Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Spain central bank: recession continued in Q1

MADRID (AP) ? Spain's recession continued in the first three months of the year, with the economy shrinking by 0.5 percent, its seventh quarterly contraction, the Bank of Spain said Tuesday.

The central bank said that the first-quarter drop was somewhat milder than the 0.8 percent recorded in the final quarter of 2012. Compared with a year earlier, the economy was 2 percent smaller.

The central bank blamed the quarterly contraction on a further fall in consumer spending, which dropped 0.8 percent in the first quarter. The unemployment rate is 26 percent.

The bank has predicted the economy will contract 1.5 percent this year and only return to growth in late 2014.

Official figures by the national statistics agency will be reported on April 30.

The figures came as the country's Treasury successfully sold 3 billion euros ($3.9 billion) in short-term debt with lower interest rates indicating growing investor confidence in the government's handling of the economy. Spain's borrowing costs have also fallen over the past few months following a pledge by the European Central Bank to buy up unlimited amounts of debt if asked by a country in need of help.

The Treasury sold 2.16 billion euros in nine-month bills at an average interest rate of 0.79 percent, compared with 1 percent in the last such auction March 19. It also placed 855 million euros in three-month bills at 0.12 percent, down from 0.29 percent last month.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/spain-central-bank-recession-continued-q1-095102387--finance.html

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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Revis enjoyed time as?Jet? |? No one else pursued

Jordan RodgersAP

C Eric Wood has moved into a leadership role with the Bills.

Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald wonders if Dolphins G.M. Jeff Ireland will panic when it comes to making a trade for Chiefs T Branden Albert.

Adding some beef to the interior of the defensive line in the draft is a possibility for the Patriots.

What?s the fallout from the Revis trade for Jets coach Rex Ryan?

Ravens coach John Harbaugh took part in a Tough Mudder race.

Could Michigan State RB Le?Veon Bell wind up with the Bengals?

An argument that the Browns?will be unaffected?by the investigation into owner Jimmy Haslam?s family business.

The Steelers website compares Georgia LB Jarvis Jones with former Steeler Chad Brown.

An attempt to simulate the Texans? draft board.

Colts G.M. Ryan Grigson admits to taking a look at mock drafts in the weeks leading up to the real draft.

Jaguars G.M. David Caldwell will be trying to avoid making the draft mistakes his predecessors made.

Will Bernard Pollard or George Wilson start at safety for the Titans?

With four offensive linemen coming off surgeries, the Broncos could be in the market for some help at the position in the draft.

The Chiefs may be targeting skill position players at the end of the draft.

Raiders T Jared Veldheer has bulked up this offseason.

QB Phillip Rivers is learning the Chargers? new offense as quickly as he can.

Cowboys DE DeMarcus Ware has started lifting weights after shoulder surgery.

Bart Hubbuch of the New York Post thinks the Giants could take Notre Dame LB Manti Te?o.

Are the Eagles better off keeping or trading the fourth overall pick?

Redskins QB Kirk Cousins tried out broadcasting during the Michigan State spring game.

Former Navy LB Keegan Wetzel visited with the Bears.

The Lions wouldn?t mind a wide receiver to take some pressure off Calvin Johnson.

A pre-draft look at Vanderbilt QB Jordan Rodgers, younger brother of Packers QB Aaron Rodgers.

The Vikings have made a place for analytics in their personnel evaluations.

Character traits are an important part of the profile when the Falcons look at potential draftees.

The Panthers aren?t hurt by a lack of strong quarterback and running back prospects in the draft.

Mike Triplett of the New Orleans Times-Picayune thinks the Saints will wind up trading RB Chris Ivory to the Jets.

Even with Darrelle Revis in the fold, Stephen Holder of the Tampa Bay Times thinks the Buccaneers need help at cornerback.

The Cardinals own the seventh overall pick, a spot which has landed teams some star players in recent years.

The Rams probably aren?t looking for a kicker or punter in this year?s draft.

Bills big and small are adding up as the 49ers building their new stadium.

