Chatter: How Boston was bombed

NEED TO KNOW

This is what the Boston bombs looked like. Ball bearings, nails, a backpack, a pressure cooker: these are the ingredients that the FBI says went into the two explosive devices that killed three people and injured over 150 more at Monday's Boston Marathon.

This is what the victims looked like. One young American woman, one female Chinese postgraduate student, one 8-year-old boy. This is what Boston looked like: Belfast or Baghdad. As GlobalPost's executive editor and Boston native Charles Sennott reflects, the city "may never be the same." This is what the rest of the world looked like. From all over the planet, the expressions of shock, grief, anger and love poured in.

As for what the bombers looked like, that we still don't know. The FBI says the investigation is "in its infancy" and the range of suspects and motives still "wide open." But somewhere, somehow, "someone knows who did this."

WANT TO KNOW

"A fitting tribute." That's what the UK's current prime minister says its most divisive former PM, Margaret Thatcher, will receive in her grandiose ceremonial funeral this morning. The baroness' coffin was borne through central London with full military honors before being taken to St. Paul's Cathedral for a service attended by some 2,300 people.

Others claim they can think of more fitting tributes to the Iron Lady, whom many in the UK have never forgiven for the divisions they say her policies wreaked between north and south, industry and finance, poor and rich. It's precisely for fear of such "tributes" that alongside the mourners were thousands of police, deployed to head off the protesters who were bound to gather. United Kingdom? As Thatcher's rival memorials prove, the UK is a kingdom divided.

Poison pen pal. Authorities say a letter addressed to a US senator has tested positive for the poison ricin. The "white, granular substance" was found in an envelope sent to Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker, which luckily was intercepted during a routine mail check before it could ever reach the Capitol.

Coming so soon after the Boston bombings, the incident has naturally revived nasty memories of the anthrax mail-outs that followed 9/11 – though investigators say there is so far no indication that this week's attacks are linked.

Safaris can be an unsavory business. In Tanzania, home to some of Africa's most popular nature reserves, the government has announced plans to designate 600 square miles of northern territory a "wildlife corridor" – meaning the only beings allowed to access the land will be native animals, and the foreign trophy hunters who pay a handsome fee to shoot them.

Meanwhile tens of thousands of Maasai, the semi-nomadic people who have grazed their cattle there for generations, face an unceremonious eviction. GlobalPost reports on the international campaign to stop the Maasai being kicked off the land they say is theirs.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Applicants wanted: One-way ticket to Mars. Candidates must like red, dehydrated space food, and living on a rocky, lifeless planet forever.

Sound like the gig for you? Send your application to Mars One, a Netherlands-based non-profit that's offering 24 amateur astronauts the chance to take a once-in-a-lifetime flight to the Red Planet. Literally, once in your lifetime. You get on that spaceship, you ain't coming back. The company hopes to build a community of settlers in outer space, because that always works out so well. But on the upside – we hear the Mars Rover parties like a boss.