SINGAPORE: Singapore students have a hunger for knowledge and are ready to face the workforce and the world, observed a key partner of the Tata Crucible Campus Quiz.
Mr Giri Balasubramaniam, more popularly known as "Pickbrain", is the host of the global business quiz.
He said the world looks up to Singapore in many ways, and one of them is quality education.
The Tata Crucible Campus Quiz has been held in India, Singapore and the UK.
The defending team from Singapore Management University (SMU) won the challenge in Singapore this year.
This is SMU's fourth win, and its third consecutive one since it was held in Singapore five years ago.
The team from the National University of Singapore took second place, and the Nanyang Technological University took third spot.
The quiz tests students' knowledge on business-related topics as well as their lateral-thinking abilities.
The SMU team is set to represent Singapore in April next year at the International Finals in India.
The quiz covers a wide range of subjects from the world of business and economy, including business houses, personalities, brands, and markets.
Organiser Tata group aims to encourage lateral association, speed of thought and out-of-the-box thinking, among youth.
Tata group is made up of more than 100 firms in various sectors, and has operations in over 80 countries globally.
Pope Benedict's former butler Paolo Gabriele leaves after the verdict in his trial at the Vatican in October.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Vatican spokesman: Pope Benedict XVI pardons his former butler, Paolo Gabriele
Gabriele was given an 18-month prison term in October for aggravated theft
He was convicted after leaking private papers from the pope's apartment
The papers informed a book that revealed corruption claims within the Church hierarchy
(CNN) -- Pope Benedict XVI has pardoned his former butler, Paolo Gabriele, weeks after he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for leaking the pope's private papers, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said.
The pope visited Gabriele in prison "in order to confirm his forgiveness and communicate in person his decision to grant Mr. Gabriele's request for pardon, thereby remitting the sentence passed against the latter," said a Vatican statement.
"This constitutes a paternal gesture toward a person with whom the Pope shared a relationship of daily familiarity for many years."
Gabriele was immediately released and has returned home, the statement said.
"Since he cannot resume his previous occupation or continue to live in Vatican City, the Holy See, trusting in his sincere repentance, wishes to offer him the possibility of returning to a serene family life," it said.
Gabriele, one of the pope's closest personal assistants, was convicted in October of aggravated theft for leaking secret papers from the pontiff's personal apartment to an author who included them in a best-selling book.
During the high-profile trial, Gabriele declared himself not guilty, but said he had abused the pope's trust. He asked forgiveness of the pontiff for his actions, which he said were intended to expose wrongdoing.
The Holy See media office had previously indicated that Gabriele could be pardoned. He has been held in a cell in Vatican City since October.
Gabriele was arrested in May, following a Vatican investigation into how the pope's private documents appeared in the book "Sua Santita" ("His Holiness"), by Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi.
The book, based on the papers, revealed claims of corruption in the church's hierarchy.
At his trial, police told how they found more than 1,000 important documents among a stash of hundreds of thousands of papers in Gabriele's apartments in Vatican City and Castel Gondolfo, a town near Rome.
Among them were original papers signed by Pope Benedict XVI, some of them stamped with an order for destruction, according to the journalists allowed to attend the trial.
Also found in his possession were a gold nugget belonging to the pope, a signed check made out to Pope Benedict XVI for 100,000 euros and an original version of Virgil's Aeneid from 1581.
Computer expert sentenced over Vatican leaks
CNN's Mitra Mobasherat contributed to this report.
Part of complete coverage on
updated 10:01 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
Some believe the world will end Friday, the last day of ancient Mayan calendar. Mayans, or at least those living in Merida, Mexico, don't buy it.
If the world's about to end, what would be your last meal on Earth? Feast your eyes on the most popular choices.
updated 10:26 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
People in a tiny French village are hoping to profit from the end of the world predicted for later this month. Jim Bittermann reports.
Bushmaster corporation: If you buy one of their semi-automatic rifles -- like the kind Adam Lanza used -- "Consider your Man Card reissued."
updated 4:49 PM EST, Thu December 20, 2012
The evolving face and story of Aesha, disfigured by the Taliban and featured on the Time magazine's August 2010 cover, captivated the world.
updated 5:51 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
ITN's Alex Thomson gains rare access to accompany the Syrian army in Daraya.
updated 7:18 AM EST, Thu December 20, 2012
India's rape cases, one every 22 minutes, betray what's wrong with society where millions believe women invite trouble by being careless.
updated 11:08 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
A recent Gallup report shows that Singapore's wealthy population is the unhappiest -- less happy than the populations of Syria and Haiti.
updated 6:59 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
Sudanese government has been bombing and spreading terror in the South Kordofan state, surgically cleansing the land of the Nuba people.
updated 5:16 AM EST, Fri December 21, 2012
CNN's Fred Pleitgen on the first museum exhibit on the biblical ruler of Judea.
updated 9:39 AM EST, Sat December 22, 2012
Crazy golf on an insane scale -- a putting green swimming in a giant bowl of noodles and chopsticks and the Great Wall of China for a hazard.
2012 is a big year in horse racing as 6 million people head to the track. The rise of celebrity horses Frankel and Black Caviar creates a buzz.
Share a message of hope for the victims, your thoughts about gun control, or sound off on another related topic.
updated 10:49 AM EST, Wed December 19, 2012
With a death-defying leap, a hot novel and the U.S. election -- 2012 has been an incredible year. Watch the highlights in CNN's video mash-up.
NEWTOWN, Conn. He was the awkward, peculiar kid who wore the same clothes to school every day.
He rarely spoke and even gave a school presentation entirely by computer, never uttering a word.
Play Video
Newtown residents react to the NRA's response to school shooting
He liked tinkering with computers and other gadgets, and seemed to enjoy playing a violent video game, choosing a military-style assault rifle as one of his weapons.
New details about Adam Lanza emerged Friday, as the nation paused to mark one week since he slaughtered 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
Multiple funerals and visitations were held Friday, and at the hour of the attack, 9:30 a.m., a bell tolled 26 times, once for each victim killed at the school.
Lanza also fatally shot his mother before blasting his way into Sandy Hook, and killed himself after the school massacre.
In high school, Lanza would slither through the hallways, awkwardly pressing himself against the wall while wearing the same green shirt and khaki pants every day. He hardly ever talked to his classmates.
"As long as I knew him, he never really spoke," said Daniel Frost, who took a computer class with Lanza and remembered his skill with electronics. Lanza could take apart and reassemble a computer in a matter of minutes
Play Video
Newtown moment of silence
36 Photos
Victims of Conn. school shooting
Lanza seemed to spend most of his time in the basement of the home he shared with his mother, who kept a collection of guns there, said Russell Ford, a friend of Nancy Lanza's who had done chimney and pipe work on the house.
