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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene. As Boston begins healing, they are getting a little help from man's best friend. Five Golden Retrievers: Addie, Isaiah, Luther, Maggie and Ruthie. They're comfort dogs sent by Lutheran Church Charities in Illinois. One of their jobs: just be ready if someone needs a friend to hug.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

Running can be good for you but apparently, is bad for animals. People who like to run through the Baskett Slough National Wildlife Refuge were stunned by a new sign. According to the Statesman Journal, the signs at a trailhead there say: No Dogs, Horseback Riding and No Jogging. Hiking is apparently fine. Wildlife officials warn that running people can stress out the animals, and might even interfere with their breeding.

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OK, lets meet a couple of guys who are big fans of Ghostface Killah.

MAHBOD MOGHADAM: The best Ghostface song, I think, is " Nutmeg." That's all of his...

GREENE: That's Mahbod Moghadam. He and his friend Tom Lehman co-founded a Web site called Rap Genius.

MOGHADAM: Tom is here looking up...

TOM LEHMAN: These are my favorite lines of Ghost. It's from "Buck 50," where he says: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, docialiexpilisticfragicalsuper Wu-Tang Chamber. Cancun catch me in the a room eating grouper...

Members of Congress are already expressing how they think the suspect in the marathon bombing case should be questioned and tried. Some lawmakers are also using the attack in Boston to argue both for and against overhauling immigration and gun control.

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Now solar power has had its problems in recent decades. For years, solar panels were too expensive to compete. More recently, as we heard earlier in the business news, solar panels got so cheap that manufacturers ran into trouble. But solar energy had a signal achievement in March, and that is our last word in business today.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

Good morning. I'm David Greene. Earlier this week we told you about a Michigan judge who held himself in contempt when his cell phone went off in the courtroom. He said judges are not above the rules. An Oregon judge this week showed that jurors are not above the rules, either. During a trial in the town of Salem, the judge noticed that a juror's pocket was glowing.

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Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

If you think this has been an unbelievable week of news, try telling it to Joe Berti. Mr. Berti traveled to Boston for that city's marathon and crossed the finish line seconds before the first bomb exploded. He was OK and he went home to Texas, where he was close enough to a fertilizer plant to see it explode on Wednesday night. Some people might feel star-crossed at that point, but Mr. Berti considers himself lucky.

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All morning we have been following the extraordinary events in Boston, where a manhunt is underway for one of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. The brother of the young man the police are searching for, his brother was killed in a shootout last night with police. Meanwhile, this American city, the city of Boston and its surrounding neighborhoods are in total lockdown.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep.

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

And I'm David Greene. It has been an astonishing overnight and morning in and around the city of Boston. Some of you may be hearing this after following this story all morning. Some of you, especially in the western United States, might be just waking up.

For the latest on the Boston Marathon Bombing case, David Greene and Steve Inskeep talk to Fred Bever of member station WBUR and Chechen expert Thomas de Waal of the Carnegie Endowment for International peace

David Greene and Steve Inskeep talk to David Boeri of member station WBUR, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston and Zolan Young, an intern at The Boston Globe, about the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.

In 1987, Jack Richmond was driving a forklift at work when the vehicle overturned onto him, crushing his leg below the knee. His daughter, Reagan, was just 2 months old at the time.

"Initially when they told me I would lose my leg, I was in denial and disbelief and kind of like, 'What, why? Can't you fix it?' " Jack tells Reagan in a visit to StoryCorps in Knoxville, Tenn. "But it just couldn't be saved."

"And you had a brand new daughter — me," says Reagan, now 25. "What were you thinking?"

In state legislatures around the country, lawmakers are debating important subjects — education reform, election laws, gun control and abortion. But in Florida, one of the hottest issues to come before the Legislature this term involves cats.

There, lawmakers are considering a contentious bill that would offer legal protection to groups that trap, neuter and return feral cats to their colonies.

An Alternative To Shelters

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It's MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. Good morning. I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep.

We're learning more about last night's fire in the Texas town of West. The fire started in a fertilizer plant, and a father in a vehicle nearby was taking video of the flames when the plant exploded.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Are you OK?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: You OK?

UNIDENTIFIED CHILD: Yeah. I can't hear.

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION, from NPR News. I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. We're listening to a memorial service in Boston for victims of the Boston Marathon.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BOSTON CHILDREN'S CHORUS: (Singing in foreign language)

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All this morning, we have been following the aftermath of a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas last night. When volunteer firefighters in the city of West, Texas - that's about 20 miles north of Waco - first arrived to battle a fire at the plant, they encountered a disaster in the making.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

We're told this fire was burning at the site of a couple of storage tanks, each of which had the capacity to carry 12,000 gallons of ammonia.

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It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.

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The nation's attention turns this morning to a tiny city in Texas. It's simply called West. It is the site of a fertilizer plant from which a message went out to police radio last night.

UNIDENTIFIED DISPATCHER: There has been an explosion on the fire scene. There are firefighters down at this time. Again, there has been an explosion on the fire scene. There are firefighters down at this time.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

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Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep. There may be only one place in the world you will not hear Psy. His video "Gangnam Style" was seen 1.5 billion times, including several thousand in my household. His new video, "Gentleman," has 142 million views so far but is not on South Korean Public Broadcasting.

In that video, Psy dances up the street and kicks an orange cone that says no parking. South Korea's KBS says abusing public property does not meet its standards. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Good morning, I'm David Greene.

Dating can be tough in a small country like Iceland. There are only 320,000 people and many of them are distant relatives. So the government came up with an idea. They created a genealogy Web site. There's even a Smartphone app. Just tap phones with your date. And if you happen to share a grandparent, you'll get an alert. If a date is out of the question, the app does also track relatives' birthdays and so you can send them a card.

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Now, President Obama had promised to put the full weight of his office behind getting Congress to pass new gun control legislation. That weight was apparently not enough. When the legislation failed yesterday, Obama went into the White House Rose Garden and made a blistering speech, calling it a shameful day for Washington.

NPR's Ari Shapiro was there.

Like many California cities hit hard by the real estate crash, Indio (near Palm Springs) has been forced to make steep cutbacks to avoid bankruptcy. But unlike other cities, Indio hosts the highest-grossing music festival in the world — Coachella — which wraps up this weekend. It has made city leaders eager to capitalize on Coachella's riches.

Sam Torres, plumber by day, Indio city councilman by night, says he was prepared to become the most hated man in the city, and he very well may have achieved that goal. His offense? Proposing a 6 percent tax on Coachella tickets.

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Two prominent Harvard economists have admitted there are errors in an influential paper they wrote on government debt. This paper was widely cited in recent budget debates. But the economists insist their mistakes do not significantly change their research.

NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: In their 2010 paper, Ken Rogoff and Carmen Rinehart argued that economic growth falls significantly when a country's debt level rises above 90 percent of its Gross Domestic Product or GDP.

A gluttonous predator is power-eating its way through reefs from New York to Venezuela. It's the lionfish.

And although researchers are coming up with new ways to protect some reefs from the flamboyant maroon-striped fish, they have no hope of stopping its unparalleled invasion.

Lad Akins has scuba dived in the vibrant reefs of the Bahamas for many years. But when he returned a couple years ago, he saw almost no fish smaller than his hand.