As Mitt Romney inches closer to selecting a vice presidential running mate, conservatives from influential media organizations are urging him to pick Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and the Weekly Standard all published pieces this week that argued Ryan would be a better pick than politicians like former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Ohio Senator Rob Portman. Democrats say they would be excited to run against Ryan, who authored the controversial Republican budget that calls for massive cuts to social programs.

With the violence mounting in Aleppo, at least 1,500 Syrians fled to Turkey on Thursday. The heavy fighting has created fear that there could be a mass migration. Turkey has already set up nine camps and absorbed more than 50,000 refugees since the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began 17 months ago. Turkish officials are reportedly worried about being overwhelmed by people fleeing the crisis.

The Justice Department has decided not to go after Goldman Sachs or its employees for the trades they made at the time of the financial crisis. The issue was made public when Senator Carl Levin alleged that Goldman misled its investors and the U.S. government and requested a criminal investigation looking into the subprime mortgages known as Abacus. The Justice Department released a statement Thursday stating they “have determined that, based on the law and evidence as they exist at this time, there is not a viable basis to bring a criminal prosecution with respect to Goldman Sachs or its employees in regard to the allegations set forth in the report.”

Victory! One year after a 3-1 defeat at the Women’s World Cup final in Germany, the United States won 2-1 against Japan in the Olympic final on Thursday. The final is said to have broken the Olympic women’s soccer attendance record with 83,000 people in attendance. The previous record was set in 1996 when 76,489 fans watched the final between the U.S. and China in Athens, Georgia.

James Holmes, the alleged Aurora movie theater gunman, is mentally ill. At least that’s what his attorneys argued at a pretrial hearing on Thursday. Holmes’s lawyers are asking for more information from prosecutors and investigators so they can get to the bottom of Holmes’s mental state and make sure he receives a fair trial. Meanwhile, more than 20 news organizations asked a judge to unseal documents relating to the case and to lift a gag order that prohibits the University of Colorado from releasing any details about Holmes. Prosecutors argued that lifting the seal could jeopardize their investigation.

The newly democratized Libya just elected its first president: former opposition leader Mohammed Magarief. The national assembly voted the moderate Islamist into power Thursday. He will lead the 200-member congress in its duties of choosing a prime minister, passing laws, and drafting a constitution. Magarief was a leader of Libya’s longest-running opposition movement and had been living in exile since the 1980s. “I am very very happy. This is a big responsibility,” he said. Even his competitor was pleased with the election, saying, “This is democracy, this is what we have dreamt of.”

Usain Bolt made history on Thursday by becoming the first sprinter to win the 100m and 200m in consecutive Olympics. He won the 100 on Sunday and the 200 today, having set the 200m world record of 19.30 seconds at the 2008 Olympics and then lowering it to 19.19 at the 2009 world championships in Berlin. Bolt finished ahead of fellow Jamaican Yohan Blake, who came in at 19.32 seconds.

Russian investigators have discovered 70 members of an Islamist sect living in an eight-story underground bunker near the city of Kazan. It's believed that the members have been below ground for a decade, including 20 children, many of whom have never been exposed to sunlight. The group is called the Fayzarahmanist sect, and they're followers of a self-declared prophet who tried to create his own independent Islamic state in the '70s. A criminal investigation has been opened into the unusual community, but no arrests have been made.

What an underachiever. The United States’ own Michael Eaton claimed a gold medal in the decathlon Thursday, but fell short of breaking his own world record for the event. His winning score of 8,869 points is the eighth-highest for the event in Olympic history. In order to win, Eaton had to sprint, run, jump, throw and vault with more skill than his competitors—including teammate Trey Hardee, who finished second. The wins marks the first time the U.S. has taken two decathlon medals in one Games since 1956.

