The growing frequency of these reports is disturbing: The Associated Press is reporting that at least 14 people have been killed and 41 people were taken hostage at an immigration services center in Binghamton, New York. The gunman, who was reportedly recently let go from his job at IBM, blocked the back door of the office with his car and entered a citizenship class while firing a weapon. Investigators found him dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and two handguns and a hunting knife were found at the scene. Four of the 41 hostages are currently in critical condition. At a news conference Governor Paterson called the incident "a senseless act of violence."

At a joint press conference in Strasbourg, President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy waxed poetic on each others' talents—and pledged mutual military and economic support. Obama praised Sarkozy's "initiative, imagination, creativity" and called France American's "oldest ally, our first ally." Sarkozy praised Obama's desire to "change the world" and his interest in the world as a whole—not just American interests. But the cheery sentiment came with some serious demands: Obama encouraged European intervention in Afghanistan. Sarkozy also praised Obama's choice to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which he characterized as a place that treated "terrorists with terrorist methods." The French leader noted that, since his nation had implored the United States to close the notorious prison, it was now their responsibility to help America deal with the prison's aftermath.

Ignore the harsh unemployment news: If the markets are any indication, the U.S. is actually in the throes of an economic recovery. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 39.51 points to 8017.59, its highest close since Feb. 9. The four-week streak of gains was the highest since 1933. Meanwhile, S&P added 8.12 to end at 842.5 and Nasdaq added 19.24 to close at 1621.87, and is up 2.8 percent this year.

Well, at least he paid his taxes. One of Barack Obama’s top economic advisers, Lawrence Summers, was paid over $5.2 million last year by the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, reports The Washington Post. The White House released financial disclosure funds Friday, which revealed Summers’ compensation for serving as the hedge fund’s part-time managing director after he resigned as president of Harvard University. The forms also showed that Summers received hundreds of thousands of dollars for delivering speeches at troubled Wall Street firms including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers. White House aides said Summers’ speaking engagements occurred before he was officially part of the Obama transition team.

Does this square with “family values”? In an interview that will air on Monday on The Tyra Banks Show, Levi Johnston says that Sarah Palin allowed him and Bristol to share a bedroom in her home, even though the Alaska Governor probably knew they were having sex. "I'm pretty sure she probably knew," says Johnston. "Moms are pretty smart." Johnston and Bristol called off their engagement last month after their son, Tripp, was born in December. Johnston also says that he and Bristol had safe sex “most of the time,” and that he needed to “mature” before marrying Bristol.

Remember when a bunch of Republican governors tried to posture themselves for the 2012 presidential race by saying they would refuse President Obama’s stimulus money? The Washington Post: “South Carolina's Republican governor will break his political logjam with the White House over stimulus funds today, his aides said, becoming the last governor in the nation to officially seek billions of dollars in federal economic recovery funds.” Governor Mark Sanford announced his decision at a 1 pm news conference today, complying with a deadline for the money. South Carolina’s 11-percent unemployment rate is the second highest in the country, and the state is poised to receive about $8 billion in rescue funds.

He really shot himself in the foot—well, thigh. After the New York Giants’ Super Bowl champ and wide receiver Plaxico Burress accidentally shot himself in the thigh in a Manhattan nightclub last November, his team said they’d stick with him, criminal charges and all. But they spoke too soon: Burress was abruptly cut loose from the team on Friday. “We hung in there as long as we could in hopes that there could be a resolution to this situation,” said the Giants general manager. Burress faces two felony counts of criminal possession of a loaded and unlicensed weapon, which carry a minimum charge of three and a half years in prison. It’s likely the NFL will suspend him for personal conduct violations, and even if his charges were reduced he would have missed most of this season. Burress caught the winning touchdown in the 2008 Super Bowl. Let’s hope he enjoyed it.