Nancy Lanza was often seen around town and regularly met friends at a local restaurant. But her 20-year-old son was seldom spotted around town, Ford and other townspeople said.
The basement of the Lanza home had a computer, flat-screen TV, couches and an elaborate setup for video games. Nancy Lanza kept her guns in what appeared to be a secure case in another part of the basement, said Ford, who often met her and other friends at a regular Tuesday gathering at My Place, a local restaurant.
During the past year and a half, Ford said, Nancy Lanza had told him that she planned to move out West and enroll Adam in a "school or a center." The plan started unfolding after Adam turned 18.
"She knew she needed to be near him," Ford said. "She was trying to do what was positive for him."
John Boehner is a bloodied House speaker following the startling setback that his own fractious Republican troops dealt him in their "fiscal cliff" struggle against President Barack Obama.
There's plenty of internal grumbling about the Ohio Republican, especially among conservatives, and lots of buzzing about whether his leadership post is in jeopardy. But it's uncertain whether any other House Republican has the broad appeal to seize the job from Boehner or whether his embarrassing inability to pass his own bill preventing tax increases on everyone but millionaires is enough to topple him.
"No one will be challenging John Boehner as speaker," predicted John Feehery, a consultant and former aide to House GOP leaders. "No one else can right now do the job of bringing everyone together" and unifying House Republicans.
The morning after he yanked the tax-cutting bill from the House floor to prevent certain defeat, Boehner told reporters he wasn't worried about losing his job when the new Congress convenes Jan. 3.
"They weren't taking that out on me," he said Friday of rank-and-file GOP lawmakers, who despite pleading from Boehner and his lieutenants were shy of providing the 217 votes needed for passage. "They were dealing with the perception that somebody might accuse them of raising taxes."
Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo
That "somebody" was a number of outside conservative groups such as the Club for Growth and Heritage Action for America, which openly pressured lawmakers to reject Boehner's bill. Such organizations often oppose GOP lawmakers they consider too moderate and have been headaches for Boehner in the past.
This time, his retreat on the tax measure was an unmistakable blow to the clout of the 22-year House veteran known for an amiable style, a willingness to make deals and a perpetual tan.
Congressional leaders amass power partly by their ability to command votes, especially in showdowns. His failure to do so Thursday stands to weaken his muscle with Obama and among House Republicans.
"It's very hard for him to negotiate now," said Sarah Binder, a George Washington University political scientist, adding that it's premature to judge if Boehner's hold on the speakership is in peril. "No one can trust him because it's very hard for him to produce votes."
She said the loss weakens his ability to summon support in the future because "you know the last time he came to you like this, others didn't step in line."
Boehner, 63, faces unvarnished hostility from some conservatives.
"We clearly can't have a speaker operate well outside" what Republicans want to do, said freshman Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan.
Huelskamp is one of four GOP lawmakers who lost prized committee assignments following previous clashes with party leaders. That punishment was an anomaly for Boehner, who is known more for friendly persuasion than arm-twisting.
He said Boehner's job would depend on whether the speaker is "willing to sit and listen to Republicans first, or march off" and negotiate with Obama.
Conservative Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, said one of the tea party's lasting impacts would be if Boehner struggled to retain his speakership due to the fight over the fiscal cliff, which is the combination of deep tax increases and spending cuts that start in early January without a bipartisan deal to avert them.
"If there's a major defeat delivered here, it could make it tough on him," King said. "He's in a tough spot."
The Himalayas, the world's highest mountain range, may soon hold another record: it could become home to the greatest density of dams in the world. More than a thousand are either already operating, under construction or being planned in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan. Besides providing clean energy, they could improve flood control and access to drinking water. But they will also pose a serious threat to indigenous species.
Hydroelectricity supplies about one-fifth of India's power, but even so nearly 300 million of the country's inhabitants have no access to electricity. More dams could help plug the energy shortfall: India's hydropower potential is estimated to be four times its current production of 39 gigawatts.
Maharaj Pandit at the University of Delhi, India, and R Edward Grumbine at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming, have now studied the impact 292 of the planned Himalayan dams will have. They used satellite imagery and published data on Himalayan species richness to estimate how each dam's location would affect forest cover and biodiversity.
Extinctions loom
"We project that about 1700 square kilometres of forests would be submerged or damaged by dams and related activities", says Pandit. He and Grumbine predict that such deforestation will result in the likely extinction of 22 flowering plants and 7 vertebrate species by 2025. This number would rise to 1505 flowering plants and 274 vertebrates by 2100 if construction work continues.
Another recent study suggests the dams will be bad news for many of the Himalayas' 300 species of fish. Jay Bhatt and colleagues at the University of Delhi studied distribution of fish species in 16 Himalayan rivers, and found that those richest in biodiversity, with the greatest number of endemic species, were also those where dams will be concentrated.
"Dozens of dam projects are already caught up in litigation due to faulty environmental impact assessments, displacement of people, inadequate compensation, destruction of traditional water and livelihood sources, and loss of biodiversity," says Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People, an informal group of organisations and individuals interested in the impact of dam-building. The combined effect of several hundred new dams would be gargantuan, he adds.
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SEOUL: North Korea confirmed Friday that it had arrested a US citizen in November, saying legal action would be taken against him but giving no details of the charges.
The man, identified as Pae Jun-Ho, entered North Korea on November 3 as a tourist, and "committed a crime" against the country, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
"He was put into custody by a relevant institution," it added.
The United States has no diplomatic ties with North Korea and KCNA said consular officials from the Swedish embassy, which acts on behalf of the US, had visited Pae on Friday.
"Legal actions are being taken against Pae in line with the criminal procedure law" of North Korea, the agency said without elaborating.
The arrest was first reported earlier this month by a South Korean newspaper which had identified the detainee as a a 44-year-old Korean-American tour operator.
KCNA said Pae was detained as he entered the north-eastern port city of Rason which lies inside a special economic zone near North Korea's border with Russia and China.
Several Americans have been held in North Korea in recent years.
In 2010 former US president Jimmy Carter won plaudits when he negotiated the release of American national, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, sentenced to eight years of hard labour for illegally crossing into the North from China.
On another mercy mission a year earlier in 2009, former president Bill Clinton won the release of US television journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee, jailed after wandering across the North Korean border with China.
CNN asked people from all over the world to send in their best moments of 2012
From the Philippines to Scotland, hundreds of people sent their most memorable images
Submissions include exhilarating holidays, the birth of kids, the realization of dreams
What was your best moment of 2012? Send us your pictures
(CNN) -- For some it was an exhilarating holiday to an exotic place, finding new love or conquering their greatest fear. For others, it was witnessing an historic event.
And for a few, it was simply a case of being in the right place at the right time to capture a moment that will forever stick in the mind.
CNN asked people from all over the world to send in their highlight of the year. From the Philippines, to Scotland, to South Africa, hundreds of people shared their most treasured images.
