National

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."

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning, I'm Steve Inskeep.

Once Louisville won the NCAA men's basketball title, there was only one thing for Rick Pitino to do. He promised his players that if they won, he'd get a tattoo. We do not know if Pitino had second thoughts in the final seconds of the win over Michigan, but now the coach has done it. A Louisville spokesman tweeted a photo of the 60-year-old coach's back. It is now marked with the team record, 35-and-five, along with a blood-red letter L.

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.

Six months after Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of low-income New Yorkers are facing homelessness. They've been living in subsidized hotel rooms since the storm, but that funding is about to run out. Advocates say there isn't enough public and low-income housing to accommodate them all.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

There's something about charter schools that parents love. So when the mayor of Indianapolis, a city that's been a leader in the development of charter schools, shut one down last summer, a group of parents and staff made a bold decision. They choose to keep the school going with hardly any funding and no charter.

Kyle Stokes reports.

KYLE STOKES, BYLINE: At first, parents fought the mayor's decision to close The Project School in central Indianapolis. They went to court. They took to the streets in protest.

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

The Atlantic Coast of the U.S. took an economic hit six months ago from Hurricane Sandy. It left behind damaged businesses, homes and hundreds of thousands of waterlogged vehicles.

NPR's Sonari Glinton reports that it's still affecting the auto industry.

SONARI GLINTON, BYLINE: Much of the physical damage of Sandy has been cleaned up, but if you didn't live in the storm's path, it's hard to contemplate the scope of destruction - especially when it comes to cars.

Across the country, state budgets are back in the black after years of belt-tightening and spending cuts. From California to Florida, in nearly every state, the economic recovery has produced a surge in tax revenue.

For governors and state legislators, that's produced a new question: how to spend the money.

The past three years have not been easy ones for elected officials. Nearly every state requires them to produce a balanced budget. And with declining revenue from sales, property and income taxes, that has meant big spending cuts.

Roughly one in four cellphone towers in the path of Hurricane Sandy went out of service. It was a frustrating and potentially dangerous experience for customers without a landline to fall back on. Now, local officials and communications experts are pushing providers to improve their performance during natural disasters.

Lori McCaskill lives in Brooklyn, and when Sandy hit last October, her Verizon cell service went out. She couldn't work. She couldn't check in with family and friends. Her sister was due to have a baby any day.

All parents are bound to disagree, argue or even raise their voices with each other.

But psychologists say parents can minimize the negative impact of their arguments on their children. It's just a matter of using a few simple techniques to turn down the heat and repair the damage after it's over.

Psychologist Suzanne Phillips at Long Island University says one of the most important things for parents to remember when they're on the verge of a big argument is not to involve the child.

For years now, psychologists have been telling couples who yell at one another to stop for the sake of the kids. Such conflict in the home — even when no violence is involved — is associated with a host of negative behavioral and life outcomes for children.

Colorado responded to the mass shootings in Aurora, Colo., and Newtown, Conn., by passing new gun control measures last month. That's not sitting well with several gun-related businesses in the Centennial State, where four companies have announced plans to relocate all or some of their operations.

As the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell is credited with bringing countless voices to our ears. And now, for the first time, here he is imploring us to hear his own voice:

The sound is scratchy. You have to strain to decipher it, but the words are clear. They're from Bell's lips, recorded in 1885 but unveiled just last week by the Smithsonian.

"It lets us know what the past was really like. It fills in a gap for people," says Shari Stout, collections manager at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.