10 things you need to know today: July 24, 2015

(Image credit: (AP Photo/Denny Culbert))

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1. Three dead after gunman opens fire in Louisiana movie theater
2. Inspectors general call for criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton's email use
3. Anthem to buy Cigna for $54.2 billion
4. Obama calls gun laws his "greatest frustration"
5. Nikkei buys Financial Times for $1.29 billion
6. Trump says he will make a third-party White House run if GOP mistreats him
7. Texas prosecutor says Sandra Bland shows no sign of murder
8. Turkey to let U.S. launch ISIS airstrikes from its bases
9. Obama starts first trip to Kenya as president
10. NASA spots most Earth-like planet to date

published 24 July 2015

1. Three dead after gunman opens fire in Louisiana movie theater

A gunman opened fire in a crowded Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater on Thursday night about 20 minutes into a showing of the comedy Trainwreck, killing two people and wounding nine others before fatally shooting himself as police arrived. Police did not immediately identify the killer, but said he was a 58-year-old "lone white male" with a criminal history. A school teacher was credited with saving lives by shielding a friend, who then managed to pull a fire alarm even though both were wounded.

Two inspectors general are calling on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email account during her tenure as secretary of state, The New York Times reported Thursday. The inspectors general of the State Department and the intelligence agencies said in a June 29 memo that there were "hundreds of potentially classified emails" in Clinton's account, and they said an investigation was necessary to determine whether any had been mishandled.

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Health insurance giant Anthem Inc. announced Friday that it would buy rival Cigna Corp. in a $54.2 billion deal. The news came after a year of contentious negotiations. Cigna rejected an offer of $184 per share in June, and now it will get $188 per share in cash and stock. If the deal goes through, it could create the largest health insurer in the U.S. Just three weeks ago, Aetna agreed to buy Humana for $37 billion in a wave of consolidation since the launching of ObamaCare.

President Obama said Thursday that his "greatest frustration" as president has been his inability to pass "common sense gun safety laws" despite "repeated mass killings." Obama made the remark in an interview with BBC News hours before a gunman killed two people and himself in a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater. "If you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it's less than 100," he said. "If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it's in the tens of thousands."

London-based publisher Pearson announced Thursday it was selling the Financial Times to Nikkei, Japan's biggest financial news group, for $1.29 billion. Pearson confirmed only hours earlier that it was in "advanced talks" about a sale. German publisher Axel Springer had also reportedly been bidding. Nikkei, eager to expand into the English-speaking world, had approached Pearson repeatedly in recent years only to be told the pink-hued Financial Times was not for sale.

Donald Trump said Thursday that he would "absolutely" launch a third-party bid for the presidency in 2016 if he felt the Republican National Committee did not treat him fairly in the 2016 GOP primaries. Trump said the party "has not been supportive" in the controversy-fueled early days of his campaign, in which he has feuded with several powerful Republicans. "I'm not in the gang," Trump said. "I want to do what's right for the country — not what's good for special interest groups that contribute."

Waller County, Texas, prosecutor Warren Diepraam said Thursday that preliminary autopsy reports supported a coroner's conclusion that the cause of Sandra Bland's death was suicide by hanging. Bland, a black woman jailed after a tense traffic stop, was found dead in her cell three days later hanging by a trash bag. Diepraam said Bland showed none of the defensive wounds that would suggest a violent struggle and homicide. Bland's relatives say she would not have killed herself.

Turkey has agreed to let manned and unmanned American warplanes use two Turkish air bases to launch attacks on the Islamic State, Obama administration officials said Thursday. A senior administration official called the agreement a "game changer" because it would greatly increase the U.S. military's ability to hit ISIS targets in Syria. The two governments negotiated the deal over a period of several months. Turkish forces just had their first skirmishes with ISIS fighters inside neighboring Syria.

President Obama arrives in Kenya on Friday in his first trip to his father's home country since taking office. Obama, who went to Kenya a couple of decades ago to learn about his heritage, will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit the East African nation. He also will visit Ethiopia, where the African Union is headquartered, and he will be the first sitting U.S. president to visit that country, too. Kenyan officials demanded an apology from CNN for calling the country a "hotbed of terror" in a report on Obama's trip.

Astronomers have found the first planet close in size to Earth orbiting in a sun-like star's "habitable zone," NASA announced Thursday. The new planet was detected by scientists looking through data from the planet-spotting Kepler telescope. There are 1,030 confirmed planets in the universe, but only a dozen would not be too cold or too hot to sustain life. And only Kepler-452b has a sun like ours, making it "the first pin on the board of the map of habitability," one Kepler scientist said.

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.