National / International News

Paula Radcliffe says London Marathon spectators will need to be more aware of security following events in Boston.

Two art museums in Boston are offering free admission Tuesday in the wake of the explosions at the Boston Marathon. They hope that residents will find comfort and community.

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The medical director at Antrim Area Hospital says it is regrettable a child- who later died - did not receive the appropriate care in its emergency department last month.

A third of Italians are now making pizza at home, and 19 percent are baking their own bread, an association of Italian farmers reports. Bakeries are adapting by by offering prepared food, and more importantly, sandwiches.

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Leap Motion, a highly accurate device allowing users to control their PCs with gestures, will be embedded into a range of HP laptops.

A Highland mother-of-two tells how she sprinted to find her children after hearing the Boston Marathon explosions.

A Border Force worker from Stansted Airport resigns from his job with the help of a cake.

Detectives investigating the attempted murder of police officers in a failed bomb attack in County Antrim last month arrest two men.

After the explosions, comes the investigation. The president has said that authorities will "follow every lead," and Boston's mayor is reminding the public that "no piece of information or detail is too small." But in an age of surveillance cameras on nearly every block, and cell phone cameras in nearly every pocket, how do investigators actually wade through all that possibly helpful video they're going to get?

Consider that almost as soon as the bombs went off, social media sites were full of snippets of the tragedy that people had captured on their cell phones. But it's not just dramatic footage like this that could help investigators.

“As important is a video five minutes before the explosion, two blocks away,” says Angelo Guarino, president of Ocean Systems, a company that develops forensic video technology for use by law enforcement. He says in a moment where you might be waving "hi mom" into the camera, in the background a person that investigators have connected to the attack might be walking by, “and that might be where they get the best image.”

Investigators will likely gather thousands of hours of video, from cell phones and store security cameras. And ATM cameras.  And traffic light cameras. But it will be in hundreds of different digital formats, many of them proprietary, so just collecting it all into one system is tough. Guarino warns that the usual ways we share videos, over YouTube, or burned on a dvd, involve data compression, to make the files smaller and easier to send. “That means throwing data away, throwing evidence away,” he says.  “It could come down to a pixel.”

To tackle that issue, companies like Guarino’s have developed special technology that can be used to gather and copy video without compromising its quality. Once all that video is gathered, it goes to a place like the Digital Media Evidence Processing Lab at the University of Indianapolis, where, someone like Grant Fredericks -- a forensic video expert -- sifts through it all, frame by frame, trying to make connections.

Fredericks says his team will tag everything, including “clothing descriptions, hat descriptions, backpack descriptions, shoes descriptions, location descriptions.” Those tags are cross-referenced so “you can then track an individual across the city,” he says. 

But is all this technology, all this combing of video, worth it? When asked what are the odds that the person who planted the package would have actually been caught on video yesterday, Fredericks doesn’t hesitate. “One hundred percent likely, probably 100 times or more,” he says.

On an average day, a person is likely to be recorded 30 times, he adds. And this was the Boston Marathon.

Pupils' progress and behaviour are to be used to assess teachers for performance pay, in guidance sent to schools.

Pakistan's former military leader Pervez Musharraf is barred from standing in general elections in May.

Sally Bercow, who is being sued for libel over a tweet she posted, was not "some kitchen table blogger", the High Court hears.

China reveals the structure of its military units, in what state-run media describe as a first.

The CBI claims the "sheer scale of prescription" in the new science curriculum will leave pupils in England little time for practical experiments.

Tens of thousands of kids in Arizona got a free breakfast this week from McDonald's. Franchise owners in a handful of states have gotten together to give out food on the days that schools administer big standardized tests.

The promotion was such a big draw at a Central Phoenix McDonald's Tuesday morning that it took some effort to squeeze through the front door. "I suspect that we'll serve over 500 students this morning, just in this restaurant alone," says franchise operator Jerry Gehrke.

Last year, Arizona McDonald's restaurants gave out more than 81,000 meals to kids on test day. Restaurants in a handful of other states, including Florida, Oklahoma and Minnesota, have also participated. Gehrke spends $2 a head on each student's Egg McMuffin, a pack of apple slices, and a carton of milk or orange juice. He says it's good for the kids, who need brain food to ace the state's standardized tests.

The free breakfast also builds customer loyalty.

"It does. It makes me feel like, oh my God, after so much money being spent here, I finally get something back," says mom Naomi Quintero, who eats at the restaurant every weekend with her family.

Quintero's sons will each get 18 grams of protein in their egg sandwich. That's pretty good fuel for a test, said Simin Levinson, a nutritionist at Arizona State University. "I would consider it to be a well-rounded meal," she says.

But it's not the only place to get one. The nearby Creighton School District says about 4,700 students eat a free breakfast every day. Their families are poor enough to qualify for subsidized meals. Levinson says these meals are nutritionally similar to the free McDonald's menu. But if she had a choice, she'd take the one that's free of corporate influence.

"This is where I can't help but be a little bit skeptical: Is this a ploy that McDonald's is using in creating a whole new generation of consumers that will be brand loyal specific to McDonald's?" she says.

That worries Levinson because she says the next time those 500 kids are in line, they're likely to chose something loaded with fat and sodium.

Temporary studios and satellite trucks have been arriving at Westminster as last minute preparations take place ahead of the ceremonial funeral at St Paul's Cathedral.

The city of Boston is coming together for prayer vigils and reflections following yesterday's explosions at the Boston Marathon. Host Michel Martin talks with Bishop Gayle Harris, of The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, about how Bostonians are handling the shock and the faith community's response.

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Investigators are following every lead after yesterday's bombings at the Boston Marathon. Host Michel Martin speaks with Don Borelli, a former FBI special agent on terrorism, to hear how investigators piece together a crime like this, and determine who is responsible.

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Biographer reflects on Thatcher funeral choices

For the first time, China gives numbers for its ground, air and naval forces. It also slams the U.S. for its shift to Asia.

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