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The White House now believes Syria has used chemical weapons. But President Obama has shown no inclination toward military involvement in another Middle Eastern war.

The Senate passed the legislation on Thursday. President Obama will sign it, the White House says. This means the FAA will be able to shift funds so that the number of air traffic controllers on duty no longer needs to be reduced in order to satisfy sequestration.

The country singer, known for "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and many other hits, died Friday at age 81. Fresh Air remembers Jones with excerpts from a 1996 conversation with Terry Gross about his autobiography, his addictions and his perspective on his celebrated but troubled marriage to Tammy Wynette.

Democrats are using the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas and the Boston Marathon bombings to argue that the government has an important role to play in keeping Americans safe. People who want smaller government say liberals are reaching the wrong conclusions.

Robert Siegel talks to Boston Globe metro reporter Eric Moskowitz about the man who was carjacked by the Tsarnaev brothers last week. The carjack victim's escape was pivotal to tracking the suspects down, and may have stopped them from launching another attack in New York City.

How hard can it be to measure the health of a population? Oregon is finding out it's difficult to decide even what to track. But the state received almost $2 billion in federal funds to improve the health of its residents and to cut costs. The state faces substantial fines if it can't prove it has done the job.

Country music legend George Jones, who died today at 81, made a career out of turning hard living into heartbreaking songs. He could pull and bend notes until they made listeners hurt. In 2010, Jones told NPR's Melissa Block, "I try to live the song during that three minutes."

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner was supposed to be a game changing new aircraft, but battery problems grounded the fleet, costing Boeing an estimated $600 million. Now the Federal Aviation Administration has approved a fix to the battery issue, and the first Dreamliner will return to the skies this weekend in Africa. Ethiopian Airlines is relaunching the "continent's first" Dreamliner in its effort to distinguish itself in the increasingly competitive, increasingly crowded African aerospace market.

The U.S. Navy is planning to expand training exercises off California and Hawaii, citing the need for military readiness. That's raising concerns about threatened whales and marine mammals, because sonar is known harm and, in some cases, kill them. The state of California is fighting the Navy's plan.

The failure of the FBI and the CIA to keep track of Tamerlan Dsarnaev in the months preceding the Boston Marathon bombing has prompted criticism that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials ignored important warning signs. The case is reminiscent of criticism leveled at counterterrorism officials after Army Maj. Nidal Hasan's shooting rampage at Fort Hood Texas in November 2009 and after the al-Qaida-directed attempt to blow up a civilian airliner on Christmas Day of that year. In both cases, counterterrorism officials subsequently acknowledged that mistakes had been made. Whether authorities missed important evidence of Dsarnaev's intentions, however, is far less clear. Veteran intelligence officers say resource and legal constraints make it very difficult to follow suspicious individuals closely unless their behavior is genuinely alarming.