Mark Memmott

Penny Pritzker, one of the nation's richest people and a "longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser," as The Chicago Tribune writes, is President Obama's choice to be his next secretary of commerce.

The president announced the news this hour at the White House. He also said that one of his economic advisers, Michael Froman, is his choice to be the next U.S. trade representative.

There were 324,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 18,000 from the previous week's 342,000, the Employment and Training Administration reports.

Claims continue to run around the lowest pace since early 2008 — they haven't been lower since a week in mid-January 2008 when they came in at 321,000.

Update at 8:10 a.m. ET, May 3. A New Post:

(Most recent update: 4:36 p.m. ET.)

Three 19-year-old men — two of them University of Massachusetts Dartmouth college students from Kazakhstan who were friends with Boston bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — were taken into custody Wednesday by authorities in Boston. The third individual, an American citizen, was also a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where Tsarnaev was enrolled.

In what Huffington Post Business calls "one of the funniest, most eloquent court documents we've ever seen," a federal judge in Texas has loaded up his ruling on a case involving San Antonio strip clubs with at least 17 double entendres.

This is no joke:

A wild male tiger, which seems to be in search of some female companionship, has been lured into eastern India's Nandankanan Zoological Park after several frightening nights for those in nearby villages.

According to the Deccan Herald:

Following up on word there have been discussions between lawyers for Boston Marathon bombings suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and federal investigators about sparing him from the possibility of the death penalty if he provides valuable information about the attacks, NPR counterterrorism correspondent

A relatively weak 119,000 jobs were added to private employers' payrolls last month as federal spending cuts and tax increases began to bite, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report.

As the U.S. considers a "spectrum of military options" it could take to assist the groups battling against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Obama administration is leaning toward giving lethal arms to some of those rebels, a senior administration official has told NPR's Kelly McEvers.

We admire KHOU-TV meteorologist David Paul's good-natured determination.

Check how he handled it when a case of the hiccups hit during his time on the air Monday evening.

And in the comments thread, please share any stories of a time when hiccups hit. Also: your surefire cure.

Adding to reporting from NPR, The Associated Press and other news outlets, The New York Times writes Tuesday that:

There were solid increases in home prices during the month of February across all 20 major cities where that data is tracked, according to the latest S&am

(We updated the top of this post with a recap at 11:45 a.m. ET.)

Joking that a reporter's question Tuesday about whether he has "any juice" left to get things done in Washington made it sound like "I should just pack up and go home," President Obama paraphrased Mark Twain:

"Rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated," the president said, as he predicted that an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws will be among the things that get accomplished in his second term.

The investigation into the April 15 bombings at the Boston Marathon is widening, with authorities looking at about a dozen people to see whether they might have helped the two main suspects either before or after the attack, law enforcement officials familiar with the probe tell NPR's Dina Temple-Raston.

"I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport," National Basketball Association center Jason Collins writes in a Sports Illustrated essay posted Monday, "but since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation."

With that, the 34-year-old veteran of 12 NBA seasons and six pro teams becomes the first active player in the four major American team sports to come out.

"You are our witnesses because you will go beyond our lives," Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel told the world's young people Monday morning during an event to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's opening.

When Fox Sun Sports reporter Kelly Nash was at Fenway Park in Boston on Saturday to cover the Houston Astros' game with the Red Sox, she decided to take a few "selfie" photos while atop the famous Green Monster in left field.

Below, batting practice was underway. So some balls were flying in her direction. Nash turned her back to the field, held her smartphone up and started snapping.

And when she looked at one of the photos she'd just taken, Nash says, she discovered she'd come much closer to being beaned than she'd realized.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- I Would Have Stopped Him, 'Misha' Says Of Bombing Suspect.

-- Sen. Manchin Says Background Checks Bill Will Pass Next Time.

In 2011, he was the hottest name in football, for his "Tebowing" and for leading the Denver Broncos into the playoffs.

Before the 2012 season, he was traded to the New York Jets — putting him smack dab in the center of the brightest of the media's spotlights.

The man known as Misha who relatives of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects have alleged may have turned the elder Tsarnaev brother toward a radical form of Islam says he did no such thing and would have tried to stop the attack if he had known about it.

"I wasn't his teacher," Mikhail Allakhverdov (Misha) said Sunday of Tamerlan Tsarnaev. "If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this."

An explosion at an office building in the the Czech capital on Monday injured at least several dozen people and may have left some victims trapped in rubble.

The early thinking was that a natural gas leak led to the disaster in the center of Prague, police spokesman Tomas Hulan said, according to The Associated Press.

Sen. Joe Manchin says he's going to reintroduce his bill that expands background checks for gun purchases to sales made at gun shows and online, and he predicts that the second time around, it will get enough votes to move out of the Senate.

The furloughs of air traffic controllers that have slowed air travel in the past week and frustrated thousands of fliers should soon come to an end.

By a vote of 361-41, the House of Representatives just passed legislation that would allow the secretary of transportation to shift up to $253 million in funds so that controllers no longer have to be furloughed to meet the requirements of sequestration (the mandated, across-the-board spending cuts that began taking hold March 1).

Country superstar George Jones, known for "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and a long string of other hits, has died.

He was 81.

According to Webster & Associates, the Nashville public relations firm that represented Jones, he died Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He was hospitalized there on April 18 for treatment of a fever and irregular blood pressure, the p.r. firm adds.

One year after glamour quarterbacks were the big story, NFL teams mostly opted for big, beefy, bruisers during Round One of the 2013 NFL draft Thursday night.

The U.S. economy grew at a 2.5 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2013, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated Friday morning.

That's modest growth, and was below the 3.2 percent pace economists had expected to hear about. But growth was up substantially from fourth-quarter 2012, when the economy expanded at a scant 0.4 percent annual rate.

An estimated 38 people died early Friday at a psychiatric hospital north of Moscow when a fire swept through the facility.

The state news agency RIA Novosti says it has been told by a "police source" that most of the victims "died in their sleep [from] inhaling the fumes as they were likely sedated by prescribed medicine."

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving suspect in the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings and the crimes that followed, has been moved out of Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center "and is now confined at the Bureau of Prisons facility FMC Devens at Ft. Devens, Mass.," U.S. Marshals Service spokesman Drew Wade said in a statement emailed to reporters Friday morning.