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ani district in the shadows of the Tora Bora mountains, kicking off a four-day operation against the Taliban by roughly 175 Americans and 1,250 Afghan troops, in a teeth-clenching test of U.S. mentoring and training.
• The Afghans were lined up behind the Americans, leaning back on their 130-pound backpacks, saving their strength to carry the packs onto the Chinooks for their first air assault -- and without the Americans' high-tech goggles, letting their eyes adjust to the dark for the assault to come.
• They didn't talk much.
• A Predator drone feed showed the groups landing in the darkened district -- dark spots trudging slowly up hills and sometimes falling into ditches -- U.S. and Afghan alike. They set up a post to oversee the insurgent-ridden villages they would be guarding for the next four days, as Afghan police cleared them out house by house.
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• BOSTON (AP) -- With the Boston marathon bombing suspect in a prison hospital, investigators are pushing forward both in the U.S. and abroad to piece together the myriad details of a plot that killed three people and injured more than 260.
• FBI agents picked through a landfill near the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where 19-year-old suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was a sophomore. FBI spokesman Jim Martin would not say what investigators were looking for.
• A federal law enforcement official not authorized to speak on the record about the investigation told The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity on Friday that the FBI was gathering evidence regarding "everything imaginable."
• Meanwhile, U.S. officials said the bombing suspects' mother had been added to a federal terrorism database about 18 months before the April 15 attack -- a disclosure that deepens the mystery around the Tsarnaev family and marks the first time American authorities have acknowledged that Zubeidat Tsarnaeva was under investigation before the tragedy.
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is charged with joining with his older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, now dead, in setting off the shrapnel-packed pressure-cooker bombs. The brothers are ethnic Chechens from Russia who came to the United States about a decade ago with their parents.
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