Is linebacker on the Seahawks? list of draft priorities?

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/04/21/darrelle-revis-six-years-with-jets-were-unbelievable/related/

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Monday, April 22, 2013

Five days of fear: What happened in Boston

FILE - This Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Bob Leonard shows second from right, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 1 and third from right, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings by law enforcement. This image was taken approximately 10-20 minutes before the blast. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Bob Leonard, File)

FILE - This Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Bob Leonard shows second from right, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 1 and third from right, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, who was dubbed Suspect No. 2 in the Boston Marathon bombings by law enforcement. This image was taken approximately 10-20 minutes before the blast. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Bob Leonard, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo, an emergency responder and volunteers, including Carlos Arredondo, in the cowboy hat, push Jeff Bauman in a wheelchair after he was injured in one of two explosions near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo provided by Ben Thorndike, people react to an explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon in Boston. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Ben Thorndike, File)

FILE - In this Monday, April 15, 2013 file photo, Bill Iffrig, 78, lies on the ground as police officers react to a second explosion at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in Boston. Iffrig, of Lake Stevens, Wash., was running his third Boston Marathon and near the finish line when he was knocked down by one of the two bomb blasts. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/The Boston Globe, John Tlumacki, File) MANDATORY CREDIT: THE BOSTON GLOBE, JOHN TLUMACKI

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 16, 2013 file photo, Tammy Lynch, right, comforts her daughter Kaytlyn, 8, after leaving flowers and some balloons at the Richard home in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Kaytlyn was paying her respects to her friend, 8-year old Martin Richard who was killed in Monday's bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Since Monday, Boston has experienced five days of fear, beginning with the marathon bombing attack, an intense manhunt and much uncertainty ending in the death of one suspect and the capture of the other. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

(AP) ? In the tight rows of chairs stretched across the Commonwealth Ballroom, the nervousness ? already dialed high by two bombs, three deaths and more than 72 hours without answers ? ratcheted even higher.

The minutes ticked by as investigators stepped out to delay the news conference once, then again. Finally, at 5:10 p.m. Thursday, a pair of FBI agents carried two large easels to the front of the Boston hotel conference chamber and saddled them with display boards. They turned the boards backward so as not to divulge the results of their sleuthing until, it had been decided, they could not afford to wait any longer.

Now the time had come to take that critical, but perilous step: introducing Boston to the two men responsible for an entire city's terror.

"Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members of the suspects," said Richard DesLauriers, the FBI agent in charge in Boston. As he spoke, investigators flipped the boards around to reveal grainy surveillance-camera images of the men whose only identity was conferred by the black ball cap and sunglasses on one, the white ball cap worn backward on the other.

"Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those with information to come forward and provide it to us."

Photographers and TV cameras pushed forward, intent on capturing the images, even as people in the lobby stared into computers and smart phones, straining to recognize the faces. In living rooms and bars and offices across the city, and across the country, so many people looked up and logged on to examine the faces of the men deemed responsible for the bombing attack of the Boston Marathon, that the FBI servers were instantly overwhelmed.

At the least, Bostonians told each other, the photos proved that the monsters the city had imagined were responsible for maiming more than 170 were nothing more than ordinary men. But even as that relief sunk in, the dread that had gripped the city since Monday at 2:50 p.m. was renewed.

If everyone had seen these photos, then that had to mean the suspects had seen them, too.

What desperation might they resort to, marathoner Meredith Saillant asked herself, once they were confronted with the certainty that their hours of anonymity were running out?

On the morning after the marathon, Saillant had fled the city for the mountains of Vermont with three friends and their children, trying to escape nightmares of the bombs that had detonated on the sidewalk just below the room where they'd been celebrating her 3:38 finish. Now, she put aside her glass of wine, reaching for the smart phone her friend offered and scrutinized the photos of the men who had defeated her city on what was supposed to be its day of camaraderie and strength.