Talk about making old concepts new. Singer/songwriter Beck is coming out with a new album in December, but it isn’t being released in MP3, CD or vinyl form. Instead, it will be a book of sheet music in which the buyer can play his or her own version of the 20 new songs. Called Beck Hansen’s Song Reader, an announcement on his website describes it as “an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012,” and says that, “Bringing them to life depends on you.”

Seventeen-year-old Claressa Shields won a gold medal Thursday in women’s middleweight boxing. Repping the U.S., Shields beat her 33-year-old opponent Nadezda Torlopova 19-12, shuffling, dancing, and even sticking her tongue out towards the end of the match. Shields’s victory marked the only gold-medal win for the U.S. boxing team at the London games. This Olympics was the first in which the men’s team, typically the most successful in Olympic boxing, received no metals at all.  This is the first Olympic games for the sport.

The highly secretive trial of Gu Kailai and her household aide, Zhang Xiaojun, began on Thursday and was over in four hours. The pair is accused of murdering British businessman Neil Heywood. It is not known when the verdict is expected to be announced, but neither Gu nor her aide contested the murder charges. International media were barred from the trial. A human-rights expert said that it is not uncommon for criminal trials in China to be resolved quickly. “Frankly, in my experience, it’s very unusual for criminal trials (in China) to extend beyond a day.”

Mitt Romney has yet to announce his vice presidential pick, but the Obama campaign is already issuing pre-emptive strikes against many of the hopefuls. In emails to supporters, the campaign wrote that Rob Portman “is one of the architects of the top-down Bush budget,” Tim Pawlenty’s record “is painful for the middle-class families who lived under his leadership,” and Marco Rubio “has led the way on almost every extreme position Mitt Romney has embraced.” A Romney campaign spokesman said the critiques are simply “negative smear campaigns against the possible GOP vice presidential nominees.” While a Portman confidante called the tactic “desperate.”

It was a story that kicked up a firestorm of national attention, and, just as quickly, it’s over. The Louisiana public charter school revealed by the ACLU to have a policy of testing all female students suspected of being pregnant and kicking out those who turned out to be, or who refused to be tested, has reversed its policy. The chairman of the rural Delhi Charter School claimed that no one at the school realized there was anything wrong with the policy until the ACLU (and everyone in the entire country) pointed it out.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seemed to have ignored all the warning signs in the days leading up to his estranged wife’s suicide. After her death, Kennedy told police that “she needed me to take care of her,” and according to the file, he had told Mary’s caretaker that he couldn’t do more for her because “she doesn’t want to help herself.” The caretaker along with Mary’s Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor contacted Kennedy just days before her suicide with concerns that she was not doing well. The 52-year-old mother of four was found hanging in her barn in May. Even after death Mary couldn’t escape controversy, as her siblings fought with her husband over where she should be buried.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal laid out all the reasons why Mitt Romney should choose Paul Ryan as his running mate. "The case for Mr. Ryan is that he best exemplifies the nature and stakes of this election," the paper wrote on Thursday. "More than any other politician, the House Budget Chairman has defined those stakes well as a generational choice about the role of government and whether America will once again become a growth economy or sink into interest-group donimated decline." Meanwhile, Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who was once considered the most likely potential V.P. pick based on the recent changes to his Wikipedia page, now says he thinks it's more likely he'll stay in the Senate than join Romney. "I just got elected two years ago. I think that's where I'm going to end up staying," he said. "I think it's a very important position right now."

News Corp. revealed a net loss of close to $1.6 billion on Wednesday after months of losses due to the company’s phone-hacking scandals. During the fiscal year ending June 30, the corporation spent $224 million due to investigations into the hacking, including $57 million in the fourth quarter alone. The media conglomerate also said that its decision to split its publishing and entertainment divisions is "on course." Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey said that the company was "targeting to make its initial regulatory filings around the end of the calendar year."

