The FBI is taking the lead in what may be a terrorism investigation after four US Marines were killed in a gun attack at a military facility in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Officials said a single gunman opened fire at two locations – first at a recruiting station, then driving six miles to a Naval Reserve center where the four Marines were killed – before being fatally shot. It is still unclear whether he was killed by police or took his own life.

Authorities have also not yet said exactly how and where at the second location the Marines were shot, but neither location appeared to be a particularly high-security installation. 

CNN reported that at least three other people were injured, including a Chattanooga police officer a Marine recruiter and a Navy servicemember.

* Follow live updates from local paper the Chattanooga Times Free Press here.

* Special Report from ABC News and updates from the AP are here.

With more details of the circumstances of the attack expected to emerge over the coming hours, the FBI named the alleged shooter as Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez, reported to be a 24-year-old naturalized American born in Kuwait, but agents said it was “too early” to speculate on a motive.

The New York Times reviews what is known about the alleged gunman.

He played whiffle ball in a suburban neighborhood of swim meets and gently sloping lawns. He was a young man who was polite, who sometimes drove too fast, who was arrested on a drunken-driving charge. He was a hardened mixed-martial arts fighter who kept a blog where he mused about submitting to Allah.

 

Across the country in Colorado, the shooter in another mass killing – at an Aurora movie theater almost three years ago – was found guilty on all first-degree murder charges and could now face the death penalty.

http://twitter.com/NicoleAuerbach/status/621859399905230848

 

President Obama became the first sitting President to visit a federal prison when he went to the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma and met with inmates. Sarah Wheaton writes at Politico on how this week has seen a focus by the White House on criminal justice reform – a message in part drowned out by unexpected news events.

Obama’s visit to a federal prison — the first by a sitting president — capped a week of efforts to swing the pendulum away from the “tough on crime” drug laws of the 1990s. It included the announcement that he commuted the sentences of 46 nonviolent drug offenders on Monday and a call to action — and Congress — at the NAACP convention in Philadelphia on Tuesday to change sentencing laws, better prepare prisoners to re-enter society and reform the juvenile justice system that starts the cycle of crime and prison for so many American youth — disproportionately black youth.

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* WORLD *  The German parliament gets its chance on Friday to vote on whether to proceed with the agreed €86billion bailout for Greece.

On Thursday, the European Central Bank increased the emergency liquidity support for Athens, and it was announced that Greek banks would re-open on Monday.

If you haven’t already – and if you must – you can read the Euro Summit agreement on Greece annotated by former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on his blog. An example:

Given the need to rebuild trust with Greece, the Euro Summit welcomes the commitments of the Greek authorities to legislate without delay a first set of measures [i.e. Greece must subject itself to fiscal waterboarding, even before any financing is offered].

 

Friday is the one-year anniversary of the shooting down of MH-17 over Ukraine, killing 298 people, with still no definitive attribution of responsibility.

Meanwhile, new footage obtained by NewsCorp Australia appears to show the immediate aftermath of the downing of the passenger jet.

 

In Britain, the Liberal Democrats, all but wiped out in May’s national election, named their new leader. Tim Farron faces a daunting challenge, to say the least.

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* MEDIA * As Reddit says it will take steps to “hide vile content”, its former CEO writes in the Washington Post that “the trolls are winning.” Ellen Pao says:

Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between age 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers. Not surprisingly, women and minorities have it worst. We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others.

The foundations of the Internet were laid on free expression, but the founders just did not understand how effective their creation would be for the coordination and amplification of harassing behavior. Or that the users who were the biggest bullies would be rewarded with attention for their behavior. Or that young people would come to see this bullying as the norm — as something to emulate in an effort to one-up each other.