The man who led authorities on a 100mph car chase in Texas, and who may be linked to the killing of Colorado’s state prison chief has been identified as paroled prison inmate Evan Spencer Abel, authorities said Thursday. The 28-year-old inmate had reportedly been convicted of several crimes in Colorado since 2003, and was a member of a white-supremacist prison gang, the 211s. Authorities spotted Abel leaving the home of prison chief Tom Clemens around the time he was shot Tuesday night. Ebel fired at police when they tried to arrest him, but was eventually shot. Ebel is now considered brain dead, said police, but has been hooked up to life support for organ harvesting. 

Several families of the children who were gunned down in the Newtown shooting were brought together Thursday at New York City Hall by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Vice President Joe Biden to call for a renewal of the assault-weapons ban. Biden, without calling the National Rifle Association by name, said it “must be awful being in public office and concluding that even though you might believe you should take action, that you can’t take action because of the political consequences you might face. What a heck of a way to make a living, what a heck of a way to have to act.” Senate Democrats have dropped the ban, citing a lack of votes, but announced Thursday that an expansion of federal background checks will be included in the revised bill.

Busy day on Capitol Hill. The House of Representatives on Thursday passed a $984 billion spending bill to avoid the looming government shutdown, which will keep the government funded through the rest of the fiscal year. The bill also cleared the Senate and will now head to President Obama’s desk. The bill moves some money around government agencies to help avoid the effects of the sequester. Meanwhile, the House also passed Paul Ryan’s budget, which offers sizable cuts to Medicare, repealing the 2010 Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), and a plan to achieve a balanced budget within 10 years. It’s unlikely to go much further though: it pretty much has everything in it that President Obama campaigned against.

Nice try, delivery guys. One month after the financially beleaguered U.S. Postal Service announced it would end Saturday delivery in an attempt to save $2 billion annually, Congress passed legislation Thursday requiring six-day delivery. The law does, however, leave room for the Postal Service to alter what services it offers on Saturdays. While it will no longer pick up or deliver first-class mail, magazines, and direct mail on Saturdays, the USPS will continue to deliver packages and pharmaceutical drugs. The Postal Service has said it could need a taxpayer bailout of more than $47 billion by 2017 if Congress does not allow it flexibility in changing its business model.

President Obama arrived in the West Bank on Thursday and met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while Gaza militants fired rockets into an Israeli border town Obama visited in 2008. The Israeli military said four rockets in total were fired, but the third and fourth ones landed in Gaza. No one was injured. On his first trip to Israel as president, Obama stressed the importance of the Israeli-U.S. friendship as well as committing to a two-state solution. In what had to be a disappointing omen—to say the least—a tree gifted by Obama to Israeli President Shimon Peres’s home was dug up Thursday morning to test for “pests.”

It's all fun and games until some nerd gets hurt. A new handbook on cyberwarfare says it's OK to kill hackers who perpetrate attacks causing death or serious property damage. The set of rules, written by 20 legal experts at the behest of NATO, is the first attempt to determine how international law should apply to state-sponsored cyberattacks. "Everyone talks about cyberspace as though it's the Wild West," the project's leader told The Guardian. "We discovered that there's plenty of law that applies to cyberspace." For example, just like in conventional warfare, civilian targets such as hospitals and nuclear power plants must be avoided at all costs. 

After Sandy Hook, author Stephen King published an e-book imploring Americans to find a middle ground on gun control. Since very few people read that e-book and since, just this week, police thwarted what could have been yet another massacre at the University of Central Florida, he's taken to the Bangor Daily News to ask again. King clarifies that, as a gun owner and deer hunter himself, he is “dead against repeal of the Second Amendment,” but that the truth is, the laws proposed to curb gun violence are not aimed at doing so—and if they were the Supreme Court would overturn them. “Stop with the paranoia, please,” he begs. “If they stand (and they probably will), the hunters can still hunt, the target shooters can still shoot, and homeowners can still have a weapon or two at hand for defense and protection. The rest of us will be a little safer.” 

