Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Morning Social Media Newsfeed Tuesday, April 30, 2013

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With its Future on the Line, Foursquare Readies Ad Retargeting and In-App Ads (SocialTimes)
Foursquare is looking for advertisers to participate in its efforts to retarget ads to Web users based on their check-ins and to serve up interstitial ads in its mobile apps, according to a leaked pitch deck for advertisers obtained by Gawker's Valley Wag. Foursquare's latest round of funding was in loans, rather than outright investment, demonstrating its investors' impatience with the company's failure to generate revenue. CNET Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley wants to dismiss worries that the startup isn't growing, saying that all important metrics are rising about 10 percent to 30 percent from month to month. Crowley, who also is a co-founder of the check-in and local search app, noted that Foursquare "doesn't talk about growth numbers that much," but the company pays attention to the number of active users, signups, check-ins, people using search and other metrics, and all are rising, he said.SFGate Crowley noted that March was the company's highest revenue-generating month yet, and that it's regularly signing six-figure deals with advertisers and merchants. He wouldn't comment on 2013 revenue, merely stating that the company is on track to hit an aggressive goal. Street Fight
Foursquare capped off its nearly yearlong transition into a local discovery service earlier this month, releasing a major update to its mobile application that brought search features to the forefront of the service. The update put the New York-based startup on a collision course with the publicly traded Yelp, pitting the two companies in an indirect (if not lopsided) battle over the future of local discovery. VentureBeat Foursquare's plight contrasts strongly with the success of shopping app Shopkick, which is pulling in cash in ways that most location-based mobile apps - including Foursquare - have so far been unable to. The app, which rewards people for shopping in certain stores, helped Shopkick's partners make $200 million last year.

Android's Google Now Feature Comes to iPhone (The Wall Street Journal/Digits)
With an update to its search app, Google's intelligent search system Google Now is now available for the iPhone and iPad. It doesn't have as deep of an integration with the operating system like it does on Android, but this Google Now version does offer a taste of one of the smartest features on Android. The Huffington Post Google Now's invasion of Siri's turf marks Google's latest attempt to lure iPhone and iPad users away from a service that Apple built into its own devices. Google quickly won over millions of iPhone users in December when it released a mapping application to replace the navigation system that Apple dumped when it redesigned iOS last fall. CNET Unlike Google Now on Android, which you can start using as long as your device is running Android 4.1 or later, the Google Now app on iOS will require you to log in to your Google account first. But the defining features of Google Now, the voice recognition and the predictive search, remain intact.

Jason Collins Thanks Fans on Twitter After Coming Out (Mashable)
Jason Collins was the talk of Twitter on Monday after coming out and becoming the first openly gay active athlete in a major American sport. He dominated Twitter's list of worldwide trends.

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9 Social Media Tips for Freelancers from Columbia's Sree Sreenivasan (SocialTimes)
Columbia University's first chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan @sree provided a slew of social media advice to freelancers at ASJA 2013. Here are just a few of his tips.

Weather Company Unveils Three New Web Series, Offers 'Four-Screen' Ad Opportunity (paidContent)
The Weather Company, eager to expand beyond its usual fare of snow and storms, announced three new original Web series on Monday that will feature athlete amputees, virus pandemics and disaster survivors. On the social media front, the Weather Company has been creating personalized products like custom Twitter forecasts and, as an executive described Monday, a "social emergency network" that can let people use Facebook to warn loved ones in a given region about an impending weather apocalypse.

Facebook Nixes Option Allowing Users to See Only Posts from Friends on a Page (AllFacebook)
Previously, users could visit Facebook pages and choose to see posts from their friends. However, as sister site Inside Facebook discovered recently, that option is no longer there. Now, users can only see posts by the pages and posts by fans, but not posts by their friends.

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Twitter and Comedy Central Kick Off 5-Day #ComedyFest with Mel Brooks' First Tweet (The Next Web)
Twitter and Comedy Central have kicked off a five-day experimental online comedy festival that will take place on Twitter and Vine, beginning first with a live-streamed event featuring Mel Brooks, the "2,000 Year Old Man," as he signs up for a Twitter account with the help of Carl Reiner and Judd Apatow. Brooks and Reiner made literal comedic history in the 1960s with their 2,000 Year Old Man sketches.

Twitter Ads App Throws its Neck on Chopping Block (AllTwitter)
Miles Recny admits that his app, Followgen, directly cannibalizes Twitter's ads revenue model and does so on Twitter's very own platform. It seems he's trying to prevent his app's inevitable demise - or, at the very least, he's attempting to will it to happen with some measure of predictability (one of those).