"I expected that I would feel relief, 'OK, now I can put a face to it,' and start some closure," Saillant says. "But I think I felt more doom. I felt, I don't know, chilled. Knowing where we are and the era in which we live, I knew that as soon as those pictures went up that it was over, that something was going to happen ... like it was the beginning of the end."

There was no way she or the people of Boston could know, though, just when that end would come ? or how.

___

Marathon Monday dawned with the kind of April chill that makes spectators shiver and runners smile ? the ideal temperature for keeping a body cool during 26.2 miles of pounding over hills and around curves. By the four-hour mark, more than 2/3 of the field's 23,000 runners had crossed the finish line, and the crowds of onlookers were beginning to thin a little. But the growing warmth made it an afternoon to relish.

Passing the 25-mile mark, Diane Jones-Bolton, 51, of Nashville, Tenn. picked up the pace, relishing the effort and the sense of accomplishment of her 195th marathon.

Near the finish line, Brighid Wall of Duxbury, Mass. stood to watch the race with her husband and children, cheering on the competitors laboring through the race's final demanding steps.

In the post-race chute Tracy Eaves, a 43-year-old controller from Niles, Mich., proudly claimed her medal and a Mylar blanket, and took a big swig from a bottle of Gatorade.

And at the corner of Newberry Street and Gloucester, cab driver Lahcene Belhoucet pulled over, relishing the overabundance of paying passengers on an afternoon that traditionally gives almost as much of a boost to Boston's economy as it does to the city's spirits.

But the blast ? so loud it recalled the cannon fire heard on summer nights when the Boston Pops plays the 1812 Overture ? brought the celebration crashing down.

"Everyone sort of froze, the runners froze, and then they kept going because you weren't sure what it was," Wall said. "The first explosion was far enough away that we only saw smoke." Then the second bomb exploded, this time just 10 feet away.

"My husband threw our kids to the ground and lay on top of them," Wall said. "A man lay on top of us and said 'Don't get up! Don't get up!"

From her spot beyond the finish, a "huge shaking boom" washed over Eaves.

"I turned around and saw this monstrous smoke," she said. She thought it might be part of the festivities, until the second blast and volunteers began rushing the runners from the scene.

"Then you start to panic," she said.

Back in the field, Jones-Bolton noticed runners turning around and coming back at her. Then she realized most were wearing the blankets given to those who'd already completed the race. Suddenly the race came to halt, but nobody could say why. When word began to spread, Jones-Bolton panicked at the thought of her husband standing at the finish line, but was reassured by other runners.

At the finish, Wall, her husband and children raised their heads after a minute or two of silence. Beside them, a man was kneeling, looking dazed, blood dripping from his head. A body lay on the ground nearby, not moving at all. But in a landscape of blood and glass and twisted metal, they were far from alone.

"We grabbed each other and we ran but we didn't know where to run to because windows were blown out so another man helped me pick up my daughter," and they ran into a coffee shop, out the back door into an alley and kept going.

Meanwhile, the instincts of Dr. Martin Levine, a Bayonne. N.J., physician who has long volunteered to attend to elite runners at the finish line, told him to do just the opposite. Looking up at the plume of smoke, he estimated it was about two storefronts wide and quickly calculated how many spectators might be located in such an area.

"Make room for casualties ? about 40!," he yelled into the runner's relief tent. "Get the runners out if they can!" And he took off. Just then the second bomb went off. He reached the site to find a landscape resembling a battlefield, littered with severed limbs.

"The people were still smoking, their skin and their clothes were burning," he said. "There were lower extremity body parts all over the place...and all of the wounds were extreme gaping holes, with the flesh hanging from the bones ? if there was any bone left."

Back in his cab, Belhoucet said he mistook the first blast for an earthquake. Fearing that a building might collapse, he considered running. But then people came pouring down the street and he beckoned a family into the car. He grabbed the wheel, then turned momentarily to ask where they wanted to go.

Only then did he notice the man's face, dripping with blood.

___

Now, three days after the bombing, investigators had made significant headway in deciphering the method behind the terror.