2012 was the year the Olympics games came to London, and, unsurprisingly, many people sent in their images of the various competitions held around the capital.
Read: Your photos from Australia's total solar eclipse
Sub-zero swim
HIDE CAPTION
Gaya Ilang, who works as the artist Gaya3in1, was lucky enough to participate in the Games' spectacular opening ceremony -- playing a nurse. She sent in an image of proud participants posing eagerly just before they took part in the ceremony.
"I like this [image] as it has performers from different categories -- a snapshot of the ceremony -- and reminds me of the excitement of the day, clearly visible on everyone's faces," she said.
Sport of a non-Olympic kind captured the imagination of Jamie McCaffrey from Ottawa, Canada. He submitted this lively image of soldiers from the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment of the Canadian Army Reserves competing in the tug of war at the annual Glengarry Highland Games in Maxville Ontario.
"The sight of these soldiers in a brutal test of raw strength while combined with the skirl of the pipes, the colors and flash of the different tartans on the kilts, and the cheer of the crowd was a feast for the eyes and ears," he said.
"Although, I understand that the music of the bagpipes may not be for everyone -- subtle it is not," he added.
Read: Your Diwali shots from around the world
From the bombast of organized games to the quiet joy of a proud parent, many people chose their children as the source of their best moments of 2012.
Charlotte Brocker from Berlin, Germany, captured a wonderful image of her son Malik wearing his Ramones t-shirt on a bike ride in August.
My cheerful and determined young man helped me to realize what matters in life and what doesn't Charlotte Bröcker, iReporter
Malik was born with clubbed feet and a physical condition called Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenitas, which means he has little muscle strength in his limbs.
His mother took the photo in August after casts set on Malik's legs to strengthen them had been taken off.
"My cheerful and determined young man helped me to realize what matters in life and what doesn't," she said.
"Malik is a very happy, easy going young man, not much can hold him back, not even being stuck in casts. I also love how he's rocking that t-shirt!"
For some, 2012 was the year not just of striking out on to new journeys, but of returning home.
Jessica Munoz from California, U.S., was thrilled to be reunited with her soldier husband on his return from Afghanistan. The poignant moment when she was reunited with her husband was captured by her friend, Libby Lugo.
"My friend literally grabbed the camera out of my hands and pushed me in the right direction [to her husband]," she said.
"All the stress and fear and pain suddenly were replaced with love and magic and joy. I felt like I had gotten something precious back that was taken from me."
And sometimes it was images even closer to home that made for the best moments of the year. Even right outside the window.
Read: The Philippines shows the world how to celebrate Christmas
Abdel Hamid Zein took these beautiful, surreal images from the window of his 50th floor apartment in Dubai.
All the stress and fear and pain suddenly were replaced with love and magic and joy Jessica Munoz, iReporter
"It is foggy in Dubai on rare occasions and usually lasts for two to three hours in the morning," he said.
"It was quite impressive, because it's not everyday you wake up and you find yourself above the clouds."
And of course what year would be complete without at least one ambition being realised?
For Julie Fox, a trip to Elvas, Portugal to ride a balloon at the International Hot Air Balloon Festival provided the chance to tick one dream off her life list -- particularly when she found out the rides were free.
"I'd always had a romantic image of hot air ballooning over the Serengeti or somewhere like that but have never been able to afford it," she said.
"The whole experience: Inflation, take off, the quiet contemplation of the countryside and the aerial views, wondering where we would land and the fun of packing up the balloon before driving back to the launch site is something that will stay with me forever."
President Obama is nominating Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, CBS News has learned. An official announcement is forthcoming later today.
Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, has widely been seen as the frontrunner for the position since U.N. ambassador Susan Rice withdrew her name from consideration. Rice came under heavy fire from Republican senators for putting forth a flawed explanation of the events in the Sept. 11 consulate attack in Benghazi, Libya in the days after the attack.
Kerry is expected to be confirmed with relative ease in the Senate. The 69-year-old senator is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is widely respected in Democratic foreign policy circles. Clinton plans to leave her post in January.
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick will now appoint someone to serve in Kerry's seat until a special election is held between 145 and 160 days of Kerry leaving the Senate. Soon-to-be-former Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who lost his seat in November, could run on the Republican side. Democrats being discussed include Ted Kennedy Jr., Reps. Ed Markey, Michael Capuano, Steve Lynch, and even actor Ben Affleck.
CBS News' Major Garrett and Caroline Horn contributed to this report.
The National Rifle Association stood its ground today in arguing that the answer to gun violence in schools is an armed security force that can protect students, while blaming the media and violent entertainment and video games for recent deadly shootings.
"The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre said in presenting the NRA's first comments about the Connecticut school shooting since it occured a week ago today.
LaPierre offered no olive branch to gun-control advocates who have called for tougher laws in the wake of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Instead, he called for schools across the country to recruit armed security professionals to protect their students.
"It's not just our duty to protect [our children], it's our right to protect them," LaPierre said at a news conference. "The NRA knows there are millions of qualified active and reserved police, active and reserve military, security professionals, rescue personnel, an extraordinary corps of qualified trained citizens to join with local school officials and police in devising a protection plan for every single school."
He was interrupted twice by protestors who stood in front of LaPierre's podium holding signs and shouting that the NRA "has blood on its hands" and that the NRA is "killing our kids." The protestors were eventually escorted out of the room.
President Obama Launches Gun-Violence Task Force Watch Video
President Obama on Gun Control: Ready to Act? Watch Video
Joe Biden to Lead Task Force to Prevent Gun Violence Watch Video
LaPierre also scoffed at the notion that banning so-called assault weapons or enacting gun control laws would stop school violence. He instead cast blame for gun violence in schools on violent entertainment, including video games, and the media.
"How many more copycats are waiting in the wings for their moment of fame from a national media machine that rewards them with a wall of attention they crave while provoking others to make their mark?" he asked.
LaPierre announced that former U.S. congressman Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas would lead the NRA's effort to advocate for school security forces.
The leadership of the NRA has held off on interviews this week after refusing to appear on Sunday morning public affairs shows this past weekend. They said they would grant interviews beginning next week to discuss their position.
NRA News anchor Ginny Simone said Thursday that in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, membership surged "with an average of 8,000 new members a day."
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the NRA is partially to blame for the tragedy.
"We're not trying to take away your right to advance the interests of gun owners, hunters, people who want to protect themselves," Bloomberg told "Nightline" anchor Cynthia McFadden in an interview Thursday. "But that's not an absolute right to encourage behavior which causes things like Connecticut. In fact, Connecticut is because of some of their actions."
The guns used in the attack were legally purchased and owned by the shooter's mother, Nancy Lanza, whom Adam Lanza shot to death before his assault on the school.
