Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

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Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

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Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

Over the last few days, thousands of people have taken to the Internet to play Sherlock Holmes.

Armed with little more than grainy surveillance camera videos, cellphone photos and live tweets from police scanners, they have flooded the Web with clues, tips and speculation about what happened in Boston and who might have been behind it.

Monday's bombings, the first major terrorist attack on American soil in the age of smartphones, Twitter and Facebook, provided an opportunity for everyone to get involved. Within seconds of the first explosion, the Internet was alive with the collective ideas and reactions of the masses.

But this watershed moment for social media quickly spiraled out of control. Legions of Web sleuths cast suspicion on at least four innocent people, spread innumerable bad tips and heightened the sense of panic and paranoia.

"This is one of the most alarming social media events of our time," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "We're really good at uploading images and unleashing amateurs, but we're not good with the social norms that would protect the innocent."

Even as first responders were struggling to tend to the needs of the three killed and more than 170 injured in the Boston Marathon blasts, Web forums were cranking out rumors that there had been four bombs instead of two, that an area library had been targeted and that the death count was well over a dozen.

In short order, forums like Reddit and 4chan were alive with speculation — based on little or no evidence — that the culprits were Muslim fundamentalists or perhaps right-wing extremists.

In a mad rush to be the first to identify the perpetrators, anonymous posters online began openly naming people they believed had planted the bombs. Caught up in the mania, some traditional media ran with that information. Thursday's New York Post cover showed a photo of two men at the marathon under the headline "Bag Men" and implied that the two were prime suspects. In fact, neither was a suspect and one of the men, Salah Barhoun, was a high school student from outside Boston and had nothing to do with the explosions.

Once the FBI released images of the actual suspects, things really got out of hand. Online gumshoes scoured the Web for faces that might match and illustrated their work with drawings, circles and other home-brewed CSI techniques.

Some amateur sleuths focused their suspicions on Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month. Using an animation tool, they used an image of Tripathi to highlight similarities between his face and the FBI photos of one of the Boston bombing suspects.

However, Tripathi has no apparent connection to the marathon bombing. That was underscored Friday, when authorities revealed the identities of their suspects, two ethnic-Chechen immigrant brothers — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of Cambridge, Mass.

"We have known unequivocally all along that neither individual suspected as responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings was Sunil," Tripathi's family said in a statement on Friday.

Advocates of social media and crowd-sourcing have long touted its unrivaled power to gather huge amounts of information quickly in crisis situations. With tens of thousands of people on hand at the marathon, most armed with smartphones, the sheer volume of data available for analysis proved too tempting to ignore.

"People in the moment want to participate. They want to be a part of what's going on," said Nicco Mele, an expert on technology and social media at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

So as the Boston Police Department engaged in a gunfight with the two brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday, tens of thousands of Web denizens tuned in to live streams of police scanners, furiously tapping notes and ideas into Reddit and Twitter.

"I feel like we've reached a certain threshold here — the Internet is finally outstripping cable news completely," a poster using the handle PantsGrenades wrote on Reddit. "In fact, I wonder if we're inadvertently doing their work for them."

Their speculation was not limited to the events in Boston. The unusual confluence of tragic and suspicious events in the past week led many online to suggest that the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, might have been a terrorist attack as well and that the ricin-laced letters mailed to politicians could have come from those behind the marathon bombing.

According to Murray Jennex, a crisis management expert at San Diego State University, the huge influx of online voices enabled by social media can be extremely helpful because eye witnesses are holding cameras in almost every location.

But beyond the photos they upload, their speculation and theorizing don't necessarily lead to a more efficient resolution.

16.38 | 0 komentar | Read More

Death toll in China quake hits 113

Reporting from Beijing --  A strong earthquake struck China's mountainous Sichuan province  Saturday morning, leaving at least 113 people dead and more than 3,000 injured.

Chinese authorities assessed the magnitude of the quake at 7.0, while the U.S. Geological Survey reported 6.6.

Although nowhere near in magnitude, the tremor evoked troubling memories of the great earthquake almost exactly five years ago along the same fault line that killed almost 90,000.

The earthquake's epicenter was about 80 miles southwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, in Lushan country near the city of Ya'an. The city of 1.5 milion is best-known for its panda breeding research center, which was reported not to have sustained serious damage.

