Life’s certainties: death, taxes and gun violence

On Sept. 16, 2013, former U.S. Navy reservist Aaron Alexis, 34 opened fire on a naval installation in Washington D.C. killing 12 employees before police shot him dead.

Samantha Lewthwaite, the British woman thought to be linked to the Nairobi mall attacks converted to Islam in high-school when she was 17, The Daily Mail reported Friday. The 29 year-old Muslim convert is also wanted by Interpol over a 2011 plot to bomb holiday resorts in Kenya. At the age of 17 she met online with Jamaican-born British Muslim Germaine Lindsay, according to UK media reports.

Britain announced Friday it will host next year’s NATO summit with the leaders of the military alliance expected to focus on Afghanistan as its troops withdraw from the conflict. It is the first time the event has been held in Britain since 1990, as the Cold War came to an end. “I’m delighted that the UK will host the 2014 NATO summit,” Prime Minister David Cameron said in a statement.

At least 22 people, mostly children, drowned and scores are missing after an Australia-bound boat carrying Middle Eastern asylum-seekers sank off Indonesia Friday in rough seas, police said. Twenty-five people were plucked to safety but more than 70 were unaccounted for after the boat carrying people from Lebanon, Jordan and Yemen went down off the main Indonesian island of Java, police said.

A U.N. panel said Friday it was more certain than ever that humans were causing global warming and predicted temperatures would rise by 0.3 to 4.8 degrees Celsius (0.5-8.6 degrees Fahrenheit) this century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also projected sea levels would rise by between 26 and 82 centimeters (10.4 and 32.8 inches) by 2100, according to a summary of the first volume in a long-awaited review.