In the aftermath of the shooting, many, including Bloomberg, have called for stricter regulations on the type of weapons used in this and other instances of mass gun violence this year.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has said she intends to introduce a bill banning assault weapons on the first day of next year's Congress -- a step the president said he supports.
It is tragic that it took the deaths of 20 children, but it seems that the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown has finally shifted the debate about guns and violence in the US.
In focusing on Newtown, Connecticut, we mustn't lose sight of the full extent of this problem, on which mass shootings barely register as a statistical blip. The figures are staggering: in 2010, there were 11,078 homicides and 19,392 suicides committed using firearms in the US.
International comparisons show that the US is an outlier among wealthy nations for its high rates of gun ownership and gun violence, and that there is a correlation between gun availability and gun homicide across nations (Journal of Trauma, vol 49, p 985 ).
Such research suggests that restrictions on the availability of guns in the US could bring down the death toll. But correlation does not prove causation, and there are many reasons why homicide rates may vary from country to country. Unfortunately, good data at the individual level on gun ownership in the US – who has them and how that relates to violence – is seriously lacking, in large part because the National Rifle Association has used its political influence to curtail research.
Research restrictions
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has faced particularly onerous restrictions. Back in the 1990s, Congress slashed its budget for studying gun violence and passed language preventing funds from being used to promote gun control. Questions on gun ownership have also been stripped from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, the survey used by the CDC to investigate how risky behaviours lead to death, disease and injury.
"There's a limit to what you can achieve if you can't do original data collection," says Philip Cook of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, one of the leading researchers in the field.
Despite these formidable obstacles, there is now a body of evidence pointing to what works, and what doesn't, in reducing gun violence (Crime & Delinquency, doi.org/d66b69).
While political rhetoric focuses on gun control, the strongest evidence comes from community-based law enforcement. Best studied are the "focused deterrence" strategies promoted by the National Network for Safe Communities. These involve police and community leaders meeting with the criminal groups – not necessarily formal gangs – that in many cities are responsible for more than half of all gun violence.
These encounters deliver a clear message: "We know who you are; we're not going to tolerate what you're doing, and here's what will happen if you don't clean up your act." Help is also offered to street criminals who want to change their ways.
In Boston, where the approach was pioneered in the 1990s, "Operation Ceasefire" was credited with a 63 per cent reduction in youth homicides. Similar efforts have spread to several dozen other US cities. Of 10 rigorous studies of their effectiveness, nine show statistically significant reductions in crime (Campbell Systematic Reviews, doi.org/j3d)
Assault on rifles
President Barack Obama now says that Congress will be sent a package of gun control measures by January . These seem likely to include a ban on assault weapons like the rifle used at Newtown, controls on the sale of high-capacity ammunition clips, and eliminating loopholes that allow private sales of guns – thought to comprise 40 per cent of the trade – without any background checks on the purchaser.
Evidence for the effectiveness of such gun laws is less clear, and hard to assess – these are not controlled experiments and typically several measures are introduced at once, making it hard to tease apart their effects.
Nevertheless, experience in California, which prohibited private gun sales without background checks in 1991, suggests that this may be a useful step.
A new study of guns recovered by law enforcement conducted for the National Institute of Justice indicates that they move into criminal hands more slowly in California than in states with unfettered private sales. "Our 'time-to-crime' is longer," says Garen Wintemute of the University of California, Davis, one of the report's authors.
As for mass shootings, it stands to reason that removing assault rifles and high-capacity clips from sale should limit the death toll from individual incidents. Australia's experience is encouraging: after 13 mass shootings in 18 years, a ban on semi-automatic rifles and pump-action shotguns was introduced in 1996. It was associated with a reduction in overall gun homicide deaths – and there has not been a shooting involving five or more deaths since (Injury Prevention, doi.org/ff7gm4).
In the US, knee-jerk positions for or against gun control have until now won out over careful consideration of the evidence. In memory of the children who died at Newtown, it is time to put these divisions aside and begin a sensible, meaningful discussion about how to solve a terrible and complex problem.
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TOKYO: The toxic chemical made infamous by campaigning single mother Erin Brockovich has been found at up to 15,800 times safety limits in groundwater at a Japanese iron plant, the factory's operator said Thursday.
Excessive amounts of hexavalent chromium were discovered at Nippon Denko's plant in Tokushima in the country's west as it prepared to halt production of chromium salts at the sixties-era factory, the firm said.
Also known as chromium-6, cancer-causing hexavalent chromium was at the centre of the 2000 US film "Erin Brockovich", which starred Julia Roberts as a real life legal assistant who leads a battle against a California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply.
At the Japanese plant, the chemical was found at up to 400 times safety limits in soil and up to 15,800 times allowable levels in groundwater, Nippon Denko said, but added that "no hazards to human health or the outside environment" were reported.
"We voluntarily surveyed the soil and groundwater at the plant between June and August before the closure," a company spokesman said, adding that two dozen locations on the site were tested.
"At the moment, we're assuming the contamination is limited to the plant's compound and that no adverse effects have been caused to surrounding areas," a local government statement said.
The authority said its own survey had found no traces of the chemical in water surrounding the plant, which sits on landfill, or in wells on the fringes of the facility.
The company said it was planning to enclose contaminated areas with 11 metre containment walls to prevent seepage of the tainted groundwater.
NEW: Iowa motorists cope with wet, heavy snow and treacherous roads
Heavy snow, high winds stretch from Iowa to Wisconsin in the season's first blizzard
Tens of thousands without power in Nebraska, Iowa
Storm to crawl from Midwest to New England by Friday
Is the storm hitting near you? Share your photos and videos on CNN iReport.
(CNN) -- Does the end of the world start with a snowstorm?
Probably not, but a blizzard in the upper Midwest is proving potent enough to cut power to tens of thousands of homes and force schools to call it quits from Nebraska to southern Wisconsin Thursday -- one day ahead of the official arrival of winter and, as it happens, the predicted Mayan apocalypse.
As much as another foot of wet, heavy snow is expected in places, accompanied by winds gusting to 50 mph and blowing snow that could reduce visibility to just about zero, forecasters warn.
In Omaha, Nebraska, utility crews struggled overnight -- sometimes in near whiteout conditions -- to restore power to 38,000 customers left in the dark by the storm, according to the Omaha Public Power District. The utility urged customers to brace for slow going.
In neighboring Iowa, more than 30,000 customers were without power, most of them in the Des Moines area, according to MidAmerican Energy.
The storm -- the first blizzard of the season -- made travel treacherous throughout the region. Nebraska authorities closed much of snow-packed I-80 through the state Thursday morning as blowing snow dangerously reduced visibility.
As CNN iReporter Kevin Cavallin drove through Ames, Iowa, late Wednesday night, thick snow blanketed the roads and swirled in the frigid air.
