Mark Memmott, NPR

(Most recent update: 4:36 p.m. ET.)

Three 19-year-old men — two of them University of Massachusetts Dartmouth college students from Kazakhstan who were friends with Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — were taken into custody Wednesday by authorities in Boston. The third individual, an American citizen, was also a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev was enrolled.

As the U.S. considers a "spectrum of military options" it could take to assist the groups battling against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Obama administration is leaning toward giving lethal arms to some of those rebels, a senior administration official has told NPR's Kelly McEvers.

(We updated the top of this post with a recap at 11:45 a.m. ET.)

Joking that a reporter's question Tuesday about whether he has "any juice" left to get things done in Washington made it sound like "I should just pack up and go home," President Obama paraphrased Mark Twain:

"Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated," the president said, as he predicted that an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws will be among the things that get accomplished in his second term.

The investigation into the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon is widening, with authorities looking at about a dozen people to see whether they might have helped the two main suspects either before or after the attack, law enforcement officials familiar with the probe tell NPR's Dina Temple-Raston.

"I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport," National Basketball Association center Jason Collins writes in a Sports Illustrated essay posted Monday, "but since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation."

With that, the 34-year-old veteran of 12 NBA seasons and six pro teams becomes the first active player in the four major American team sports to come out.

The man known as Misha who relatives of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects have alleged may have turned the elder Tsarnaev brother toward a radical form of Islam says he did no such thing and would have tried to stop the attack if he had known about it.

"I wasn't his teacher," Mikhail Allakhverdov (Misha) said Sunday of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. "If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings and the crimes that followed, has been moved out of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center "and is now confined at the Bureau of Prisons facility FMC Devens at Ft. Devens, Mass.," U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade said in a statement emailed to reporters Friday morning.

Four presidents praised another member of their exclusive club Thursday at the dedication of the George W. Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

We're due for one of those rare moments Thursday morning when the current president and all of his living predecessors will be together.

The occasion: The dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are due to be there along with, of course, George W. Bush.

The latest developments in the investigation into the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon and related news include:

Update at 2 p.m. ET. FBI Says Suspects Planned Explosions In Times Square, New York Mayor Bloomberg Says:

The latest developments in the investigation into the bombings at the Boston Marathon and related news include:

Update at 7:36 p.m. ET. Suspect Unarmed When Arrested:

When police cornered Dzhokhar Tsarnev in a boat in Watertown, they said they traded fire with the Boston bombing suspect.

A Twitter account from The Associated Press was hacked Tuesday afternoon and the erroneous message — to be perfectly clear, it WAS NOT TRUE — sent stocks down sharply for a few moments.

The false message claimed there had been two explosions at the White House and that President Obama had been injured. Again, none of that happened.

(Most recent update: 7:00 p.m. ET.)

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings was charged Monday with using a weapon of mass destruction to kill three people and wound more than 200 in what FBI investigators said evidence shows was a coldly calculated attack.

(Most recent update: 5:10 p.m. ET)

With the capture Friday night of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old surviving suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon, the story moves into a new phase — one of trying to answer critical questions.

-- Why?

-- How?

-- Was anyone else involved?

(We most recently updated this post at 11:10 p.m. ET on Friday. See this note about how we cover news such as this. For our running post about developments on Saturday, go here.)