NPR News 2013-04-23 加文本

NPR News 2013-04-23

From NPR News in Washington, I'm Lakshmi Singh.

Exactly, one week after the terrorist attack during the Boston Marathon, bells tolled across the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Just before that, the state came to a standstill for about a minute. At 2:50pm eastern when the first of two bombs exploded during one of the world's premier sporting events and horrified many around the globe.

One bell rang out in Medford Massachusetts Krystle Campbell, the 29-year-old restaurant manager killed at the Marathon, where she was cheering on a friend. The attack also took the lives of an eight-year-old boy and a 23-year-old graduate student from China. A memorial service reportedly will be held tonight at Boston University for Lingzi Lu.

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been charged by federal authorities with using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in the deaths of three people. Nineteen-year-old  Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arraigned at his bedside in a Boston hospital where he has been treated for gunshot wounds. NPR's Craig Windham reports the Justice Department says Tsarnaev could face the death penalty if convicted.

Tsarnaev is a naturalized U.S. citizen so White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says he  can not be tried by a military commission as several congressional Republicans have suggested.

It comes to United States citizens, it's against the law to try them in military commissions.

Carney says Tsarnaev will be prosecuted in federal court.

Since 9/11 we have used the federal court system to convict and incarcerate hundreds of terrorists.

Carney says President Obama is being kept up today on the progress of the probe into the Boston bombings. But Carney would not say what if anything Tsarnaev may be communicating to investigators. Craig Windham, NPR News, Washington.

Halliburton says it's close to reaching an out court settlement with private oil spill victims. NPR's Debbie Elliott says the contractors involved in a complex trial over who is responsible for the worsen environmental disaster in U.S. history.

Halliburton was the cement contractor for BP on the deep water horizon drilling rig that exploded three years ago, killing 11 workers and spilling more than four million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The two companies have blamed the other for a bad cement job that failed to plug the well. Halliburton says it has participated in court facilitated settlement discussions to resolve a substantial portion of private claims. Talks that chief financial officer Mark McCollum said are at an advanced stage during a conference call with investors. BP has reached a multi-billion dollar deal with private plaintiffs. Both companies are also defending civil claims from the U.S. Justice Department and Gulf Coast states. Debbie Elliott, NPR News.

Dow is up 26 points.

This is NPR News.

Drivers are paying less for gas these days after the price of oil dropped sharply this month. Oil has fallen about 9% in the past three weeks to $ 88 a barrel that helped keep gasoline prices lower. So people were paying an average of  $3.51 for a gallon of regular. Analysts predict pump prices could fall another 20 cents over the next two months.

Passengers are already feeling the impact of furloughs that affected the Federal Aviation Administration. There are reports of at least two-hour flight delays due to staff shortages. At some airports, tens of thousands of workers are required to take a certain number of days off without pay under the government's automatic spending cuts.

An award winning children's author has died. E.L. Konigsburg won the Newbery award, the most prestigious children's book award not once but twice. NPR's Lynn Neary has this remembrance.

E.L. Konigsburg set out to be a chemist, because she said in the small town where she grew up, people didn't go to college to be an artist. She got a degree in chemistry and taught science at a private girl school. But once her own children were in school, she began to write. Konigsburg says she wanted to write something that reflected her kids growing up because when she was growing up, none of the book she read reflected her. In 1968, her book  From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler won the Newbery award.  Ingrid Bergman played Mr.s Frankweiler in a 1973 film based on the book. In 1997, Konigsburg won a second Newbery for the View from Saturday. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

U.S. stocks trading higher with the Dow up 28 points at last glance at 14,576. I'm Lakshmi Singh, NPR News.