Occasional flashes of lightning illuminated the snow-covered scene, punctuated by windy gusts of up to 40 miles per hour, as Iowa shivered under its first significant snowfall of the year.
But while the weather will make travel treacherous, Cavallin expects Iowa residents to get out and about as crews start the job of clearing the roads. "A hefty snow storm like this is not that unusual for Iowa. We get a lot of snow and a lot of wind," he said.
Fellow CNN iReporter Clarence Smith in Des Moines said it was the most snow he'd seen since 2009 -- and he warns its wet, heavy consistency is going to add to the challenges for motorists.
"I was just cleaning off my car and it is so wet, it is like plaster. It doesn't come off easily," he said. "At one point I was hitting it with a snow scraper, you can say chiseling, basically."
And while many Iowans may be cursing the weather Thursday as they slip and slide around, Smith points out that the state has enjoyed a record period without snow.
In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker declared a state of emergency, put the National Guard and state patrol on standby and closed state offices to the public in 20 counties most likely to be affected by the storm. Employees were still expected to report for work.
As much as 7 inches was already on the ground Thursday morning in parts of southern Wisconsin, with as much as another foot on the way during the storm's predicted Thursday afternoon peak.
The Wisconsin State Patrol and National Weather Service urged people to avoid traveling.
Blizzard warnings were up Thursday for portions of Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, Illinois and Wisconsin and virtually all of Iowa. Winter storm warnings extended further into Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin, as well as into Michigan and Indiana.
Most airports were operating normally, the FAA reported. One major exception was O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, where incoming flights were running nearly two hours behind because of high winds, the FAA said.
The storm is expected to slide over New England by Friday.
CNN's Jim Kavanagh, Jareen Imam, Laura Smith-Spark, Carma Hassan and Joe Sutton contributed to this report.
NEW YORK The New York Stock Exchange (NYX) is being sold to a rival exchange for about $8 billion, ending more than two centuries of independence for the iconic Big Board.
The buyer, IntercontinentalExchange Inc. (ICE), an upstart exchange based in Atlanta, made clear Thursday that little would change for the iconic trading floor in Manhattan's financial district if regulators approve the deal.
There will be dual headquarters in New York and Atlanta and ICE will open an office in Manhattan. NYSE CEO Duncan Niederauer will become president of the combined company and CEO of NYSE Group.
ICE said that the tie-up will create a top exchange operator covering a diverse lineup of markets and boosting efficiency.
"We believe the combined company will be better positioned to compete and serve customers across a broad range of asset classes by uniting our global brands, expertise and infrastructure," said IntercontinentalExchange Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Sprecher. "With a track record of growth and returns, clearing and M&A integration, we are well positioned to transform our combined companies into a premier global exchange operator that remains a leader in market evolution."
Sprecher will keep his positions. Four members of the NYSE board will be added to IntercontinentalExchange's board, expanding it to 15 members.
NYSE Euronext Inc. shareholders can chose to receive either $33.12 in cash, .2581 IntercontinentalExchange Inc. shares, or a combination of $11.27 in cash plus .1703 shares of stock.
IntercontinentalExchange plans to fund the cash portion of the acquisition with a combination of cash and existing debt. It added that the addition of NYSE will help it cut costs and should boost its earnings by more than 15 percent in the first year after the deal closes.
The deal has been approved by the boards of both companies, but still needs the approvals by regulators and the shareholders of both companies. It's expected to close in the second half of next year.
Exchanges have repeatedly attempted to merge recently as competition intensifies and commissions decline.
Last year, IntercontinentalExchange and Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. made a failed $11 billion bid to buy NYSE Euronext.
Earlier this year, European regulators blocked Deutsche Boerse AG from buying NYSE Euronext.
Shares of NYSE jumped 40 percent in premarket trading to $33.75 and are headed for a new high for the year. Shares if ICE rose 5 percent, to $134.98.
Shares of both companies had been halted in premarket trading earlier Thursday.
Schools across the country, already on edge following last week's massacre of 20 students and six adults at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school have been further unnerved following a series of copycat threats, sometimes yielding arrests and caches of deadly weapons.
From California to Connecticut, police in the past five days have arrested more than a dozen individuals in Indiana, South Carolina, Maryland and elsewhere who were plotting or threatening to attack schools.
"After high-profile incidents like the shootings at Columbine and Sandy Hook, threats go off the wall. Some of those threats turn out to be unfounded, but sometimes those incidents propel people planning legitimate threats," Ken Trump, a national school safety consultant, told ABCNews.com.
CLICK HERE FOR AN INTERACTIVE MAP AND TIMELINE OF THE SANDY HOOK SHOOTING.
Many of these incidents turned out to be little more than young people acting out or seeking attention, but in some cases police found significant stockpiles of firearms and ammunition.
Just a few hours after the world learned what happened inside the halls at the Sandy Hook elementary school, police arrested a 60-year-old Indiana man who had allegedly threatened to "kill as many people as he could before police stopped him," according to the police report, at an elementary school in Cedar Lake, Ind.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
Indiana School Shooting Threat: Parents Not Notified Watch Video
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When Von Meyer was arrested, just 1,000 feet from Jane Ball Elementary School, police confiscated from his home $100,000 worth of guns and ammunition including 47 weapons.
The school was placed on lockdown.
Meyer's case was taken by the Lake County public defender's office, but an attorney has not yet been assigned. He has been charged with seven crimes, including felonious intimidation, and an automatic "not guilty" plea was made on his behalf at a hearing on Tuesday.
Many of the suspects arrested in the wake of the Connecticut shooting were themselves school students – teenagers or young adults.
On Wednesday, in Laurel, Md., an unidentified student at Laurel High School was taken to the hospital and placed under psychiatric evaluation after school security officials found maps of the school and lists of students they believed he planned to kill.
Authorities called the evidence a "credible threat." The student, however, was not arrested or charged with a crime.
In Columbia, Tenn., police arrested Shawn Lenz, 19, who on Saturday posted to Facebook that he felt like "goin on a rampage, kinda like the school shooting were that one guy killed some teachers and a bunch of students."
He later told police that "it was stupid" to have written what he did. Lenz was arraigned Tuesday on terrorism and harassment charges and was appointed a public defender. He did not enter a plea.
A Tampa, Fla., school was put on lockdown two days in a row, Tuesday and Wednesday, after students found bullets on a school bus. Police there have made no arrests.
Despite the rash of recent threats, anecdotal data compiled by Trump's National School Safety and Security Services and analyzed by Scripps Howard found that there were approximately 120 known but thwarted plots against schools between 2000 and 2010. The list is not comprehensive and many incidents likely went unreported.
Fifty-five of those known threats -- all thwarted -- involved guns and 22 of them involved explosive devices, according to the Scripps Howard report.
"We're getting better at preventing these situations," Trump told ABC News.com.
