Mother Jones recaps the Boston Marathon explosions from first reports to President Barack Obama’s statement that “Boston is a tough, resilient town and so are its people.”---

Top of the Alty World

“What We Know About the Boston Marathon Explosions.”—Mother Jones

Google has also created a person finder site for people searching for loved ones at the marathon or for people with information to share.—Google

Slate notes that the bombings occurred on “Patriot’s Day” a holiday some anti-government activists have begun to mark considering this week marks the times of the Oklahoma City bombings as well as the lethal raid against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas.--Slate

The FDA has allowed drugs approved on fraudulent research to sit on pharmacy shelves for years without notifying the public.—ProPublica

A Guantanamo Bay detainee describes the trauma of violent forced feedings and the prison’s hunger strike.—AlterNet

Top of Alty Utah

The SLCPD is reevaluating security for the Salt Lake Marathon this Saturday since the bombings in Boston.—KUER

Utah Political Capitol hosts Maryann Martindale of Alliance for a Better Utah to talk about her legal complaint against Utah Attorney General John Swallow.—Utah Political Capitol

The Utah Republican Party rejects changes to party nominating process and squares off for a showdown with a group looking to change Utah’s caucus system.—Utah Policy

Rantosphere

A former trader at Lehman’s Brothers reflects on why he left the world of high finance.

“What I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part of Wall Street that I worked in was simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors, often teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more sophisticated investors that call themselves proprietary trading desks and hedge funds. Of course, the traders had all sorts of excuses and jargon to deal with this truth. “Oh no,” they would say, “We are important providers of liquidity that create stable financial markets. We’re a crucial part of a system. And besides, if we don’t do it, someone else will.” These are the lies that people tell themselves so that they can buy larger homes.”--NickChirls

The Long View

Salt Lake City Weekly profiles Johnny Bangerter a former white supremacist looking to leave his racist past behind and turn over a new leaf in his life as an activist.

“His life was punk and partying—and to Bangerter, the two are very different things. The partying—and doing drugs with older kids—may have drawn Bangerter in, but the politics became increasingly important to him. He wrote a terrorizing threat to the IRS at 12 years old when he first started paying income taxes. “To me, punk rock was a civil-liberties cause, not a fad,” he says. “To wear a mohawk or to dress a certain way was a statement against this Leave It to Beaver suck-ass fucking society. It was a political statement. … There was an activist core in our youth scene called Positive Force. We became active in the anti-nuclear stuff, definitely on the left, feeding the homeless, that kind of stuff. Like what Food Not Bombs is today.” –Salt Lake City Weekly