Armies of white-suited agents had spent many hours sifting through the evidence littering Boylston Street, climbing to nearby rooftops to make sure no clue would go overlooked. Their efforts revealed that the bombers had constructed crudely assembled weapons, using plans easily found on the Internet, from pressure cookers, wires and batteries popular at hobby shops. But investigators still did not know why. And, more importantly, they had only the haziest idea of who to hold responsible.

It all came down to the photos, culled after a painstaking search of hundreds of hours of videotape and photographs gathered from surveillance cameras and spectators. But if they were unable to identify the men, that left the investigators with a difficult choice: They could keep them to law enforcement officers who so far had had no luck, prolonging the search and risking letting the men slip away or attack again. Or they could ask the public for help. But then, the suspects would know the net was closing in.

When they decided to release them, it would only put Bostonians further on edge.

"There was this kind of strange tension," said Brian Walker of Boston. "You walk by people and you just kind of look at them out of the corner of your eye and check them out. I was conscious that I didn't feel comfortable walking around with a backpack. It was like I just want to be safe here and everybody is kind of jumpy."

But as investigated pored over tips in the hours before the photos were made public, the city, at least, was struggling to right itself.

On Monday, the bombs had exploded just a half-block before Brian Ladley crossed the Marathon finish line. But, feeling lucky to be alive, he was out at 7 a.m. Thursday to join the line at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, hoping to hear President Barack Obama speak at an interfaith service to honor the victims. The event was still hours away, but when tickets ran out, authorities spotted his marathon jacket and plucked him and some other runners out of line to watch the service in a nearby school auditorium.

"If they sought to intimidate us, to terrorize us ... It should be pretty clear right now that they picked the wrong city to do it," Obama told the crowd of more than 2,000 inside the church. "''We may be momentarily knocked off our feet. But we'll pick ourselves up. We'll keep going. We will finish the race."

After it ended, Ladley found himself shaking hands with the president, too awestruck to remember their conversation. But what meant the most was the camaraderie of the crowd.

"It was wonderful to have a moment with other runners and be able to share our stories," he said.

Less than a mile away, 85-year-old Mary O'Kane strained at the bell ropes in the steeple of historic Arlington Street Church, imagining the sounds spreading a healing across her city ? and the land. Sprinkled amid hymns like "Amazing Grace" and "A Mighty Fortress," patriotic tunes like "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America" wafted down from the 199-foot steeple and over Boston Common across the street.

"I feel joyful. I feel worshipful. I feel glad to be alive," she said. The city's response to the bombing had revealed its strength and brotherhood, attributes she was certain would carry it through. But her belief in Boston was tinged with sadness. Now she understood a little bit about how New Yorkers who experienced 9/11 must feel.

"I mean, it happened ? it finally happened," O'Kane said. "We were feeling sort of immune. Now we're just a part of everybody...The same expectations and fears."

___

In the hours after investigators released the photos of the men known only as Suspect (hash)1 and Suspect (hash)2, the city went on about the business of a Thursday night, a semblance of normality restored except for the area immediately surrounding the blast site. Restaurants that had closed in the nights just after the bombing reopened for business. At Howl at the Moon, a bar on High Street downtown, the dueling pianists took the stage at 6 p.m., almost as if nothing had changed.

But across the Charles River in Cambridge, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and his brother Dzhokhar, 19, were arming up.

Later, friends and relatives would recall both as seemingly incapable of terrorism. The brothers were part of an ethnic Chechen family that came to the U.S, in 2002, after fleeing troubles in Kyrgyzstan and then Dagestan, a predominantly Muslim republic in Russia's North Caucasus. They settled in a working-class part of Cambridge, where the father, Anzor Tsarnaev, opened an auto shop.

Dzhokhar did well enough in his studies at prestigious Cambridge Rindge and Latin to merit a $2,500 city scholarship for college.

Tamerlan, though, could be argumentative and sullen. "I don't have a single American friend," he said in an interview for a photo essay on boxing. He was clearly the dominant of the two brothers, a former accounting student with a wife and son, who explained his decision to drop out of school by telling a relative, "I'm in God's business."

It's not that Tamerlan Tsarnaev didn't have options. For several years he'd impressed coaches and other as a particularly talented amateur boxer.

"He moved like a gazelle. He could punch like a mule," said Tom Lee, president of the South Boston Boxing Club, where Tsarnaev began training in 2010."I would describe him as a very ordinary person who didn't really stand out until you saw him fight."

But away from the gym, Tamerlan swaggered around his parent's home like he owned it, those who knew him said. And he began declaring an allegiance to Islam, joined with increasingly inflammatory views.

One of the brothers' neighbors, Albrecht Ammon, recalled an encounter in which the older brother argued with him about U.S. foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and religion. The Bible, Tamerlan told him, was a "cheap copy" of the Quran, used to justify wars with other countries. "He had nothing against the American people," Ammon said. "He had something against the American government."

Dzhokhar, on the other hand, was "real cool," Ammon said. "A chill guy."

Since the bombing, the younger brother had maintained much of that sense of cool, returning to classes at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and attending student parties.

On the day of the bombing, he wrote on Twitter: "There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don't hear them cuz they're the minority."

But by Tuesday, when he stopped by a Cambridge auto garage, the mechanic, accustomed to long talks with Dzhokhar about cars and soccer, noticed the normally relaxed 19-year-old was biting his nails and trembling.

The mechanic, Gilberto Junior, told Tsarnaev he hadn't had a chance to work on a Mercedes he'd dropped off for bumper work. "I don't care. I don't care. I need the car right now," Junior says Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told him.

Now, with the photos out, it was time to move. Already, one of Dzhokhar's college classmates had taken to studying the photo of Suspect (hash)1 ? nearly certain it was his friend, although others were skeptical. It wouldn't take long for others to notice.

___

The call to the police dispatcher came in at 10:20 p.m. Thursday: shots fired on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge. Ten minutes later, when police arrived to investigate, they found one of their own, university officer Sean Collier, shot multiple times inside his cruiser at the corner of Vassar and Main.

The baby-faced 26-year-old, in just a year on patrol, had impressed both his supervisors and the students as particularly dedicated to his work. Just a few days earlier, he'd asked Chief John DiFava for approval to join the board at a homeless shelter, in a bid to steer people away from problems before they developed. Now he was being pronounced dead at the hospital.

Witnesses reported seeing two men. Fifteen minutes later, another call came in of an armed carjacking by two men, not far away on Third Street. After half an hour, the carjackers had let the owner go, but not before using the victims' bank card to pocket $800 from an ATM and telling the man they'd just killed a police officer and that they were responsible for the bombing, Watertown Police Chief Edward Deveau said.

Investigators had their break.

The carjacking victim had left his cellphone in the Mercedes SUV, enabling police to track its location via GPS, Deveau said. It was past 11 p.m. now, and as the car sped west into Watertown, one of Deveau's officers spotted it and gave chase, realizing too late he was alone against the brothers driving two separate cars. When both vehicles came to a halt, the men stepped out and opened fire. Three more officers arrived, then two who were off-duty, fending off a barrage. When a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officer, Richard Donohue, pulled up behind them, a bullet to the groin severed an artery and he went down.

"We're in a gunfight, a serious gunfight," Deveau said. "Rounds are going and then all of the sudden they see something being thrown at them and there's a huge explosion. I'm told it's exactly the same type of explosive that we'd seen that happened at the Boston Marathon. The pressure cooker lid was found embedded in a car down the street."

In the normally quiet streets of Watertown, residents rushed to their windows.

"Now I know what it must be like to be in a war zone, like Iraq or Afghanistan," said Anna Lanzo, a 70-year-old retired medical secretary whose house was rocked by the explosion.

As the firefight continued, Tamerlan Tsarnaev moved closer and closer to the officers, until less than 10 feet separated them, continuing to shoot even as he was hit by police gunfire, until finally he ran out of ammunition and officers tackled him, Deveau said. But as they struggled to cuff the older brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev jumped back in the second vehicle.

"All of the sudden somebody yelled 'Get out of the way!' and they (the officers) look up and here comes the black SUV that's been hijacked right at them. They dove out of the way at the last second and he ran over his brother, dragged him down the street and then fled," he said.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

A few blocks over, Samantha England, was heading to bed when she heard what sounded like fireworks. When she called 911, the dispatcher told her to stay inside, lock the doors and get down on the floor. She reached for the TV, trying to figure out what was going on.

"As soon as they said it on the news, that's when we started to freak out and realize they were here," England said.

But after all the gunfire, the younger Tsarnaev had vanished. Officers, their guns drawn, moved through the neighborhood of wood-frame homes and cordoned off the area as daylight approached.

At Kayla DiPaolo's house on Oak Street, she scrambled to find shelter in the door frame of her bedroom as a bullet came the side paneling on her front door. At 8:30 a.m., Jonathan Peck heard helicopters circling above his house on Cypress Street and looked outside to see about 50 armed men.

"It seemed like Special Forces teams were searching every nook and cranny of my yard," he said.

Unable to find Tsarnaev, authorities announced they were shutting down not just Watertown, but all of Boston and many of its suburbs, affecting more than 1 million people. Train service was cancelled. Taxis were ordered off the streets. Filming of a Hollywood movie called "American Hustle" ? the tale of an FBI sting operation ? was called off. In central Boston, streets normally packed with officer workers turned eerily silent.

"It feels like we're living in a movie. I feel like the whole city is in a standstill right now and everyone is just glued to the news," Rebecca Rowe of Boston said.

But as the hours went by, and the house-to-house search continued, investigators found no sign of their quarry. Finally, at about 6 p.m., they announced the shutdown had been lifted.

At the Islamic Society of Boston, Belhoucet, the cab driver who'd fled the bombing scene, arrived for evening prayer only to find it shuttered. But he told himself the city's paralysis could not continue much longer. "Because there is no place to hide," Belhoucet said. "His picture is all over the world now."

Across Watertown, people ventured out for the first time in hours to enjoy the day's unusually warm air. They included a man who took a few steps into his Franklin Street backyard, then noticed the tarp on his boat was askew. He lifted it, looked inside and saw a man covered in blood.

He rushed back in to call police. And again, the neighborhood was awash in officers in fatigues and armed with machine guns. Hunkered down inside the boat, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev traded fire with police for more than an hour, until at last, they are able to subdue him.

Just before 9 p.m., police scanners crackle:

"Suspect in custody."

On the Twitter account of the Boston police department, the news is trumpeted to a city that has been holding its collective breath over five days of fear: "CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won."

With that, Boston pours into the streets. In Watertown, officers lower their guns and grasp hands in congratulation. Bostonians applaud police officers and cheer as the ambulance carrying Tsarnaev passes. Under the flashing lights from Kenmore Square's iconic Citgo sign, Boston University sophomore Will Livingston shouts up to people hanging out of open windows: "USA! USA! Get hyped, people!"

But on Boylston Street, where the bombing site remains cordoned off, there is silence even as the crowd swelled, and tears are shed.

"I think it's a mixture of happiness and relief," said Matt Taylor, 39, of Boston, a nurse who drove to Boylston Street as soon as he heard of the arrest.

Nearby, Aaron Wengertsman, 19, a Boston University student, who was on the marathon route a mile from the finish line when the bombs exploded, stands wrapped in an American flag. "I'm glad they caught him alive," Wengertsman says. "It's humbling to see all these people paying their respects."

They include 25-year-old attorney Beth Lloyd-Jones, who was 25 blocks from the bombings and considers them deeply personal, a violation of her city. She is planning her wedding inside the Boston Public Library, adjacent to where the bombs exploded.

"Now I feel a little safer," she says. But she can't help but think of the victims who suffered in the explosions that started it all: "That could have been any one of us."

