Day Four: Gunfire and explosions can still be heard from inside the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi as the Kenyan army continues to hunt for militants. Despite announcements yesterday that the situation is under control and the siege was over, the battle appears to go on. The number of dead in the initial attack has been adjusted downward from 68 to 62. The Red Cross says 65 people are unaccounted for.

  Reports are still mixed and conflicting, but here are some of the details. 1. Three Kenyan soldiers are reported killed. 2. Several Americans of Somali origin are among the terrorists. 3. The terror group included women. 4. Some of the attackers may have changed clothes and left the mall with fleeing shoppers. 5. A Tweet from the militants claims they are still holding hostages and standing their ground.

Shutdown Countdown: It’s now six days until the federal government partially shuts down, unless Congress passes a spending bill. Republican leaders and Tea Party members are beginning to knock heads over the wisdom of forcing a shutdown in order to defund healthcare reform.

Leak Plugged: A former FBI bomb expert has agreed to plead guilty to leaking classified information to the Associated Press about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. The Justice Department tracked the leak to Donald Sachtleben, 55, of Carmel, Ind. after a controversial move to access the AP’s phone records. Sachtleben had already been accused of trading online child pornography and agreed to 12 years in prison for both crimes.

World: Scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Sweden this week are puzzling over a slowdown in global warming. The speed at which the planet has been heating up has slowed since 1998, although it is still warming. One theory is that the oceans are absorbing the heat, but no one knows for sure. Climate change skeptics have seized on the warming “hiatus” as proof that there’s no such thing as global warming.

Smartbuy: Blackberry, once a hot stock and the leader in smartphones under the name Research In Motion, is becoming a privately owned company in a $4.7 billion sale. The Blackberry once had half the market for smartphones but now has only 3%. The company announced just last week that it is laying off 4,500 employees.

The Yogurt Sting: The NY State Atty. General’s office used a yogurt shop in Brooklyn to catch companies that get paid to put positive reviews on websites like Yelp, Google and City Search. Nineteen companies are being fined a total of $350,000. Posting fake reviews for your own establishment, known as “astroturfing”, is considered false advertising.

Twitter War: When Somali terrorists took over the Nairobi shopping mall they were live-Tweeting their propaganda. Twitter cancelled their feed but it has popped up again under a different name a half-dozen times in a game of terrorist Whack-A-Mole. It’s a brave new world in which killers Tweet like teenagers at a rave.

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