Conan O’Brien fans are probably hoping this news will start a trend. A Boston affiliate of NBC is refusing to air Jay Leno’s new talk show, set to premiere this fall, in favor of an hourlong local news show. The station owner is an early critic of the late-night talker, saying, “We don't think the Leno show is going to be effective in primetime." He continued: “It will be very adverse to our finances. [The news is] fundamentally is a better financial plan for us.” The peacock network isn’t taking the news lightly—president John Eck countered by saying, “WHDH's move is a flagrant violation of the terms of their contract with NBC,” and threatened to strip its affiliation. Boston is the seventh-largest television market, and if other affiliates jump onboard, the “innovative” new show could wind up dead on arrival.

With the bankruptcy of the Sun-Times Media Company this week, people are once again announcing the death of print. Should we be worried? Dan Gross writes at Slate, “While newspapers have serious problems, the recent failures of several newspaper companies … shouldn't necessarily lead to visions of the apocalypse. … Each company was undone in large measure by really stupid (and in one case criminal) activities by managers. … the newspaper companies that have failed wholesale were essentially set up to fail by inexperienced managers who believed piling huge amounts of debt on businesses whose revenues were shrinking even when the economy was growing was a shrewd means of value creation.”

A new Bureau of Labor Statistics report bears bad news: Not only did America lose 663,000 jobs in March, but we underestimated previous job loss. January's report of 655,000 jobs lost turns out to be nearly 100K shy of the 741,000 jobs actuall lost in the first month of the year. Though the economy has toyed with optimism in other arenas, like the stock market, employment remains flatly low. Though the Federal Reserve says employment will increase three-tenths of a percent shortly, some economists say we're heading for the double-digits.

Iowa isn’t a state you would consider on the vanguard of social liberalism, but the state Supreme Court overruled the state’s same-sex marriage ban today, saying it violated the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples and making Iowa the third state where gay marriage is legal. Though the decision is likely to split the electorate in the moderate state, the justices were—surprisingly, given how divisive the issue is—unanimous in their decision.

With both the House and the Senate passing their own versions of President Obama’s $3.5 trillion spending plan yesterday, Obama can finally get to work on the ambitious goals he laid out during the campaign. Both houses of Congress voted to trim the budget slightly to curtail his spending proposals and trim his plans to cut taxes, but the blueprints will give the President the opportunity to achieve tax cuts for the middle class, health care for the uninsured, money for college loans, and a cap-and-trade system to reduce global warming. The battle, however, is far from won: next, a conference committee will convene to discuss the differences between the two chambers' plans, as there is little agreement over the details.

This is one way to ruin a family vacation: Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was with his family at Disney World yesterday when news broke of his on 16 charges of racketeering, fraud, and extortion. Among the new revelations are allegations that Blagojevich delayed construction of a $2 million charter school in an effort to extort money from Rahm Emanuel. Five of Blago’s aides, including his brother, were also indicted. Blagojevich was all smiles when a reporter ambushed him at the Florida resort, though he refused to answer any questions and had her escorted away.

All better? Speaking at a town hall meeting today in Strasbourg, France, President Obama pledged to repair relationships with Europe, saying global cooperation was “sidetracked by Iraq.” "We must be honest with ourselves," Obama said. "In recent years, we've allowed our alliance to drift." Obama also appealed to Europe to pledge more troops to Afghanistan, saying “This is a joint problem and it requires a joint effort.” Summarizing the recent rift between the United States and Europe, Obama said “In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world," Obama said. “But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans chose to blame America for much of what's bad.”

Kenneth Cole wanted a turbaned man for its 25th anniversary campaign, put couldn't find a Sikh model, until Sonny Caberwal sent in a head shot at his brother-in-law's behest. Now the former business developer and tea entrepreneur has a contract with the Boss model agency and a spread in GQ's Style magazine where he poses in a black dinner jacket and pink turban. Caberwal said his modeling is not about him, "but about Sikh identity and our culture and traditions being in a positive light to people around the world."