Libya’s National Transitional Council handed over power on Wednesday to the General National Congress, the 200 person national assembly that was elected last month. The congress is the country’s first body to be formed in free elections in over 47 years, and the handover marked the first peaceful government transition since before Muammar Gaddafi took over in 1969. After the handover, the National Transitional Council’s Chairman announced that the General National Congress was now the “sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people.” The Congress will have 30 days from its first official session to appoint a new prime minister and it must also oversee the drafting of a new constitution.

Fighting has erupted between gunman and police in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula. The fighting occurred near a police station in the city of al-Arish a day after the government launched a military offensive in the region, which continued into Thursday. The offensive was the result of an attack by militants that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers in the region on Sunday and attacks on security checkpoints during the week that wounded many others. The resulting military offensive on Wednesday killed at least 20 people. But a news report said on Thursday that “clashes resumed between armed men and police forces in front of police station number two in al-Arish.”

Everyone’s favorite alien life form is back! Sony Pictures Animation has signed a deal to develop a movie based on Alf, the hit 1980’s sitcom. The movie is expected to be a live action/CG hybrid similar to last summer’s breakout hit The Smurfs.  No director or screenwriter has been assigned to the film, but producing duties will be shared by Paul Fusco, Alf co-creator Tom Patchett, and Jordan Kerner, who produced the aforementioned Smurfs movie. The release date has not yet been announced.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t giving away whether Chief Justice John Roberts did in fact switch sides, swinging the Affordable Care Act decision in the Obama administration’s favor—but she’s certainly dropping some hints. In an interview with Reuters that also focused on a recent injury and her future with the court—she said she wants to serve at least three more years—Ginsburg said, "Don't ask me if the chief switched sides” before the question could even be asked. But she went on to explain that part of the job of being a Supreme Court Justice is to convince the other justices to change their views, and that there’s plenty of back-and-forth as a case is being decided. “It ain't over 'til it's over,” she said.

Ronald Poppo, the victim of the “Miami Zombie” Rudy Eugene, said that Eugene “turned berserk” and “ripped me to ribbons.” In recently released interviews with detectives, Poppo discussed the attack that left him with a mangled face and blind in both eyes. Poppo said he did not remember ever meeting or seeing Eugene before the day of the attack and that “for a very short amount of time I thought he was a good guy.” He also graphically described the incident: “He mashed my face into the sidewalk. My face is all bent and mashed up. My eyes, my eyes got plucked out. He was strangling me in wrestling holds at the same time he was plucking my eyes out.”

Sure, they’re being held indefinitely in a foggy legal limbo—but at least the inmates at Guantanamo have good entertainment options. Apparently their tastes are shifting away from the Harry Potter books, long a favorite of the inmates, to The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, the old sitcom starring Will Smith, which a librarian has said he is ordering the full run of. Another previous favorite: President Obama’s The Audacity of Hope. The offerings are part of a library of 28,000 books and videos in seven languages, mostly Arabic, Pashto, English, and French, and apparently the inmates partake not just for entertainment, but to learn English.

Security researchers at Kaspersky Labs have found a strange new cyber-espionage tool, and they say it’s from the same state-sponsored hackers who designed an espionage tool that recently flooded Iranian computers. The new spyware is called Gauss and it has infected at least 2,500 computers, mostly in Lebanon. Researchers say it may be the first example of state-sponsored cyberwarfare that includes the stealing of login information—in this case, banking credentials. One of them said that unlike other recently-discovered spyware, Gauss seems to have multiple purposes. “When you look at Stuxnet and DuQu, they were obviously single-goal operations,” he said. “But here I think what you see is a broader operation happening all in one.”

Who says the U.S. doesn’t make anything the world wants anymore? On Thursday, the Commerce Department reported the U.S. sent a record $185 billion in goods and services abroad in June. The trade data represents good news on several fronts. Imports fell in part because of a decline in the value of oil-related stuff we brought in from overseas. (Translation: thanks to lower oil prices, Americans had to spend less cash on overseas oil.) Despite slower growth abroad, foreigners still have a healthy appetite for stuff that’s made in America. And the smaller trade deficit indicates the pace of economic growth is picking up.

