U.S. President Barack Obama had intended to spend July 19 campaigning in Florida, but his plans changed the moment he learned alleged gunman James Holmes, 24, killed 12 people and injured 38 more during an early Friday screening of The Dark Knight in Aurora, Colorado.

Addressing the nation from the Harborside Event Center in Fort Myers, Florida, Obama, 50, did his best to make sense of Holmes' mass killing spree. "This morning we woke up to news of a tragedy that reminds us of all the ways that we are united as one American family," he said. "The federal government stands ready to do whatever's necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice."

"We will take every step possible to ensure the safety of all of our people. We're going to stand by our neighbors in Colorado during this extraordinarily difficult time."

The death of Egypt's infamous former spy chief, who was believed to hold more secrets about Egypt and its politicians than any other, was just as controversial and mysterious as his life.

Among faithful admirers and angry critics, Omar Sulieman was laid to rest yesterday, having died at the age of 76 a hospital in Cleveland on Thursday.

State-run Al-Akhbar reports that Suleiman's funeral was both military and popular, led by Egypt's top general Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi and his deputy Sami Anan and attended by thousands of Suleiman's admirers.

The paper states that the funeral of the man known for leading the crackdown against Islamists in Egypt turned into an anti-Muslim Brotherhood protest as the mourners chanted against the group and recently elected President Mohamed Morsy.

The funeral put Morsy in a dilemma between his loyalty to the Brotherhood, which considers Suleiman one of its fiercest opponents, and his responsibility to attend the funeral of a member of the state he currently heads. Akhbar reports that Morsy skipped the funeral but sent a representative.

Syrian state news agency SANA said on Sunday that unspecified Western intelligence agencies plan to hijack local satellite television channels to broadcast misinformation.

False reports are to include news of defections, rebels capturing cities across the country and even coups d'état, SANA said, citing a source at the Syrian Information Ministry.

The news are supposed to be broadcasted by Syrian journalists working outside the country who will be pressured into delivering false reports, the agency said.

"Arab parties" are expected be aiding Western spies in their information attacks, the agency added, without elaborating.

Pro-government media in Syria have come under pressure since the outbreak of civil strife in the country in March 2011. Websites for SANA and Al-Watan newspaper sustained hacker attacks, and the EU blacklisted Al-Watan and the television channel Ad-Dunya.

Israel has bolstered its security presence for the London Olympics amid fears that an Iranian terror squad in Europe may be planning an attack on its athletes, according to a press report Sunday.

Scotland Yard and Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5 are believed to have raised their assessment of the threat against the Israeli delegation following last week's suicide attack on an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria, the Sunday Times reported.

The Israeli government has reportedly dispatched agents from its internal security service Shin Bet to protect its team of athletes.

Meanwhile Israel's foreign security service Mossad is said to have sent a team, codenamed Bayonet, to Europe in search of a group of terror suspects believed to be working with Iran's Quds force and Hezbollah.

Quds, the special operations unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, has recruited several white European Islamic converts, including two from Germany, one from Sweden and two Britons, security experts were cited as saying.

Union Free-market capitalism was supposed to save us from the tyranny of faceless apparatchiks. But that's not what happened.

The great power struggle of the 20th century was the competition between Soviet-style communism and "free-market" corporatism for domination of the world's resources. In America, it's taken for granted that Soviet communism lost (though China's more capitalist variant seems to be doing well), and the superiority of neo-liberal economics -- as epitomized by the great multinational corporations -- was thus affirmed for all time and eternity.

There's a small problem with this, though. An old bit of wisdom says: choose your enemies carefully, because over time, you will tend to become the very thing you most strongly resist. One of the most striking things about our victorious corporations now is the degree to which they've taken on some of the most noxious and Kafkaesque attributes of the Soviet system -- too often leaving their employees, customers, and other stakeholders just as powerless over their own fates as the unhappy citizens of those old centrally planned economies of the USSR were back in the day.

It's not just that the corporations have taken control over our government (though that's awful enough). It's also that they've taken control over -- and put serious limits on -- our choices regarding what we buy, where we work, how we live, and what rights we have. Our futures are increasingly no longer our own: more and more decisions, large and small, that determine the quality of our lives are being made by Politburo apparatchiks at a Supreme Corporate Soviet somewhere far distant from us. Only now, those apparatchiks are PR and marketing executives, titans of corporate finance, lobbyists for multinationals, and bean-counting managers trying to increase profits at the expense of our freedom.

With tongue only somewhat in cheek, here are a few ways in which Americans are now becoming a new lumpenproletariat, subject to the whims and diktats of our new Soviet-style corporate overlords.

Port-au-Prince - The deadly earthquake that leveled Haiti's capital more than two years ago brought a thread of hope: a promise of renewal. With the United States taking the lead, international donors pledged billions of dollars to help the country "build back better," breaking its cycle of dependency.

But after the rubble was cleared and the dead buried, what the quake laid bare was the depth of Haiti's dysfunction. Today, the fruits of an ambitious, $1.8 billion U.S. reconstruction promise are hard to find. Immediate, basic needs for bottled water, temporary shelter and medicine were the obvious priorities. But projects fundamental to Haiti's transformation out of poverty, such as permanent housing and electric plants in the heavily hit capital of Port-au-Prince have not taken off.

