Chatter: Boston waits for answers

NEED TO KNOW

The surviving Boston bombing suspect has a lot of questions to answer. Reports suggest he's already getting started: according to anonymous sources, 19-year-old Dzokhar Tsarnaev is awake in hospital and, unable to speak because of a throat wound, responding to questions in writing.

Tsarnaev – who, remember, does not have the right to remain silent – is expected to be charged as soon as federal prosecutors have decided exactly what they'll pursue him for. We don't know yet what those charges will be, but we do know that the lead prosecutor has a reputation for showing no mercy.

In Boston, meanwhile, a week has passed since two bombs killed three people and maimed many more at the marathon finish line. The city remembers the victims today with a moment of silence at 2.50 p.m., exactly seven days after everything changed.

WANT TO KNOW

The strange case of the disappearing passengers. Some 10 civilians are feared kidnapped by Taliban after bad weather forced their helicopter to make an emergency landing in eastern Afghanistan. Seven Turkish engineers, two Russian pilots and one Afghan crew member were on their way to Kabul when the chopper went down, but authorities found the aircraft empty – the occupants seized, they believe, by some opportunistic insurgents.

NATO forces say they are helping to recover the helicopter; as for its passengers, we don't yet know.

Is Myanmar "ethnic cleansing" its Muslim minority? A new report by Human Rights Watch claims that's exactly what it's doing, on the same day that the European Union is due to decide whether to lift its sanctions on Myanmar for good.

Rohingya Muslims in the western state of Rakhine have been terrorized, displaced and denied humanitarian aid, HRW says, all of it with the incitement of public officials, community leaders and Buddhist monks, and the backing of security forces. The group wants the EU to maintain its pressure on Myanmar's government to end the alleged abuses, but Brussels is widely expected to drop everything but its arms embargo on the once pariah state.

Meet India's new morality police. Young, Hindu and radical, they object to the party-going, alcohol-drinking, unsupervised-dating habits of their educated, upwardly mobile, westward-looking peers. And they're not afraid to show it – violently.

GlobalPost goes to Mangalore, a city that has seen a growing number of vigilante interventions against so-called "immoral" behavior, to looks for clues to the simmering culture war beneath India's booming surface.

STRANGE BUT TRUE

Now that's keeping your head. Respect, please, to Yoann Galeran, a French-born deckhand in Australia who managed to fight off a crocodile that had latched on to his noggin. Showing admirable French resistance, Galeran punched the 6.5-foot saltwater croc until it finally released his head, neck and shoulders from its jaws.

"I just think if it was a bigger crocodile, I maybe wouldn't have any head," he said, with what we like imagine was a Gallic shrug. As for the croc – he lived to bite another bonce.