Barack Obama has broken the silence he has maintained on gun control since the Colorado shootings, making a plea for Democrats, Republicans and community leaders to "arrive at a consensus" on how to reduce gun violence across the United States.

At the end of a trip lasting several days that began in Aurora, Colorado, where he met with families and victims of the massacre in a cinema, the US president told an audience that such tragedies were replayed on a smaller scale in cities throughout the country on a daily basis.

"Every day and a half the number of young people we lose to violence is about the same as the number of people we lost in that movie theater," Obama said in remarks at the National Urban League Conference in New Orleans.

Firearms sales are surging in the US in the wake of the Colorado massacre as buyers express fears that politicians may use the shootings to seek new restrictions on owning weapons.

In Colorado - the scene of Friday's shooting during the screening of a Batman film that killed 12 and injured dozens of others - gun sales jumped in the three days that followed. The state approved background checks for 2,887 people who wanted to purchase a firearm - 25% more than the average Friday to Sunday period in 2012 and 43% more than the same period the week before.

Dick Rutan, owner of Gunners Den in suburban Arvada, said requests for concealed-weapon training certification were "off the hook". His four-hour course in gun safety, required for certification for a concealed-weapons permit in Colorado, had drawn double the interest since Friday.

The radical decline in sea ice around the Arctic is at least 70% due to human-induced climate change, according to a new study, and may even be up to 95% down to humans - rather higher than scientists had previously thought.

The loss of ice around the Arctic has adverse effects on wildlife and also opens up new northern sea routes and opportunities to drill for oil and gas under the newly accessible sea bed.

The reduction has been accelerating since the 1990s and many scientists believe the Arctic may become ice-free in the summers later this century, possibly as early as the late 2020s.

"Since the 1970s, there's been a 40% decrease in the summer sea ice extent," said Jonny Day, a climate scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, who led the latest study.

"We were trying to determine how much of this was due to natural variability and therefore imply what aspect is due to man-made climate change as well."

The only 'authoritarians' Latin America has ever had are those put in power by the US.

The Washington Post's double-speak

A recent article by The Washington Post's Juan Forero entitled 'Latin America's new authoritarians' is just the latest example of how the imperialists' media machine is relentlessly engaged in media warfare against sovereign nations in the South, in order to fertilise the ground for new or increased economic and military aggression against them. Such psy-op campaigns also seek to influence events on the ground in target nations, in this case in Venezuela ahead of the October elections where all signs point to another resounding victory for current President Hugo Chávez Frías.

The article is part of the psychological wing of what Nicaraguan based website tortilla con sal terms the West's "War on Humanity" in order to convince the world of the moral superiority of the minority (the Western elite/imperialists) over the majority so as to minimise the threat of a mass organised effort to challenge that minority's increasingly doomed attempts to achieve total global hegemony.

Their morals, the minority argues through its vast propaganda network which bombard the majority, are superior because they are universal and therefore must be defended and achieved regardless of the cost, including that of the destruction of entire nations, let alone millions upon millions of lives, whose governments stand in the way, Libya being the most recent example.

In the last few days there has been numerous reports that seem to indicate that once again the government and corporate controlled media are directly lying and possibly covering up a "black op" that resulted in at least a dozen deaths during a premier screening of the new Batman movie at a theater in Aurora, Colorado.

Now, yet another startling revelation has come to light and, like other bits of evidence released in the last two days, this "coincidence" adds to a series of facts that bear all the hallmarks of a false flag.

On the same day as the Aurora massacre, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine was holding an identical drill that simulated a shooter in a movie theater.

In a July 22nd speech marking the one month anniversary of the parliamentary coup that overthrow left-leaning Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, the former leader denounced that a motivating interest among the coup-plotters was a sought-after deal between Paraguay and the Montreal-based mining company, Rio Tinto Alcan.

"Those who pushed for the coup are those who want to solidify the negotiations with the multinational Rio Tinto Alcan, betraying the energetic sovereignty and interests of our country," Lugo told supporters.

Such an accusation represents the widespread discontent among Paraguayan people toward current negotiations between Rio Tinto Alcan (RTA) and the government of Federico Franco, Lugo's right wing replacement.

It also points toward the Franco administration's larger strategy to open up Paraguay to multinational corporate exploitation, from Rio Tinto Alcan to Monsanto.

22 July is a date which haunts Norway; a date it would like to forget, but never will - the date of the twin attacks carried out by Anders Behring Breivik.

As the country braces itself for the first anniversary of the attacks, thoughts are once again turning to the horror he visited on the small population.

The car-bomb in Oslo designed to kill the leadership of the country, and the shootings on the island of Utoeya designed to destroy the next generation of Labour party politicians, left 77 people dead, the majority of them teenagers.

It was one of the worst acts of terrorism the world has witnessed in recent decades.

Sandy Weill, who created the era of megabanks when he led Citigroup in the 1990s, has called for America's biggest banks to be broken up.

The call from the 79 year-old will cause a stir on Wall Street and in the City of London because Mr Weill engineered the 1998 deal that made Citigroup the world's largest bank. Hailed at the time, the merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group required the US government to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, a law dating back to the Great Depression that prevented banks from both taking deposits from customers and gambling on the markets.

"What we should probably do is go and split up investment banking from banking," Mr Weill said in a television interview on Wednesday. "Have banks do something that's not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that's not going to be too big too fail."

Mr Weill's intervention comes as the debate in the US over how to regulate the country's largest banks has been reignited by JP Morgan Chase's almost $6bn (£4.9bn) trading loss on complex derivative trades. JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who was Mr Weill's chief lieutenant at Citi until the two fell out, has insisted that combining retail and investment banking is beneficial to consumers and businesses.

"I'm suggesting that they [the banks] be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won't be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonsable," said Mr Weill, whose fortune was estimated at $1.3bn before Citigroup shares crashed in 2008. The bank eventually turned to the US taxpayer for a $45bn bail-out later that year.

Rather than split up the largest banks, the Dodd-Frank Act - America's signature piece of financial reform since the crisis - limited their activities and gave regulators more power. Critics of the reform say it has not removed the risk that taxpayers will ultimately have to bail-out the banks again should they get in trouble.

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The world's super-rich have taken advantage of lax tax rules to siphon off at least $21 trillion, and possibly as much as $32tn, from their home countries and hide it abroad - a sum larger than the entire American economy.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group - sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Comedian Jimmy Carr became the public face of tax-dodging in the UK earlier this year when it emerged that he had made use of a Cayman Islands-based trust to slash his income tax bill.

But the kind of scheme Carr took part in is the tip of the iceberg, according to Henry's report, entitled The Price of Offshore Revisited. Despite the professed determination of the G20 group of leading economies to tackle tax secrecy, investors in scores of countries - including the US and the UK - are still able to hide some or all of their assets from the taxman.

"This offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and - most importantly - to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of 'source' countries," Henry says.

As she presided over the regular luncheon meetings of the Monterey Bay Colony of Mayflower Descendants, Mary Jane Crawford Holmes represented a lineage stretching proudly back to the original Pilgrims.

She never could have imagined that her family's landing on Plymouth Rock would extend almost four centuries later to a grandson accused of mass murder at a Batman movie.

That sort of violence couldn't be more foreign to the genteel gatherings in the Beach House at the Monterey Peninsula Country Cub on idyllic Pebble Beach in California. And Holmes was not just a member of the chapter. She was the governor. Her duties included conducting an annual reading of the Mayflower Compact, marking the day in 1620 that the Pilgrims pledged "to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience."