Bombing

A federal magistrate released a friend of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from jail Monday on strict pretrial conditions that include 24-hour home confinement and $100,000 bail. The friend, Robel Phillipos, a 19-year-old Boston native, is charged with making false statements to the FBI related to the April 15 explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others. After a hearing before Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler, Phillipos quickly left the courthouse in street clothes and a baseball cap, surrounded by family and friends.

SHABQADAR, Pakistan - When Masoom Shah hits the campaign trail these days, he brings a 9-millimeter Glock pistol and a team of up to 50 bodyguards. Instead of appearing before large crowds, he meets small clusters of voters at guesthouses where everyone is frisked before they enter. He limits his speeches to 30 minutes and then quickly slips out of the room. And at the end of the day, he returns home and prays. "I say to God, 'Thank you, another peaceful day has passed,'" said Shah, 45, a member of Pakistan's secular, anti-Taliban Awami National Party, or ANP, and a provincial assembly candidate in the country's volatile northwest.

The federal government will tighten oversight to help ensure that foreign students seeking to enter the United States have valid student visas - the latest step to increase security after the Boston Marathon bombings. The heightened scrutiny by U.S. Customs and Border Protection is effective immediately, sources with knowledge of the issue said Friday. Officials would not discuss what they called operational details. But the move is designed to give border agents better and faster access to computerized databases that track the status of student visas.

WASHINGTON - Shortly after the FBI released photos of two Boston bombing suspects on April 18, several college friends texted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on their cellphones. One said Tsarnaev looked like suspect No. 2, who wore a white cap backward over tufts of brown curls. "LOL," Tsarnaev texted back. Later, he wrote again: "Come to my room and take whatever you want. " That night, according to an FBI complaint filed Wednesday in Boston, three young men entered Tsarnaev's dorm room at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where they all had met as students, and removed a laptop and a backpack full of fireworks that had been emptied of gunpowder.

WASHINGTON - The CIA and departments of Justice and Homeland Security have begun a high-level internal review of whether intelligence was mishandled prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, though President Obama and his top advisors said they had seen nothing to suggest counter-terrorism agencies did anything wrong. Obama said at a White House news conference that the review would seek to answer whether "additional things … could have been done" that "might have prevented" the two bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15. "We want to go back and we want to review every step that was taken," Obama said.

BAGHDAD - Shiite-dominated areas in southern and central Iraq were rocked Monday by car bomb explosions that killed at least 22 people and fueled fears that the country is sliding into a civil war. The violence occurred as Iraqi security forces surrounded the Sunni cities of Ramadi and Fallouja demanding that the area's tribes hand over those responsible for killing five Iraqi soldiers over the weekend. Authorities gave the tribes 48 hours. The deadline passed, but Jaber Jabri, a member of parliament from Ramadi, said late Monday that a tentative deal had been reached to defuse the situation.

WASHINGTON - The FBI has found female DNA on at least one of the two homemade bombs detonated during the Boston Marathon on April 15, complicating the task of identifying how and where the deadly devices were constructed. The presence of genetic material does not necessarily mean a woman helped build the pressure-cooker bombs that killed three people and injured more than 260 others, said a law enforcement official, who discussed the discovery on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

BOSTON - Russian authorities secretly wiretapped a conversation between a man believed to be one of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects and his mother in 2011 discussing the idea of jihad, a U.S. counter-terrorism official said Saturday. The Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, also intercepted a second telephone call between the mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, and another man living in southern Russia who has been the subject of a separate FBI investigation, the official said.

It's called the Trinity Site, an expanse of baked-white land in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert - the spot where "the gadget" was set off, launching an era of nuclear proliferation. Reactions to this place - the site of the world's first atomic bomb test on July 16, 1945 - vary widely and are usually influenced by age and background. For a 65-year-old Californian, it summons images of having to hunker below her school desk in a drill during the Cold War. For a 79-year-old Texan, it conjures up memories of sitting next to the radio as joyous news arrived - World War II was over and the boys were finally coming home.

Listening to 20-year-old Harvard sophomore Rebecca Mazur, in an interview with the BBC, struggle with her emotions last week after learning that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a "lighthearted" boy from her high school AP English class, was "Suspect No. 2" in the Boston Marathon bombing, I remembered the summer day in August 1970 when I got some bad news about a bright and well-mannered boy in my AP English class in Pasadena. Seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson had smuggled guns into a Marin County courtroom to stage a holdup in hopes of freeing his older brother George Jackson from Soledad Prison.