NATIONAL
April 30, 2013 | By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
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.
NATIONAL
April 25, 2013 | By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times
BOSTON - First came the sound, loud and confusing. Then Lee Ann Yanni felt as if something had bumped into her left calf. "That's when I looked down and saw the bone sticking out and thought, 'I'm a physical therapist, and I know that's not a good thing,'" she said. "I could feel the blood just pouring from my leg almost like it was a hose. And it was like 10 seconds later, after the first explosion, that the second one happened. " Yanni tried to put weight on her left leg so she could hobble to safety, but it wouldn't hold.
SPORTS
April 25, 2013 | Chris Erskine
Called up Bill Iffrig the other morning; he answers - no agent, no publicist. We chat awhile about running and how he came to be America's most famous marathon man. Iffrig is the older gentleman - all table legs and elbows - blown off his feet in Boston last week, crumpling to the ground as if fragged by shrapnel, bystanders rushing to his side. Looped over and over in the hours after the crash, it was something you almost had to have seen on TV, or later on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
NATIONAL
April 23, 2013 | By Richard A. Serrano, Melanie Mason and Ken Dilanian, Washington Bureau
BOSTON - Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has told investigators that he and his older brother planned the Boston Marathon bombings only a week or so before the race, that they were operating alone, and that they received no training or support from outside terrorist groups, officials said Tuesday. His comments appear to support investigators' theory that the attack was hastily conceived by two siblings who were self-radicalized. Writing answers from his hospital bed because he was shot in the throat, the 19-year-old accused bomber also said that his slain older brother, Tamerlan, was "upset" by the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that anger was the motivation to plant two crude homemade bombs along the crowded race route.
NATIONAL
April 23, 2013 | By Michael J. Mishak and Ashley Powers, Los Angeles Times
NORTH DARTMOUTH, Mass. - If Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is responsible for setting off pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon, as authorities allege, he displayed a remarkable poker face at his college campus in southeastern Massachusetts. The 19-year-old sophomore studied engineering, played soccer and became known for party-hopping and smoking marijuana. When he talked to his friends, it was usually about one subject - girls. As a freshman, he decorated his dorm room wall with two posters: one of Einstein, the other of 12 bikini-clad women on a beach.
NATIONAL
April 23, 2013 | By Lisa Mascaro, Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON - On the third day of hearings on a bill to overhaul the immigration system, senators took a break from partisan sniping and grilled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on whether the Boston bombings had exposed shortcomings in the nation's immigration security apparatus. Conservative Republicans have tried to slow the Senate bill since two brothers, ethnic Chechens granted political asylum from Russia as minors with their family, were identified as the suspects in last week's bombings.