 Jiang Haikun, an official with the China Earthquake Network Center, told the official New China news agency that Saturday's quake is similar to the May 12, 2008, disaster centered in Wenchuan -- about 150 miles away -- as both occurred on the same Longmen mountain fault zone.

 Officials also warned of aftershocks and secondary disasters such as landslides and road and cave collapses, especially since a light rain was falling over the mountainous  area Saturday.

 The 8 a.m. quake jolted residents out of bed, and people ran into the streets wearing their pajamas, according to reports from the scene.

"We were very calm. We have gained experience from the last earthquake. It took us 30 seconds to leave everything and run," one middle-aged man told Chinese media.

A 22-year-old woman despaired that her house survived the first earthquake, but not this latest one.

"When the May 12th earthquake happened, I thought I was lucky ....  I still had a home to go back to. Now our house can't be lived in anymore. I feel really lost. Where I should go? What I should do after all this?'' she wrote on a microblog posting.

 The rescue effort will be a test for the newly installed government of Xi Jinping, who took over as president in March. His premier, Li Keqiang, toured the earthquake-stricken area  Saturday.

"The current most urgent issue is grasping the first 24 hours after the quake's occurrence, the golden time for saving lives, to take scientific rescue measures and save peoples' lives," Li was quoted as telling state media.

About 2,000 soldiers from Chengdu command of the People's Liberation Army were rushed to the epicenter, while two helicopters hovered overhead assessing the damage below.  

Compounding the tragedy, a military vehicle carrying 17 soldiers slid off a cliff into a river, killing one soldier and seriously injuring three.

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Feuer leads Trutanich by 11 points in poll

Los Angeles City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has a steep hill to climb to keep his job in next month's election, a new USC Price/L.A. Times poll has found.

Challenger Mike Feuer, a former city and state lawmaker, held a lead of more than 11 percentage points over Trutanich, drawing support from 36.8% of voters, compared with 25.5% favoring the incumbent. With about a month to go before election day, nearly 38% of the voters surveyed had not made up their minds.

The USC Sol Price School of Public Policy/L.A. Times Los Angeles City Election Poll surveyed 500 likely voters by telephone over a three-day period beginning Monday. The poll was conducted by Benenson Strategy Group, a Democratic firm, and M4 Strategies, a Republican company. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.

Trutanich finished second with 30% of the vote in a four-way primary election last month. Feuer was first with 44%.

The city attorney could still make headway with the substantial number of undecided voters. "The race certainly hasn't been decided," said USC's Dan Schnur, director of the poll.

But he is in a tough — and somewhat unusual — position for an incumbent seeking reelection from voters who do not appear to be particularly unhappy, pollsters said.

"It's an uphill road for Trutanich," Schnur said. "This is not an angry, throw-the-bums out electorate, so you would assume [there would be] a better landscape for an incumbent."

Chris St. Hilaire of M4 noted that Trutanich was losing among Democrats, independents and Anglo voters "and that's a huge problem for him." A large number of voters who said they were undecided before the March primary election ended up voting for the city attorney, St. Hilaire said. In the May runoff, the new poll shows Trutanich would need to win undecided voters by almost 2 to 1 to overcome Feuer, he said.

Compounding Trutanich's problem, said Benenson's Amy Levin, is the "drop-off" factor, a tendency of some voters to mark their choices in the top races and skip voting in lower-profile contests.

The city attorney is one of three officials elected citywide, but races for that office, as well as city controller, have generally attracted less attention than mayoral contests. That is especially true this year when two well-funded candidates — Councilman Eric Garcetti and Controller Wendy Greuel — are spending millions in their battle to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Feuer, a Democrat, began his city attorney campaign in 2011 and has raised considerably more money than Trutanich. He's also collected support across the political spectrum.

Last year, Trutanich, a former Republican who is now registered without a party affiliation, ran for Los Angeles County district attorney, breaking a highly publicized promise to serve two terms at City Hall before seeking another office. He decided to go for a second term as city attorney after failing to make it past the county's June primary election. Many observers attribute his current campaign struggles to the ill-fated decision to run for district attorney before finishing his first city attorney term.