Men are earning less because more of them are raised by single mothers, argues MIT professor David Autor in a new analysis for the center-left research organization Third Way. Roughly 63 percent of children surveyed lived in a house with two parents in 2010, a stark contrast to the 82 percent who lived in two-parent households in 1970, and usually the single parent raising the children is female. Evidence increasingly shows that men raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” writes Autor, who notes that less successful men are less appealing to women. This leads more women to choose to raise kids on their own rather than with an unsuccessful partner, potentially sparking, as Autor suggests, “a vicious cycle.”

Yoko Ono is all too familiar with the life-shattering effect of gun violence. Joining the multitude of celebrities pushing for stricter gun control, Ono tweeted an image of bloody glasses that appear to have belonged to her former husband, Beatles legend John Lennon, who was shot dead outside his New York City apartment. Above the grisly image of the blood-splattered specs is a stark statistic: “Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the U.S.A. since John Lennon was shot and killed on December 8, 1980.” The post is just one in a string of tweets against gun violence. It isn’t the only cause the energetic 80-year-old is focused on at the moment: just last month she launched an anti-fracking campaign against Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Beware when breaking up with a former world tennis champion, guys. Former tennis pro Jennifer Capriati had misdemeanor charges of battery and stalking filed against her Thursday because of allegations that she sent 283 texts to an ex-boyfriend and punched him four times while he was working out. Capriati, 36, and ex-boyfriend Ivan Dwight Brannan, 28, broke up last February. Police said there were six incidents between May 2012 and February 2013 in which Brannan called police to report incidents of stalking him and making harassing phone calls to his workplace. Capriati's attorney called the allegations "nonsense" and said that she intends to pleag "not guilty" when she appears in a Florida courtroom next month. 

Howard Stern as Tonight Show host, we hardly knew ye. The New York Times reports that NBC has made a commitment to bring the Tonight Show back to New York, replacing Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon as host. Though the deal has yet to be cemented, several “senior television executives” said that the switch is expected to take place by the fall of 2014, at the latest. Meanwhile in New York, NBC has quietly begun constructing a new studio for the Tonight Show at its headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Guess Leno's NBC-bashing jokes went over worse than we thought.

Good jokes dance on the line between funny and offensive—bad ones cross it. The Internet is in an uproar following an inflammatory joke by Republican Sheriff Joseph D. McDonald Jr., whose sly quip mocked fun at the idea of the president’s assassination. The punchline of the joke centered around Abraham Lincoln paying a visit to Obama and proposing that he go to the theater. The Massachusetts sheriff spoke out in defense of his wisecrack Wednesday, calling the controversy surrounding it “absurd.” McDonald said the joke was the equivalent of Democrats suggesting George W. Bush go hunting with Dick Cheney, who once inadvertently shot his hunting partner in the face.

The president of NYU has lost the confidence of his staff, basically, “by ignoring us,” writes Jeff Goodwin, a sociology professor at the school who led the charge against John Sexton back in December. Specifically, Goodwin and his fellow staffers are concerned about plans to expand NYU’s offices and dorms into the part of Manhattan’s Greenwich Village where many of them live, as well as lofty aspirations to build NYU branches overseas in places like Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, “where academic freedom, and free speech generally, are so parlous.” Unlike his employees, however, NYU’s trustees continue to have confidence in the president. Still, Goodwin remains convinced that the school needs a new head. “NYU would be better off with a more trusted and less divisive leader.” 

Gamblers in Las Vegas saw a strange sight Wednesday night: 98 people were arrested in a protest outside the Cosmopolitan resort that nearly shut down the entire Las Vegas Strip. More than 2,000 culinary workers stood on the Strip, blocking traffic and chanting to protest that there has not been a union contract at the resort in two years. “Cosmopolitan, look around, Las Vegas is a union town,” protesters chanted. A spokeswoman for Cosmopolitan, which is owned by Deutche Bank, said the resort is in ongoing negotiations. But it looks like what happens in Vegas isn’t staying in Vegas this time.

