Suspect #2 Captured: An evening gun battle ended with the capture of Boston Marathon bombing suspect #2 hiding in a boat in a back yard in Watertown, Mass. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was wounded and described as being in serious condition. His brother Tamerlan, 26, had already been killed in an overnight shootout with police.

 The City of Boston had been shut down during the massive manhunt. All public transit stopped. Roads were closed, universities shut and professional sports cancelled. Bostonians gathered in streets, cheered and chanted “USA, USA” on hearing the news that the hunt was over.

The brothers of Chechen origin immigrated from Kyrgyzstan with their family about 10 years ago. The younger was a wrestler, the older a boxer who was married with one child. Dzhokhar seemed to adjust well to American life but Tamerlan not so much. He turned more deeply toward the Muslim faith and once told a photographer who chose him as the subject of a photo essay,  “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”

Texas Explosion: At least 14 people are confirmed dead now in the explosion at that Texas fertilizer plant. A larger number is reported missing but that is partly because of the confusion of locating them after the destruction of homes and businesses.  

Beauty Beat: A viral commercial circulating the Internet suggests that many women are better looking than they think they are. Dove soap had a police artist sketch women from their own description, and then again from the description of someone who met them only briefly. In every case the sketch was more accurate, and attractive, coming from the stranger’s description. Of course this is on behalf of Dove soap, which wants to make you more beautiful than you think you are.

Bad Sports: Rutgers University has suspended its head lacrosse coach to investigate complaints of verbal abuse of players. The university is trying to recover from a scandal in which it had to fire the basketball coach after publication of a video showing him shoving and berating players.

Obit Page: Al Neuharth, who built Gannett into a national newspaper chain and founded USA Today, died in Florida at age 89. Neuharth knew how to keep costs down and profits high, but his papers were never journalistic heavyweights. USA Today was mockingly nicknamed “McPaper”. Neuharth always dressed in black and white and lived the high life, riding in limousines and skipping between his luxury homes. But he was considered to be Charlie the Tuna of the news business.

-30-