Trutanich has said his campaign for district attorney was "a mistake," but he argues that he has served the city well and deserves another term.

Interviews with some of those surveyed in the USC Price/L.A. Times poll found a lack of enthusiasm for either candidate, even among those who said they had made up their minds.

"I hate full-time politicians," said Joshua Mayo, 48, a laborer who lives in Hollywood. But he said he would vote for Feuer because "he seems to have done some good things." Suzanne Brewer, 50, of North Hills, a paralegal, prefers Trutanich as "the least of the worst" and because of his experience as a prosecutor.

John Short, a 35-year-old bookkeeper who lives in Hollywood, likes Trutanich because "he is somebody in office who seems to be doing all right … so we might as well keep him in." Fred Dee, 67, of Koreatown, said he prefers Feuer because he voted for Trutanich four years ago "and I've been disappointed."

"It's time for new blood to come in; that's the main thing," Dee said.

jean.merl@latimes.com

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Officials: Boston Marathon bombing suspect died at hospital

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- The first suspect in the Boston marathon bombings, who was shot in a confrontation with police early Friday, was in cardiac arrest by the time he reached Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, officials said.

Doctors labored to save him without success, the hospital said in a news briefing. He had multiple gunshot wounds and what appeared to be blast injuries, said Dr. Richard Wolfe, chief of emergency medicine.

The second suspect in Monday's marathon bombings, which left three dead and more than 170 injured, remained at large.

FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon attack

Wolfe said two staff members heard the gunshots and warned the hospital, which braced for another "mass casualty event," he said.

At 1:10 a.m. EDT, he said, Boston police notified the the hospital that they had a "patient with multiple traumatic injuries" en route. 

Ten minutes later, the patient arrived in cardiac arrest, Wolfe said. Doctors tried "a number of procedures" for 15 minutes before he was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m.

He would not say whether the man said anything before he died or whether he was the same man discussed by police at an earlier briefing Friday.

Dr. Kevin Tabb, president and chief executive of the hospital, said the patient "was brought in under police guard" to the facility, which is still treating a dozen victims of the marathon explosions, one of them in the ICU.

Authorities said the incident began about 10:30 p.m. Thursday when an MIT police officer was shot to death on campus after responding to a disturbance. As authorities searched for the shooter, an SUV was carjacked nearby. Police chased it to Watertown, a Boston suburb. 

Officials said that the suspects opened fire and tossed explosives at pursuing officers. 

PHOTOS: Boston bombing suspects

Dr. David Schoenfeld said he was watching news of the MIT shootings at home in Watertown about 12:45 a.m. Friday "when I started hearing the gunshots and explosions. I realized something was really wrong."

 He called Beth Israel, drove in and "arrived before the patient."

"Given what had happened at MIT and all the sirens, I felt strongly that this was related to what happened earlier in the week," he said, referring to the marathon explosions.

He declined to say whether he treated the patient, saying only that it was clear who the patient was because "there was a large police presence when the patient arrived."

"You give the best care you can to every patient that comes to you,  regardless what may or may not be," Schoenfeld said. "You don't know what happened out there and you don't know who they are. You don't know what the circumstances are, whether they are a suspect, a police officer or an innocent."

PHOTOS: Explosions at Boston Marathon

The second suspect is still on the loose, officials say, and is considered armed and dangerous. In FBI photographs, the suspect is shown wearing a backward white baseball cap and a gray hooded sweatshirt. 

Officials have essentially shut down Boston while they search. Gov. Deval Patrick suspended all mass transit service, including trains, ferries, buses and commuter rail.

Beth Israel also said it accepted 24 victims from Monday's bombing. Half have been released. One remains in critical condition.

ALSO:

Boston bombing: 1 suspect dead, the other at large

Boston bombing: Bad journalism fuels terrorism hysteria

Update: Videos point to 2 suspects in Boston Marathon bombing

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Boston bombing suspect: City shut down amid manhunt

WATERTOWN, Mass. -- With the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing still at large early Friday morning, Gov. Deval Patrick ordered everyone in the city to stay home.

"There is a massive manhunt underway," he said at a morning press conference, calling it a "rapidly developing situation." 

Police Col. Timothy P. Alben added, "It may take hours."