Was the cold weather Wednesday due to hell freezing over? Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly defended President Obama on his show Wednesday after fellow conservative Michele Bachmann criticized the president for his “lifestyle of excess” at the White House. At CPAC last week, Bachmann slammed Obama for having “five chefs on Air Force One ... two projectionists who operate the White House movie theater ... and someone to walk the president’s dog.” On Wednesday night’s show, O’Reilly said Bachmann—whom “the program had been fair to, always”—did not want to comment, that the Minnesota congresswoman was engaged in a “trivial pursuit,” and that Obama is “entitled to protection, convenience, and comfort.” He also noted that the president does not employ a dog walker.

Nothing like slapping 80 million years on the universe’s age to make you feel young. According to a new study released Thursday, scientists miscalculated the universe’s age by 80 million years—meaning it’s actually 13.81 billion years old. The officials from the European Space Agency’s Planck space probe who ran the study looked at the “afterglow” of the big bang—generally recognized as the most plausible theory of how the universe was born. The $900 million Planck telescope used in the study has been taking in data from the sky for 15 1/2 months. George Efstathiou, a director at the University of Cambridge who announced the news, said its importance is earth shattering. “We’ve uncovered a fundamental truth of the universe,” he said.

Bollywood star Sanjay Dutt was sentenced Thursday to five years in jail for allegedly getting guns from the men who were later convicted in the 1993 Mumbai bombings that killed 257 people and injured 750. Dutt, 53, is one of 100 people found guilty in the bombings, although he was cleared in 2007 for conspiracy charges in the blasts. He was found guilty in 2007 of illegally possessing an AK-56 rifle and a pistol, but maintains his innocence and says he had the guns to protect his family from threats. The son of two politicians, Dutt’s sister Priya is also a Congress M.P. Despite a troubled youth, Dutt is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars and was set to reprise his role in the enormously popular Munna Bhai films.

Looks like it may not have been North Korea’s fault after all. A part of the malicious code that caused computer-network outages at banks and major broadcasters in South Korea has been traced to a Chinese IP address, the Korea Communications Commission said Thursday. The outage occurred around 2:20 p.m. Wednesday, with skulls reportedly appearing on some computer screens, sending South Korean stocks into a nosedive. The KCC has continued to investigate the cyberattack and has not ruled out the possibility of North Korean involvement.

Colorado police said Wednesday that there are “no known suspects” in the murder of Tom Clements, the state’s director of corrections chief, who was shot dead when answering the door at his house Tuesday night. A spokesman for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department, Lt. Jeff Kramer, said there is no evidence that it was a robbery, but that a random killing has not been ruled out. Kramer said authorities are searching for a “boxy” late-model two-door car that a neighbor saw outside Clements’s home at the time of the shooting. While Gov. John Hickenlooper and other state officials praised Clements’s public service, not all his decisions were popular—in fact, he had been at the center of the controversial decision about which prisons to close.

This will make for some crazy family reunions. Scientists in Dubai have successfully bred a chicken with a duck’s DNA as its father. Yes, you read that right: scientists injected the cells a duck uses to produce eggs and sperm into the organs of a chicken embryo, and the chicken began to produce the duck’s sperm as it matured. Initially part of an experiment to increase hens’ fertility, scientists now say they may soon allow hens to lay eggs of other birds, including ducks, songbirds, hawks, and eagles. The larger goal: to bring back extinct species, according to a recent TED talk. The earth is sure going to look strange in the next few years.

The whole world is watching you, Cyprus—time to get your act together. On Thursday the country’s president will present a “plan B” bailout package amid threats by the European Union to cut off funds if a strategy to raise billions of euros is not in place by Monday. The proposals may still include a controversial tax on bank deposits, despite a day of emergency talks by Parliament on Wednesday—following discussions with Russia about an alternative rescue plan. To prevent bank runs, Cyprus’s banks will be closed the rest of the week, as well as on Monday, a scheduled banking holiday. The country is teetering on the edge of default after investing heavily in Greek debt and has been negotiating with the EU for a €10 billion rescue package.

Does this mean there is hope that Lindsay Lohan won’t serve that much time in jail? Singer Bobby Brown served just nine hours in jail Wednesday, despite being sentenced to 55 days for his third DUI. A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Brown was expected to serve nine days, but there was no word on why his sentence was cut so short. Brown was arrested in October for driving erratically and pleaded no contest to the DUI charge—his second in just seven months.