The University of Colorado professor who infamously called 9/11 victims "Little Eichmanns" has won his claim that he was wrongfully dismissed from his tenured position. The jury deliberated for a day and a half and decided Ward Churchill's political views were a motivating factor in his firing, but they only awarded the former head of the ethnic studies department $1 in damages. "I didn't ask for money, I asked for justice," Churchill said outside the courtroom, seemingly nonplussed. Churchill will ask the judge to reinstate him as professor in light of the verdict, but a spokesman for the university said it would fight the request. Churchill wrote the controversial essay in 2001, claiming that some victims of 9/11 brought the attacks upon themselves for their part in the "global financial empire." It passed unnoticed until 2005, when it caused an uproar. Shortly afterward, the university dismissed Churchill for plagiarizing and falsifying some of his work, but Churchill said this was a pretext to force him out for his politically unpalatable views.

Maybe President Obama wasn’t the biggest celebrity in London? At the end of a dinner thrown by Sarah Brown for the spouses of G-20 leaders, president Obama headed straight for Harry Potter author JK Rowling like some star-struck fan and told her how he'd read her books and read them to his daughters. However, Obama is apparently less of a fanboy than shameless Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who asked for Rowling's autograph.

The Mexican police have nabbed another major player in the bloody Mexican drug war. They captured Carrillo Leyva–the Number Two of the powerful Juarez Cartel–yesterday while he was jogging in a park in a rich Mexico City suburb. It’s the fourth major arrest in the last few weeks. Leyva, who is known as “Lord of the Skies” for transporting cocaine to the States via airplane, had a $2 million bounty on his head. After this, Leyva may consider following in his father’s footsteps: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the former head of the Juarez Cartel, died in plastic surgery trying to change his appearance in 1997. The arrest came hours before Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were set to meet with Mexican officials to discuss arms smuggling.

New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff took himself out to the ballgame to review the twin New York baseball palaces just erected. What’d he think? The new Yankee Stadium is a “stoic, self-conscious monument to history,” with wider concourses (they couldn’t have been much narrower), seats closer to the field, and a hand-operated scoreboard. Citi Field, home of the Mets, is warmer but hokier—saved, Ouroussoff writes, by its interaction with the working-class Queens environment. (Relief pitchers can see an auto body shop from the visitors’ bullpen.) If you want to see the places for yourself, a few thousand dollars should do the trick.

Gordon Brown isn’t the only world leader with a crush on Barack Obama. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has hailed President Obama as “my new comrade” after their face-to-face talks and was pleased to report that Obama “can listen.” He said this was “totally different” than George W. Bush. In their meeting, Obama agreed to visit Moscow in July. "I liked the talks. It is easy to talk to him. He can listen. The start of this relationship is good," Medvedev said. "Today it's a totally different situation. ... This suits me quite well."

Ending a run epic in its length, fandom, and medical linguistics, E.R. aired its series finale on Thursday night after 15 years on NBC. “For all its grim backdrop—early morning Chicago after a night of storms, the horrifying wounds—it was a joyful scene,” writes the Los Angeles Times of the finale. The show is credited for serving as a model for not only the countless medical dramas that followed, but for one-hour nonprocedural dramas in general--a genre E.R. popularized almost instantly when it premiered in 1994. It’s no spoiler to say the finale, which was titled “And in the End,” ran much the way most of the show’s episodes did: some patients died, some survived, and the beleaguered staff struggled through their night with grim, poignant determination. The episode was directed by Rob Holcomb, who also helmed the series premiere.

Maybe she should try immaculate conception? Madonna's application to adopt the four-year-old Malawian orphan named Mercy has been rejected, the Associated Press reports, due to a requirement that prospective parents be residents in the country for 18 to 24 months before adoption. The news comes from two anonymous sources: a lawyer present during the ruling and a judge who saw the ruling but did not make it. Madonna's earlier adoption of David Banda was marred by charges that she used her celebrity to bypass requirements.