Earlier, the governor ordered a shutdown of the city's public transportation system and officials urged people in some suburbs to stay home from work and school.

"We are asking businesses not to open," Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency Director Kurt Schwartz told reporters at an impromptu news conference just after dawn. "We are asking people not to congregate outside."

PHOTOS: Boston bombing suspects

Officials urged residents of Watertown, where a dramatic scene unfolded overnight, to take particular caution.

"Search for armed suspect continues in Watertown," the Boston Police Department said in a tweet early Friday. "Residents reminded to remain indoors. All vehicle traffic suspended."

Bostonians woke up to news of a slew of other closures too.

Amtrak stopped running trains between Boston and Providence, R.I. Boston Public Schools canceled all Friday activities. And Harvard, MIT, Emerson College, Boston College and Boston University canceled classes until further notice.

Pam Curtis of Belmont, which is near Watertown, told The Times that even inside her home she feels a bit uneasy.

FULL COVERAGE: Boston Marathon attack

"It's very strange; it really is," she said. "When you know there's a suspect anywhere around."

Drew Loucks, 30, who processed the news of the manhunt as he walked to work early Friday morning, likened it to a scene from a movie or a war zone.

"You don't really feel like you're in Boston," he said. "It's really scary."

Andrew Tangel in Boston and Maeve Reston in Los Angeles contributed to this report. 

alana.semuels@latimes.com

marisa.gerber@latimes.com

ALSO:

MIT officer dies after campus shooting

MIT police officer reported shot near campus

Boston Marathon bombings: Investigators cite suspects' movements

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Boston bombings: A city can exhale

WATERTOWN, Mass. — A manhunt that locked down metropolitan Boston for 23 hours ended Friday night when police unleashed a barrage of gunfire and snatched the second suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings from his hiding place in a covered boat in a backyard.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was found huddled and covered in blood by officers who stormed the suburban neighborhood after receiving a tip from a homeowner. The suspect's brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had died before dawn Friday in a fierce gun battle with police not far from the same section of Watertown.

Only a day earlier, pictures of the two men — wearing baseball caps and carrying backpacks that authorities said held bombs — had been spread across the country in an effort to identify them. Friday night, spectators broke out into applause as an ambulance with the younger brother made its way toward a hospital, and further celebrations broke out in central Boston.

"CAPTURED!!!" the Boston Police Department tweeted. "The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody."

"The people of Boston will be able to sleep tonight," Mayor Thomas Menino said.

President Obama, who watched the arrests unfold on television from the White House residence, congratulated police and federal agents on the intense, four-day investigation that successfully sifted through countless tips and thousands of photos. He pledged that the federal government would not stop its work with the arrests.

"Obviously, there are still many unanswered questions," he said. "Among them, why did young men who grew up and studied here as part of our communities and our country resort to such violence? How did they plan and carry out these attacks? And did they receive help?"

Friday's events ended an intense dragnet underway since two closely timed bombs went off during Monday's marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 170.

The climactic finale began shortly after 10 p.m. Thursday, authorities said, when the brothers shot a police officer to death at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hijacked a sport utility vehicle, then opened fire on pursuing officers with gunshots, explosives and homemade hand grenades, leaving one officer critically wounded.

The furious gun battle — with 200 rounds of ammunition exchanged as residents of a Watertown neighborhood crouched in their homes — ended with the elder Tsarnaev dead and the younger, also apparently wounded, fleeing on foot.

In scenes rare to modern American law enforcement, city authorities shut down the entire Boston transit system, asked businesses to close, searched trains and urged people to stay home and lock their doors. The search rendered bustling Boston eerily empty — a scary snow day, some Bostonians described it.

"Hurricanes, natural disasters — a city shuts down. But nothing like this," said Steven Feldman, a lawyer who works in downtown Boston.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis concurred, pointing to the dizzying array of ammunition and explosives deployed by the two suspects. "This is the stuff that [for] an urban police department, it's almost unheard of," he said.

By nightfall, authorities had decided to lift the advisory to stay indoors, warning that it still might not be entirely safe. But "we cannot continue to lock down an entire city," said Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police.

Residents of a 20-block area of Watertown near the shootout began venturing outside, some to go to the store, some for a short walk.