___

EDITOR'S NOTE ? This reconstruction of events is based on reporting and interviews by Associated Press journalists across Boston and elsewhere from Monday through Saturday. AP writers Bridget Murphy, Michael Hill, Allen G. Breed, Denise Lavoie, Jeff Donn, Meghan Barr, Jay Lindsay, Katie Zezima, Pat Eaton-Robb, Rodrique Ngowi and Bob Salsberg in Boston; Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee; Michelle Smith in Providence, R.I., Michael Rubinkam in Scranton, Pa.; and Trenton Daniel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, contributed to this report. Follow Adam Geller on Twitter at http://twitter.com/AdGeller

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-04-21-Boston%20Marathon-Five%20Days%20of%20Fear/id-53514aec5c6b48689a4206c234918e4e

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MPs want review into RBS/Lloyds 'bad bank'

LONDON (Reuters) - The finance ministry should examine the advantages and disadvantages of breaking up state-backed lenders RBS and Lloyds and hiving off their toxic assets into a 'bad bank', senior MPs have demanded.

The cross-party Treasury Select Committee, responsible for examining the finance ministry's policies, recommended it deliver a cost-benefit analysis in time for the government's spending review in June.

The report should also look at the impact on competition, it said.

Britain pumped 66 billion pounds into the banks to keep them afloat during the 2008 financial crisis, taking an 81 percent stake in RBS and a 39 percent shareholding in Lloyds.

The government does not have to adopt recommendations made by the committee but it would be considered unusual for it not to do so.

Officials at Britain's finance ministry could not be reached for comment. RBS and Lloyds declined to comment.

The committee has considered evidence from the outgoing head of Britain's central bank, Mervyn King, who called on the government to break up RBS so the state-backed lender could return to health and be sold to the private sector.

King said RBS needed to split off the bad assets on its books and build up capital at the remaining "good bank" so it can lend more.

However, Chancellor George Osborne appeared sceptical about the move, expressing concerns over the time it would take and the disruption it would cause when appearing before the committee.

RBS and Lloyds have already undertaken restructuring programmes shedding hundreds of billions of pounds worth of assets including the majority of their toxic assets.

RBS has said it hopes to be in a position to allow the government to start selling its shares before the next general election in 2015.

Industry and political sources have said a sale of the government's shares in Lloyds is possible before the election if they hit the 61 pence level which the government regards as its break-even price. They closed at 47.5 pence on Friday.

(Reporting by Matt Scuffham; editing by Jason Neely)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/mps-want-review-rbs-lloyds-bad-bank-151052091--finance.html

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FAA furloughs kick in, some flight delays appear

Commercial airline flights moved smoothly throughout most of the country on Sunday, the first day air traffic controllers were subject to furloughs resulting from government spending cuts, though some delays appeared in the late evening in and around New York. And even though the nightmarish flight delays and cancellations that the airline industry predicted would result from the furloughs did not materialize yet, the real test will come Monday, when traffic ramps up.

Information from the FAA and others showed that flying Sunday was largely uneventful, with most flights on time. There were delays in parts of Florida, but those were caused by thunderstorms.

Mark Duell at the flight tracking website FlightAware said that John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia airports in New York indicated delays due to lower staffing starting late Sunday evening. JFK averaged 70-minute delays for inbound flights, but no detectable departure delays. LaGuardia averaged 74-minute delays for inbound flights, and departure delays of 37 minutes.

The FAA website said that flights from Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla., into John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Westchester County airports were delayed due to staffing issues.

The trade group Airlines for America, which represents the airlines and had predicted a big traffic snarl, said Sunday evening that it was "not seeing a significant impact at this point." A spokeswoman said the group would continue to monitor the situation, and urged flyers to stay in contact with their airlines.

Delays were also affecting travelers in Los Angeles. The FAA said late Sunday night that staffing cuts were causing delays averaging more than three hours for flights arriving at Los Angeles International Airport. The agency did not say how many flights were affected.

