Boston: The Boston Marathon investigation has turned into a hunt for answers to why two immigrant brothers from Kyrgyzstan bombed the annual running event. Investigators say they intend to question 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant without first reading him his Miranda rights. He is a naturalized US citizen, so the question of his rights is likely to trigger a legal debate.

 Tsarnaev is under guard in a hospital with bullet wounds to his neck and  leg. His 26-year-old brother, believed to be the leader in the plot, died in a shootout in the early hours of Friday morning.

Investigators want to know whether the older brother, Tamerlan, had any connections with international terrorism. He became a more devout Muslim in recent years and made a six-month trip to Russia in 2012.  At the time, Russian authorities asked the US to investigate whether Tamerlan had links to any extremist groups. The brothers are ethnic Chechens from an area with a long history of civil war and ethnic strife. The young men’s parents, now living in Russia again, told Russian television their sons could not have done this. “I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a set-up,” their mother said.

Tsarnaev could be charged under federal law for using a weapon of mass destruction. Federal prosecutors can seek death, unlike Massachusetts, which does not have a death penalty.

• In related news, the Ambassador from the Czech Republic has issued a clarification saying that, contrary to what many Americans seem to think, the Czech Republic is not Chechnya, which is 2,000 miles southeast across the Black Sea.

World: A 6.6 magnitude earthquake in southwest China has killed at least 200 people and injured an estimated 6700. It’s in Szechuan Province, the same region where a quake killed 90,000 in 2008.

National: Five snowboarders were killed in an avalanche outside the boundaries of Loveland ski area in Colorado. Loveland is on the east side of the steep Loveland Pass along Interstate 80 west of Denver. One boarder in the group survived.

• A hungry sinkhole ate three cars on a Chicago street after a water main burst. No one was seriously hurt, but it was really bad for the cars.

More Bad Sports: Rutgers University agreed to pay its fired basketball coach $475,000 to settle for the remaining two years of his contract, which would have paid him $1 million. Mike Rice was fired for abusing players. This reminds us of British playwright George Bernard Shaw who once gave an inattentive waiter $100 and said, “This is what I tip for bad service.”

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