But in that same time there were about 50 lethal school shootings, including the killing of 32 people at Virginia Tech.
"While shootings statistically may be rare, they impact a community and these kids forever," said Trump.
Like a Christmas bauble hanging in the night, this view of a backlit Saturn shines in the darkness. The image was taken during a rare chance for NASA's Cassini spacecraft to observe the planet's rings while in Saturn's shadow. Conveniently, Saturn blocks the sun and the rings are illuminated from behind.
As well as providing a unique view of an already enchanting world, the image reveals details in the rings that aren't easily seen in direct sunlight. The picture is a composite of infrared, red and violet-spectrum photos taken by Cassini in October and released this week.
The last opportunity for Cassini to spot Saturn from this angle was in 2006, when NASA created a mosaic of images that revealed previously unknown faint rings around the planet.
The two tiny dots in the lower left-hand quarter of the photo are two of Saturn's moons, Enceladus and Tethys. Enceladus is closer to the rings; Tethys is below and to the left. Previous Cassini fly-bys discovered that Enceladus is a geologist's paradise of snaking ridges, chasms and scratches, while Tethys hosts a mysterious spear-shaped feature.
For more on Saturn and Cassini, visit our Saturn and its moons topic guide.
LONDON: Bank of England policymakers voted 8-1 to maintain their quantitative easing stimulus programme at their December meeting, repeating the voting pattern from the previous month, minutes showed on Wednesday.
The BoE's nine-member monetary policy committee (MPC) had voted earlier this month to keep the QE stimulus amount at 375 billion pounds ($611 billion, 460 billion euros).
Polcymakers were also unanimous in keeping the bank's key interest rate at 0.50 percent, according the minutes from the December 5-6 gathering. British borrowing costs have stood at this record low level since March 2009.
Lone policymaker David Miles voted again this month for an extra £25 billion for the asset purchasing programme in order to lift economic growth, repeating his call from November.
Under quantitative easing, the Bank of England creates cash that is used to purchase assets such as government and corporate bonds with the aim of boosting lending and in turn economic activity.
He was best known for contentious confirmation battle over his Supreme Court nomination
Bork was a staunch advocate for 'originalism'
He was 85
Washington (CNN) -- Former federal judge and conservative legal scholar Robert Bork died early Wednesday at his home in Virginia, his family confirmed to CNN.
Bork, who was 85, was best known for being nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, only to be rejected for the post after a contentious confirmation battle led by left-leaning groups who opposed his conservative judicial philosophies.
Bork had recently served as a senior legal adviser to Republican Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. He was a solicitor general during the Nixon administration and first gained notoriety for acceding to the president's order to fire the special prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal in 1973, an episode known as the "Saturday Night Massacre."
But it was the Senate's rejection of his high court nomination that earned the conservative Bork a political legacy -- symbolic of the contentious, partisan nature of congressional confirmations.
In recent years, Bork was a well-regarded conservative voice on legal and constitutional matters, author of several books and frequent commentator.
He told CNN in 2005 that he had to endure his failed nomination as a metaphor. To "Bork" someone has entered the popular lexicon as attacking a public figure in the media for partisan gain.
"My name became a verb," he said. "And I regard that as one form of immortality."
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Jeffrey Toobin, CNN's senior legal analyst, called Bork "an epic figure in American law."
Bork was also known as a staunch advocate for "originalism," a principle that defends the original intent of the Constitution.
Toobin said Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas followed Bork's example on this principle.
It made Bork "one of the intellectual godfathers of the conservative movement in this country," Toobin said.
This fall, he was tapped to co-chair Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's justice advisory committee.
Bork suffered in past years with heart disease. Before his death, he was a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, which researches and analyzes issues involving defense policy, international relations, health care, technology culture and law.
The foundation's president and CEO, Kenneth Weinstein, said Bork will be missed.
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," Weinstein said in a statement on the organization's website.
MCLEAN, Va. Robert H. Bork, who stepped in to fire the Watergate prosecutor at Richard Nixon's behest and whose failed 1980s nomination to the Supreme Court helped draw the modern boundaries of cultural fights over abortion, civil rights and other issues, has died. He was 85.
Son Robert H. Bork Jr. confirmed to The Associated Press his father died Wednesday at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington, Va. The son said Bork died from complications of heart ailments.
A spokesman for the Washington think-tank Hudson Institute where Bork was a distinguished fellow confirmed his death to CBS News.
Brilliant, blunt, and piercingly witty, Robert Heron Bork had a long career in politics and the law that took him from respected academic to a totem of conservative grievance.
Along the way, Bork was accused of being a partisan hatchet man for Nixon when, as the third-ranking official at the Justice Department he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned rather than fire Cox. The next in line, William Ruckelshaus, refused to fire Cox and was himself fired.
Bork's drubbing during the 1987 Senate nomination hearings made him a hero to the right and a rallying cry for younger conservatives.
The Senate experience embittered Bork and hardened many of his conservative positions, even as it gave him prominence as an author and long popularity on the conservative speaking circuit.
"Robert Bork was a giant, a brilliant and fearless legal scholar, and a gentleman whose incredible wit and erudition made him a wonderful Hudson colleague," said Hudson Institute head Kenneth Weinstein.
Known before his Supreme Court nomination as one of the foremost national experts on antitrust law, Bork became much more widely known as a conservative cultural critic in the years that followed.
His 1996 book, "Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline," was an acid indictment of what Bork viewed as the crumbling ethics of modern society and the morally bankrupt politics of the left.
"Opportunities for teen-agers to engage in sex are ... more frequent than previously; much of it takes place in homes that are now empty because the mothers are working," Bork wrote then. "The modern liberal devotion to sex education is an ideological commitment rather than a policy of prudence."
Bork, known until his death as "Judge Bork," served a relatively short tenure on the bench. He was a federal judge on the nation's most prestigious appellate panel, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, from 1982 until 1988, when he resigned in the wake of the bitter Supreme Court nomination fight.
Earlier, Bork had been a private attorney, Yale Law School professor and a Republican political appointee.
At Yale, two of his constitutional law students were Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham.
"I no longer say they were students," Bork joked long afterward. "I say they were in the room."
Nixon named Bork as solicitor general, the administration's advocate before the Supreme Court, in January 1973.
Bork served as acting attorney general after Richardson's resignation, then returned to the solicitor general's job until 1977, far outlasting the Nixon administration.
U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings on Capitol Hill in Washington Sept. 16, 1987.
/ AP Photo
Long mentioned as a possible Supreme Court nominee, Bork got his chance toward the end of Ronald Reagan's second term. He was nominated July 1, 1987, to fill the seat vacated by Justice Lewis F. Powell.
Nearly four months later the Senate voted 58-42 to defeat him, after the first national political and lobbying offensive mounted against a judicial nominee.
It was the largest negative vote ever recorded for a Supreme Court nominee.