Airport spokesman Marshall Lowe said about 70 flights had delays of about an hour or more Sunday, but he could not say what role the staffing cuts played in the delays.

The FAA said that "relatively good weather" and light traffic, which is typical of Sundays, helped keep delays in check. The agency said it would be working with airlines "to minimize the delay impacts of lower staffing" as the busy summer travel season approaches.

Government budget cuts that kicked in last month are forcing the FAA and other agencies to cut their spending. FAA officials have said they have no choice but to furlough all 47,000 agency employees, including nearly 15,000 controllers. Each employee will lose one day of work every other week. The FAA has said that planes will have to take off and land less frequently, so as not to overload the remaining controllers on duty.

Friday, airline trade groups and the country's biggest pilots union sued the FAA to try to stop the furloughs. They predicted that the furloughs would delay or cancel flights for as many as one out of every three airline passengers across the country. Airlines have also directed their customers to tell the FAA to find other ways to cut costs.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/faa-furloughs-kick-flight-delays-appear-000550777--finance.html

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?Before We Plunge Ahead In Creating a Fishbowl Society of ...

Politicians Rush to ?Look Tough? ? Even If It Won?t Actually Increase Our Safety

Americans are already the most spied upon people in history.

Yet spying didn?t stop the Newtown massacre, the Boston terror attacks or 9/11.

(Indeed, the FBI interviewed one of the Boston terrorist suspects 2 years ago at the request of the Russian government ? and somehow dropped the ball.)

But D.C. politicians are already using the tragedy of the Boston attacks to shred Internet privacy and increase spying on Americans.

And less than a week after a bipartisan panel of luminaries concluded that torture doesn?t yield significant information, Senator Graham is urging terror suspect number 2 to be tortured.

Professor Jonathan Turley is one of the nation?s top constitutional and military law experts.

Turley writes:

For civil libertarians, all terrorist attacks come in two equally predictable parts.

First, there is the terrorist attack itself ? a sad reality of our modern life. Second, comes the inevitable explosion of politicians calling for new security measures and surveillance. We brace ourselves for this secondary blow, which generally comes before we even fully know what occurred in an attack or how it was allowed to occur.

Politicians need to be seen as actively protecting public safety and the easiest way is to add surveillance, reduce privacy and expand the security state. What they are not willing to discuss is the impossibility of detecting and deterring all attacks. The suggestion is that more security measures translate to more public safety. The fact is that even the most repressive nations with the most abusive security services, places such as China and Iran, have not been able to stop terrorist acts.

While police were still combing through the wreckage from the Boston Marathon, politicians ran to cameras to pledge more security measures and surveillance. Indeed,?Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel?demanded more cameras in response to the Boston attack. Chicago already is one of the most surveilled cities in the United States. Emanuel?s solution: add some more. It is a perfectly Pavlovian response of politicians eager to appear as champions of public safety.

We need to resist the calls for a greater security state and put this attack into perspective. These two brothers built homemade bombs with over-the-counter pressure cookers. They placed the devices in one of the most surveilled areas of Boston with an abundance of police and cameras [Proof here]. There is only so much that a free nation can do to avoid such an attack. Two men walked in a crowd and put two bags down on the ground shortly before detonation.

No one is seriously questioning the value of having increased surveillance and police at major events. That was already the case with the Boston Marathon. However, privacy is dying in the United States by a thousand papercuts from countless new laws and surveillance systems. Before we plunge ahead in creating a fishbowl society of surveillance, we might want to ask whether such new measures or devices will actually make us safer or just make us appear safer.

Indeed, the government has wasted money and resources on things that do nothing to protect us (and might even backfire) ? instead of taking the steps which would actually increase our safety.

Source: http://www.financialnewsagency.org/before-we-plunge-ahead-in-creating-a-fishbowl-society-of-surveillance-we-might-want-to-ask-whether-such-new-measures-or-devices-will-actually-make-us-safer/4562284.html

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Source: http://pheedo.msnbc.msn.com/id/18424719/device/rss/

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