Critics say the U.S. effort to reconstruct Haiti was flawed from the start. While "build back better" was a comforting notion, there wasn't much of a foundation to build upon. Haiti's chronic political instability and lack of coordinated leadership between Haiti and the U.S. meant crucial decisions about construction projects were slow to be approved. Red tape stalled those that were.

The international community's $10 billion effort was also hindered by its pledge to get approval for projects from the Haitian government. For more than a year then-President Rene Preval was, as he later described it, "paralyzed," while his government was mostly obliterated, with 16,000 civil servants killed and most ministries in ruins. It wasn't until earlier this year that a fully operational government was in place to sign paperwork, adopt codes and write regulations. Other delays included challenges to contracts, underestimates of what needed to be done, and land disputes.

Defense Minister says military prepared for operation should Syrian gov't hands missiles, chemical weapons to Hezbollah.

Israel is preparing for a possible military intervention in Syria in case the Syrian government hands missiles or chemical weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Friday.

"I have instructed the military to increase its intelligence preparations and prepare what is needed so that ... (if necessary) ... we will be able to consider carrying out an operation," Barak said in an interview on Channel 10 television.

Claiming 70 victims, 12 confirmed dead and 58 injured, the mass shooting Friday at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, about 10 miles from Denver, is the worst mass shooting in US history. Cinema goers were 30 minutes into a sold-out midnight screening of the newly-released third installment of the Dark Knight Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises, when someone described by witnesses as dressed "entirely in black" in full SWAT/riot gear - including gas mask, ballistic helmet, bullet-proof vest, bullet-proof leggings, throat and groin protection, and black tactical gloves - entered an emergency side exit of the theater.

After releasing cannisters of tear gas into the packed movie theater, he proceeded to calmly shoot members of the audience, picking off anyone who tried to escape along the aisles. Most of the movie-goers were between 15 and 25 years of age. When the gunman decided he was done, he exited the way he came, downed his weapon and gave himself up to police. A law enforcement source told CBS News the suspect was well-equipped, with one rifle, two handguns and a knife. There were also unidentified explosives found in his vehicle. He also informed them about "possible" explosives in his apartment. When Aurora police showed up at the University of Colorado medical campus address, they found his apartment rigged with trip wires, thousands of rounds of ammunition, jars full of highly flammable liquid that would explode on mixing and 30 improvised grenades. Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said "I personally have never seen anything like what the pictures show us is in there."

The chief suspect is 24-year-old James Holmes, a graduate medical student pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at the University of Colorado. He had no previous history of trouble with the law.

Colleagues and friends have been coming forward to express shock that Holmes could be responsible for the shootout. Billy Kromka worked with Holmes for three months last summer and told the New York Times, "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to commit an atrocity like this." A former high school classmate, Keith Goodwin, called Holmes a "generally pleasant guy," and stated that "James was certainly not someone I would have ever imagined shooting somebody." Dan Kim, a 23-year-old student at University of California San Diego, called Holmes a "super-nice kid," "kinda quiet" and "really smart."

Professors have also spoken favorably of Holmes, who was an honor student and "academically, he was at the top of the top." Kelly Huffman, an assistant professor of psychology at University of California Riverside described him as "a smart and quiet guy."

How many times before have we come across this glaring inconsistency between the cold hard facts of a shooting and the real character of the chief suspect? The 'crazed lone shooter' has no history of violence, let alone psychopathic tendencies, is evidently very intelligent and has great character references from friends and colleagues. It's always possible that he was hiding a dark side, but a medical student planning such an attack with tens of thousands of dollars worth of weapons, armor and sophisticated explosives, on his own and of his own volition, takes us into the realm of the bizarre.

A man who was at the Colorado movie theater where a dozen people were killed this morning, says he saw the gunman.

He says he thinks someone deliberately let the gunman inside once the movie started.

Here's what he told TV station KCNC this morning live on their newscast.

"As I was sitting down to get my seat, I noticed that a person came up to the front row, the front right, sat down, and as credits were going, it looked like he got a phone call. He went out toward the emergency exit doorway, which I thought was unusual to take a phone call. And it seemed like he probably pried it open, or probably did not let it latch all the way. As soon as the movie started, somebody came in, all black, gas mask, armor, and threw a gas can into the audience, and it went off, and then there were gunshots that took place."

Police arrested 24-year-old James Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, for the shootings.

At least 12 people were killed and 38 others wounded when the gunman opened fire during the midnight screening of the newest Batman film, "The Dark Knight Rises."

More than 50,000 U.N. officials, scientists, environmental advocates and a few heads of state will gather this coming week in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on sustainable development. They're assembling 20 years after the first Earth Summit was held in the same city, and the goal now, as it was then, is to figure out how to cut dangerous greenhouse gases and help the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty. Or, to put it more starkly, how we can live ethically without threatening the ability of future generations to live at all.


That's what's on the agenda.

But what we want to know is: What's on the menu? Specifically, will this large gathering on climate change be serving meat - whose production and consumption are major contributors to climate change?

We tried to find out.

The first answer to our e-mail inquiries ignored the question and pointed with pride to the event's effort to be green. A U.N. spokesperson responded: "There have been quite a few actions taken by both the Brazilian Government and the UN secretariat to 'green' the Rio conference. For one thing, the conference will be 'papersmart,' with no hard documentation issued unless a special request is made for print on demand. I also know that the Brazilian Government has been addressing plastics issues."