Reagan and Bork's Senate backers called him eminently qualified — a brilliant judge who had managed to write nearly a quarter of his court's majority rulings in just five years on the bench, without once being overturned by the Supreme Court.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., summed up the opposition by saying, "In Robert Bork's America there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women."
Critics also called Bork a free-speech censor and a danger to the principle of separation of church and state.
Bork's opponents used his prolific writings against him, and some called him a hypocrite when he seemed to waffle on previous strongly worded positions.
Despite a reputation for personal charm, Bork did not play well on television. He answered questions in a seemingly bloodless, academic style and he cut a severe figure, with hooded eyes and heavy, rustic beard.
Stoic and stubborn throughout, Bork refused to withdraw when his defeat seemed assured.
The fight has defined every high-profile judicial nomination since, and largely established the opposing roles of vocal and well-funded interest groups in Senate nomination fights. Bork would say later that the ferocity of the fight took him and the Reagan White House by surprise, and he rebuked the administration for not doing more to salvage his nomination.
The process begat a verb, "to bork," meaning vilification of a nominee on ideological grounds. In later years, some accused Bork of borking Clinton nominees with nearly the zeal that some liberal commentators had pursued him.
Bork denied any animus, and said he was happy commenting, writing and making money outside government. Even friends did not entirely believe that.
"He was very embittered by the experience," said lawyer Andrew Frey, a longtime friend who worked for Bork in the solicitor general's office. "He was not well treated, and partly as a result of that he did become more conservative."
Multi-million-dollar full-motion flight simulators give trainee pilots a good approximation of the ups and downs of real flight, but the powerful hydraulic rams they are mounted on make them far too big, expensive and dangerous for the home. Gamers should take heart, though: a novel kind of gaming chair called a haptic seat might one day bring them at least some of the sensations of a full-motion simulator.
The idea is predicated on the fact that motion produces certain force effects on your body - you are pressed down into the armrests of your seat as a helicopter, say, moves upwards. So Fabien Danieau of Technicolor in Rennes, France, and colleagues at the nearby INRIA lab reasoned that a chair with armrests and a headrest that can reproduce these effects, in tandem with the strong reinforcing visuals on screen, could mimic complex motion sensations.
To test the idea, they rigged up a chair in which a headrest and two armrests were each moved independently by a commercial game controller called a Novint Falcon which has a strong force-feedback capability. They then wrote simulation software that uses the Novint system to move the armrests up slightly to make you feel you are dropping - and vice versa. Moving one armrest more than the other, meanwhile, makes users feel they are rolling to one side. Push the headrest forward a tad and you'll feel you've slowed down quickly - or pull it back a bit and you'll feel your head is being dragged back by acceleration.
All three units can be moved at once to provide more complex motion sensations like rolling as speed changes, too. In tests, the team let 17 volunteers try out the system: they reported a "realistic sensation of self motion". The plan now is to extend the number of actuators to boost believability: "The prototype could be extended by adding more points of stimulation, for instance, for the legs," the team say in their paper.
The jury-rigged system they put together looks odd, with the force-feedback units mounted on a steel frame surrounding the chair, but the idea is that the tech could one day be built invisibly into a commercial gaming chair "to simulate a sensation of motion in a consumer environment". There are other ideas that could be built into future chairs, too: creepy chair-back vibrators that introduce spine-tingling effects are in development by Disney, for instance. The team presented their work at a conference on virtual reality in Toronto, Canada, last week.
PARIS: Coal is set to surpass oil as the world's top fuel within a decade, driven by growth in emerging market giants China and India, with even Europe finding it hard to cut use despite pollution concerns, according to a report published Tuesday.
"Thanks to abundant supplies and insatiable demand for power from emerging markets, coal met nearly half of the rise in global energy demand during the first decade of the 21st century," said Maria van der Hoeven, head of the International Energy Agency.
Economic growth is expected to push up further coal's share of the global energy mix, "and if no changes are made to current policies, coal will catch oil within a decade," she said in a statement.
The latest IEA projections see coal consumption nearly catching oil consumption in four years time, rising to 4.32 billion tonnes of oil equivalent in 2017 against 4.4 billion tonnes for oil.
That has consequences for climate change as coal produces far more carbon emissions responsible for global warming than other fuels.
But the IEA report on coal found that even countries which have committed themselves to reducing carbon emissions are finding it difficult to resist the renewed allure of coal.
A number of European countries have seen their use of coal for electricity consumption jump at the beginning of this year, including by 65 per cent in Spain, 35 per cent in Britain and 8 per cent in Germany.
The shale gas boom in the United States has led to a slump in coal prices there and subsequently on the market in Europe, where natural gas remains expensive.
This gave a price advantage to coal beginning last year, with the low price of polluting in Europe's emission trading scheme also a contributing factor.
"Low coal prices, supported by a low (emissions) price resulted in a significant gas-to-coal switch in Europe," said the report.
European countries have been slow to exploit shale gas deposits, concerned about possible environmental damage, but the IEA pointed out that the US experience shows that tapping it can bring benefits from lower coal use as well as lower electricity costs.
"Europe, China and other regions should take note," said van der Hoeven.
Moreover, the IEA report doesn't foresee within the next five years the widespread take-up of technology to capture and store underground carbon emissions from burning coal.
Van der Hoeven warned that "coal faces the risk of a potential climate policy backlash" unless there is technological progress or a replication of the US experience.
The IEA, the energy advisory arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of 34 industrialised nations, sees non-OECD developing countries as driving the increase in coal consumption due to population growth and rising electricity consumption as their economies grow and modernise.
In its baseline scenario, the IEA sees rapid increases in power generation making India the second-largest coal consumer in 2017, displacing the United States where the shale gas boom makes coal uncompetitive.
Chinese coal consumption is forecast to account for more than half of global demand by 2014, with the country also displacing the United States as the biggest coal polluter on a per-capita basis.
The IEA sees China's coal demand increasing by an average of 3.7 per cent per year to 3,190 million tonnes of coal equivalent in 2017.
Even in the case of a slowdown in the breakneck growth in the Chinese economy the IEA sees the country's use of coal growing by 2 per cent per year, as well as the overall coal market growing.
The agency said that given its position developments in the Chinese market would largely determine the course of the global coal market, saying: "China is coal. Coal is China."
The IEA believes that current mining and port expansion projects are sufficient to meet China's rising needs, but expressed concern if the current low prices and uncertainties about the economic outlook make investors overly cautious.
Cancellations or a slowdown in "development projects might lead to tightened international coal markets" in the next five years, the IEA warned.
The report sees only the United States making reductions on coal-based carbon emissions on per capita and per economic output measures thanks to cheap gas displacing coal.
Increased coal use pushes up China's emissions on a per capita basis, displacing the United States as the top polluter.
