News From NPR

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg seems determined to become the formidable adversary the National Rifle Association has never had.

The billionaire mayor is spending from his personal fortune to help defeat lawmakers who voted against gun control proposals last week and to prop up those who supported the measures.

Bloomberg's first target is a Democratic senator facing a tough fight for re-election in 2014: Mark Pryor of Arkansas.

A lucky escape and quick thinking by the man who says he was carjacked by Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev may have helped police catch the brothers, according to Eric Moskowitz, a Boston Globe reporter who got an exclusive interview with the driver.

Surveyors have found what appears to be part of a plane that hit the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, New York police say. The piece of landing gear is about 3 feet wide and 1.5 feet deep, police tell The Associated Press.

In a statement, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne said the debris was found wedged between two buildings during an inspection at the site of a long-planned Islamic community center.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to track the health of a population: the average blood pressure, the rate of mental illness and the average weight.

Epidemiologists have been collecting these data for years, but now, in Oregon, there is cold, hard cash riding on measurements like these.

President Obama has spoken at two memorial services in just over a week — one for victims of the Boston Marathon attack and one for those who died in the chemical plant explosions in West, Texas. In both speeches, he focused on victims and survivors.

But other Democrats are using these events to talk about another subject: the role of government.