Outside, one resident noticed something amiss about the small boat in his backyard. When he lifted a tarp covering it, he found a man covered in blood. He quickly retreated and called 911.

A dozen police cars screeched into the neighborhood, witnesses said, followed by hundreds of officers. An FBI hostage rescue team, guided by a helicopter overhead looking for heat signatures, cautiously approached the boat, fearful that the suspect might have more explosives. They used a robotic arm to lift the tarp, officials said.

Within minutes, a new barrage of gunfire and stun grenade volleys erupted.

"It was pow pow pow pow pow, at least 15, 30 shots," said neighbor Deanna Finn, who dragged her 8-year-old son onto the bathroom floor and threw herself on top of him. She kept flushing the toilet to drown out the noise of the volleys outside.

"It felt like my entire life, I swear. I never had anything go so fast and so slow at the same time," she said.

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FBI seeks public's help identifying Boston suspects

BOSTON — The FBI appealed for the public's help Thursday in identifying two men wearing baseball caps and backpacks, one of whom was seen placing a backpack at the site of the second Boston Marathon bombing.

As President Obama traveled to the shaken city with a promise that it would "learn to run again," the FBI released photos and a video of two men seen walking through a crowd outside a restaurant near one of the two deadly explosions.

"They appear to be associated," Boston FBI chief Richard DesLauriers said as he detailed the most significant break yet in the investigation into who was responsible for the bombs that exploded Monday near the marathon's finish line, killing three people and injuring more than 170.

PHOTOS: Explosions at Boston Marathon

FBI officials believe they may have captured the planting of one of the crude pressure-cooker bombs outside a crowded restaurant near the finish line. They said an image showed the man — wearing a white baseball cap — depositing his backpack at the scene "within minutes" of the time the second bomb went off, DesLauriers said. The man walked back the way he came, away from the finish line, he said.

The same man is seen in surveillance footage walking a few steps behind a second man, this one dressed in khakis, a black jacket and a black baseball cap. That footage was captured at 2:37 p.m., about 13 minutes before the explosions, a few blocks away.

"We consider them to be armed and extremely dangerous. No one should approach them," DesLauriers said, urging members of the public with information to instead call the FBI's tip line.

"Somebody out there knows these individuals as friends, neighbors, co-workers or family members of the suspects," DesLauriers said of the agency's decision to tip its hand and release the photos.

"Though it may be difficult, the nation is counting on those individuals to come forward and provide [information] to us," he said. "No detail is too small. Each piece moves us forward towards justice."

The decision to release the photos was likely a gamble, a former FBI agent said.

"It's a cost-benefit analysis," said Richard Hahn, the former FBI senior supervisory agent in Long Beach. "Your perpetrator is going to see the photo if it's out there, and they could flee or go underground."

But, he said, the FBI may not be able to identify the individuals on its own and could decide that learning their identities through public help is worth the chance that they could try to evade law enforcement.

"If we don't know who that person is, we're not even at first base," Hahn said.

Sources close to the investigation also revealed that they have found what they believe to be the detonation system for the bombs — a circuit board and parts from a toy remote control vehicle.

Investigators have sorted through more than 3,000 images along with a massive amount of surveillance video; a department store camera near the scene of the second explosion produced some of the key images, officials have said.

"It's a long, tedious process — they're doing it as fast as they can," said Jason Pack, supervisory special agent at the FBI's national press office.

The revelations came as Obama traveled to Boston for the latest stop on a two-year-long road trip in which he has been called upon to comfort cities shocked by the effects of mass violence and disastrous weather.

"If they sought to intimidate us, terrorize us, to shake us from … the values that make us who we are as Americans, well, it should be pretty clear by now that they picked the wrong city to do it," Obama said to a standing ovation from more than 2,000 people at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. "Not here in Boston."

Under the soaring expanse of the Gothic Revival cathedral, the president was called on to try to find new words of comfort equally eloquent to those he delivered after tragedies in Newtown, Tucson and Joplin.

Boston was different, he said. The city's long history of nurturing immigrants and the millions from around the world who have studied at its universities — including the president and his wife, both graduates of Harvard Law School — gave everyone a stake in the city, he said.

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