However. China is also seen as making the most gains in emissions efficiency, followed by the United States.
Neither the Europe nor India are forecast to make considerable gains in emissions efficiency.
NEWTOWN, Conn. Family members have gathered for the first of eight funerals for school shooting victims to be held at a Catholic church in Newtown, Conn.
A motorcade of dozens of vehicles led by police motorcycles accompanied the family of 6-year-old James Mattioli to St. Rose of Lima on Tuesday. His funeral comes a day after two other 6-year-old boys were laid in the first of a long, almost unbearable procession of funerals.
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Holiday week is full of funerals for Newtown, Conn.
Margarita Rosniak and her 10-year-old daughter, Charlotte, watched from the sidewalk as people entered the church. They had traveled from California for a Christmas vacation in New York and came to Newtown to join the residents in their grief.
Clutching her daughter close, Margarita Rosniak spoke of sympathizing with the parents. Her daughter says she plans to do a school project on the massacre. She asks, "What was the point of it? They're just little kids."
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Funerals begin for Conn. shooting victims
Meanwhile, a funeral for another of the 20 innocent children killed - 6-year-old Jessica Rekos - was also scheduled for Tuesday. Her family says she loved horses and had just asked Santa for new cowgirl boots and a cowgirl hat, CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston reported.
Security remained high, and the small, affluent Connecticut community was still on edge as the rest of the country prepared for the Christmas holidays.
"There's going to be no joy in school," said 17-year-old P.J. Hickey. "It really doesn't feel like Christmas anymore." But he added, "This is where I feel the most at home. I feel safer here than anywhere else in the world."
In a sign of investors distancing themselves from gun makers, private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management announced it would sell its stake in major arms manufacturer Freedom Group. It said in a statement, "It is apparent that the Sandy Hook tragedy was a watershed event that has raised the national debate on gun control to an unprecedented level."
The mystery of why a smart but severely withdrawn 20-year-old, Adam Lanza, shot his mother to death in bed before rampaging through Sandy Hook Elementary, killing 20 children ages 6 and 7, was as deep as ever.
Sandy Hook Elementary will remain closed indefinitely.
Investigators say Lanza had no ties to the school he attacked, and they have found no letters or diaries that could explain why he targeted it. He forced into the school shortly after its front door locked as part of a new security measure. He wore all black and is believed to have used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle, a civilian version of the military's M-16. Versions of the AR-15 were outlawed in the U.S. under the 1994 assault weapons ban, but the law expired in 2004.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges and visited ranges together.
At the White House on Monday, spokesman Jay Carney said curbing gun violence is a complex problem that will require a "comprehensive solution." He did not mention specific proposals to follow up on President Barack Obama's call for "meaningful action."
New York City's billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, perhaps the most outspoken advocate for gun control in U.S. politics, again pressed Obama and Congress to toughen gun laws and tighten enforcement.
"If this doesn't do it," he asked, "what is going to?"
At least one senator, Virginia Democrat Mark Warner, said Monday that the attack has led him to rethink his opposition to the ban on assault weapons. And West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat who is an avid hunter and lifelong member of the powerful National Rifle Association, said it's time to move beyond the political rhetoric and begin an honest discussion about reasonable restrictions on guns.
In Newtown on Monday, minds were on mourning.
Two funeral homes filled for Jack Pinto and the youngest victim, Noah Pozner, who turned 6 just two weeks ago..
A rabbi presided at Noah's service, and in keeping with Jewish tradition, the boy was laid to rest in a simple brown wooden casket with a Star of David on it.
"I will miss your perpetual smile, the twinkle in your dark blue eyes, framed by eyelashes that would be the envy of any lady in this room," Noah's mother, Veronique Pozner, said at the service, according to remarks the family provided to The Associated Press. Both services were closed to the news media.
Noah's twin, Arielle, who was assigned to a different classroom, survived the killing frenzy.
At 6-year-old Jack Pinto's Christian service, hymns rang out from inside the funeral home, where the boy lay in an open casket.
In the middle of town, an ever-growing memorial has become a pilgrimage site for strangers who want to pay their respect.
One man told CBS Station WCBS why he visited: "Because I'm a dad with four beautiful daughters, when I found out it broke my heart. It's hard to sleep, I don't know how to feel."
Authorities say Lanza shot his mother, Nancy, at their home and then took her car and some of her guns to the school, where he broke in and opened fire. A Connecticut official said the mother, a gun enthusiast who practiced at shooting ranges, was found dead in her pajamas in bed, shot four times in the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
Lanza was wearing all black, with an olive-drab utility vest with lots of pockets, during the attack.
As investigators worked to figure out what drove him to lash out with such fury -- and why he singled out the school -- federal agents said he had fired guns at shooting ranges over the past several years but that there was no evidence he did so recently as practice for the rampage.
Debora Seifert, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said both Lanza and his mother fired at shooting ranges, and also visited ranges together.
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Political reaction to Newtown, CT tragedy
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Gun sales on the rise after Conn. shooting
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CBS News poll: Strong support for tougher gun laws
"We do not have any indication at this time that the shooter engaged in shooting activities in the past six months," Seifert said.
Investigators have found no letters or diaries that could explain the attack.
Whatever his motives, normalcy will be slow in revisiting Newtown.
Classes were canceled district-wide Monday, though other students in town were expected to return to class Tuesday.
Dan Capodicci, whose 10-year-old daughter attends the school at St. Rose of Lima Roman Catholic Church, said he thinks it's time for her to get back to classes.
"It's the right thing to do. You have to send your kids back. But at the same time I'm worried," he said. "We need to get back to normal."
Gina Wolfman said her daughters are going back to their seventh- and ninth-grade classrooms tomorrow. She thinks they are ready to be back with their friends.
"I think they want to be back with everyone and share," she said.
Newtown police Lt. George Sinko said whether to send children to school is a personal decision for every parent.
"I can't imagine what it must be like being a parent with a child that young, putting them on a school bus," Sinko said.
The district has made plans to send surviving Sandy Hook students to Chalk Hill, a former middle school in the neighboring town of Monroe. Sandy Hook desks that will fit the small students are being taken there, empty since town schools consolidated last year, and tradesmen are donating their services to get the school ready within a matter of days.
"These are innocent children that need to be put on the right path again," Monroe police Lt. Brian McCauley said.
With Sandy Hook Elementary still designated a crime scene, state police Lt. Paul Vance said it could be months before police turn the school back over to the district.
The shooting has put schools on edge across the country.
Anxiety ran high enough in Ridgefield, Conn., about 20 miles from Newtown, that officials ordered a lockdown at schools after a person deemed suspicious was seen at a train station.
Two schools were locked down in South Burlington, Vt., because of an unspecified threat. A high school in Windham, N.H., was briefly locked down after an administrator heard a loud bang, but a police search found nothing suspicious.
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