes that the Syrian missile defense system is no threat to such an operation, as the US equipment is much more precise. This means that there is no necessity to destroy the Syrian missile shield, he explains.

PressTV: Israel folly; one too many: Analyst

■ A hard-hitting investigative report recently published by a prominent German newspaper has uncovered some shocking details about the tactics being used by chemical giant Monsanto in assuming control of global agriculture. According to this thorough analysis, Monsanto appears to be aggressively targeting independent researchers, scientists, activists, and others opposed to genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) by utilizing the vast resources and manpower of both the United States federal government and the American military-industrial complex.
■ The report, which recently appeared in the July 13 print edition of Suddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), explains in rigorous detail how both individuals and groups opposed to GMOs and other chemical-based crop technologies have been threatened, hacked, slandered and terrorized for daring to digress from the pro-GMO status quo. On numerous documented occasions, pertinent information about the dangers of GMOs or lack of GMO safety data has been effectively blocked from timely release by mysterious forces that many say are the chemical industry in disguise.

Depositors at bailed-out Cyprus' largest bank will lose 47.5% of their savings exceeding 100,000 euros ($132,000), the government said Monday. - The figure comes four months after Cyprus agreed on a 23 billion-euro ($30.5 billion) rescue package with its euro partners and the International Monetary Fund. In exchange for a 10 billion euro loan, deposits worth more than the insured limit of 100,000 euros at the Bank of Cyprus and smaller lender Laiki were raided in a so-called bail-in to prop up the country's teetering banking sector. The savings raid prompted Cypriot authorities to impose restrictions on money withdrawals and transfers for all banks to head off a run. Christopher Pissarides, the Nobel laureate who heads the government's economic advisory body, forecast Monday that the bank controls could be in place for another two years.