A 40-year-old Florida man jumped to his death from the Peninsula, one of Manhattan's most luxurious hotels. He leapt from the sun deck on the 22nd floor and landed on a Cadillac Escalade that was parked across 55th Street. The car's driver said he was waiting for his passenger in the car when he heard a “loud boom” and saw that his “passenger side was crushed in from above.” “I was in shock,” he said. “I had never seen a body like that, it was horrible. I just stood there staring at it until someone pulled me away.

Activists reported that the city of Aleppo had come “under fresh assault” with several areas of the city under attack, some by helicopter gunships. The Syrian observatory reported that 130 people were killed across the country on Wednesday, including 26 people in Aleppo. Meanwhile, Iran is planning a foreign-ministers summit, which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said would be a gathering of countries with “a correct and realistic position on the conflict.” Iran’s foreign minister said that 12 or 13 countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America will attend, but declined to name them. Critics of the summit say it is a meeting of countries that are already close to the Syrian regime.

President Obama dug at Mitt Romney's opposition to subsidies like one for wind energy producers that's about to expire and others that offer tax credits for cleaner oil alternatives. "The wind industry supports about 5,000 jobs across this state," the President said near a wind turbine manufacturing plant in Pueblo, Colorado Thursday. "Without those tax credits, 37,000 American jobs, potentially including hundreds of jobs right here, would be at risk." Obama touted, to a supportive crowd, the benefits of clean energy as a means of competing with other countries instead of continuing to subsidize the oil industry with $4 billion a year. The tax credit on companies that produce wind energy has been consistently renewed for the past twenty years but is set to expire at the end of this year. While Obama advocates renewing it again, Mitt Romney has made clear that, if elected, he'd let the subsidy die. 

Not even a broken leg could stop U.S. runner Manteo Mitchell from finishing the last 200 meters of his relay. With about half a lap of the 4 x 400-meter relay preliminaries to go, Mitchell felt a pop in his left leg. He finished the lap at 46.1 seconds, for a total of 2 minutes, 58.87 seconds, which led Team USA to tie for first with the Bahamas. After the race, a doctor informed him he had broken his left fibula. "I figured it's what almost any person would've done in that situation," Mitchell said.

The Curiosity rover took pictures from beyond the Gale Crater for the first time since landing on Sunday night. The images it sent back from looking toward the northern Horizon looked very similar to another planet. “The first impression that you get is how Earth-like this seems looking at that landscape,” a scientist at the California Institute of Technology said. Curiosity has sent back a slew of images since landing. There was concern that the swirl of dust caused by the landing thrusters had made rovers too dusty, but Justin Maki of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory disputed that. “We do see a thin coating of dust, but nothing too bad.”

A father and pediatrician in Delaware used a waterboarding-like technique to punish his daughter, holding her head under a faucet until her nostrils filled up with water, according to the 11-year-old alleged victim. Melvin Morse and his wife, Pauline Morse, were arrested and charged with multiple child-endangerment counts. Police first began investigating the couple after a neighbor reported seeing them drag their daughter across the driveway by the ankles and spank her. The girl and her sister are in the custody of Delaware’s Division of Family Services. The 11-year-old reportedly told police that she “could never understand what she did to be punished.”

Blake Fielder-Civil, the ex-husband of the late Amy Winehouse, was found choking on his vomit last week after taking heroin and drinking excessively. He’s currently in the hospital on life support after multiple organ failures forced doctors to put him in a coma. Fielder-Civil, who was married to Winehouse for two years, is often blamed for starting the singer’s drug abuse. His coma comes a little more than a year after Winehouse was found dead in her home from accidental alcohol poisoning. Her father, Mitch, asked her fans to hope for Blake’s recovery. “Terrible news about Blake this morning. Remember Amy loved him. Let’s pray for his recovery. Mitch,” he posted on Twitter.