Instagram Reverses Ban on Account (The Verge)
Instagram drew attention to itself this weekend for banning an account that published user-submitted pictures of everyday objects that merely resembled penises. The account, called @thatlookslikeadick, was inspired by a widely-circulated picture of the Curiosity rover's tire-tracks that looked like a phallus.

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Monday, April 29, 2013

US Tax policy: Sweet land of subsidy

The downturn has forced states to be savvier and more careful about providing tax incentives to business

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News and The Economist

ON NOVEMBER 14th 2012, before audience of elected officials and assorted local dignitaries, voestalpine Metal Forming, a division of an Austrian steel company, broke ground on a manufacturing facility in Bartow County, around 50 miles (80km) north-west of Atlanta. Voestalpine supplies parts to European carmakers, and hopes to expand further. Mercedes-Benz has its only American plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while Volkswagen has one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, just over the Georgia border. Car-manufacturing factories dot the south-east, a region of low-tax states without strong unions and offering relatively cheap land. Voestalpine looked at many sites across the region, and finally narrowed the contenders down to three states.

Georgia boasts the world’s busiest airport, America’s fourth-busiest container port, several interstate highways and a well-respected workforce-training programme. To sweeten the deal, however, the state’s economic development team gave voestalpine an array of tax credits and incentives: $3.3m in job-creation credits and $1.4m in port-tax credits over five years, $4m in sales-tax exemptions on machinery and equipment, $3m in local-tax abatements and a grant of $275,000 towards site developments—in all, over $14m in credits and cost exemptions.

If that seems steep, consider that Voestalpine will invest $62m in the facility, which is scheduled to open later this year. Not including the jobs and the economic activity generated during its construction, it will eventually employ 220 people directly and could generate hundreds more jobs for its suppliers and vendors. Those 220 jobs will pay employees an average annual salary between $30,000 and $40,000—right around the Bartow County average of $37,000 a year, and particularly welcome these days, when the county’s unemployment rate stands at 9%, well above the national average of 7.6%. Much of that money will find its way back into the community as employees buy houses, food, cars and so forth—and as they spend they will pay sales and property taxes, which means more government revenue and so more money for social services.

If voestalpine fails to meet 80% or better of its promised investment and job-creation targets in five years, Georgia can claw back whatever portion of the $14m in credits and grants has not been claimed or spent. Chris Cummiskey, who heads Georgia’s Department of Economic Development, says that companies such as voestalpine “are putting far more into the community than they are taking out”.

Not everyone agrees. Opposition to incentives is a rare issue that can unite progressives and “tea-party” types. Greg LeRoy, who heads an economic-development watchdog group called Good Jobs First, suggests that states would be better off making investments that benefit everyone, rather than showering big companies with dollars. He calls subsidies aimed at luring or, worse, retaining companies that say they are thinking of moving (see chart) “a race to the bottom” that “wastes a lot of money on a microscopic fraction of employees”. Instead he suggests that governments should fund “training programmes, cluster training, investments in infrastructure or fibre-optic networks or [school] education. These are much safer investments…benefiting lots of different employers.” Mr Cummiskey believes that given Georgia’s infrastructure, even with no incentives, “We’d pick up most of the business in the south-east.”

That is easy to say from a comfortable perch in a big, rich city such as Atlanta. But incentives can give scrappier, hungrier places a way to compete for business. They keep dominant cities from getting too comfortable. They help businesses keep costs down and hedge their expansion risks. The cash crunch that followed the downturn led some states to spend more on economic development in order to lure businesses. It has led others to save precious funds by tightening economic-development budgets. Putting even a rough dollar figure on the number of incentives offered is difficult, but all states and many cities and counties have them, and they have become an accepted and largely beneficial aspect of competition.

They take a variety of forms: credits for creating jobs, taxpayer-funded workforce training, property-tax abatements, assistance with land acquisition (land is often just given away) and site development, credits against expenses for research and development, sales-tax refunds on machinery or energy used in manufacturing, credits for redeveloping brownfields or opening a business in a poor district.

Some are statutory; they are available to any company that meets a predetermined requirement. The $3.3m in job-creation credits that voestalpine will receive, for instance, comes from a credit available to any company in Georgia that creates jobs in one of seven sectors, including manufacturing. A company gets $3,000 per job per year for five years as a credit against its total tax liability. Voestalpine’s port-tax credits are also available to any company in Georgia that increases imports or exports through Georgia’s ports by at least 10% over the previous year. Around half of all American states have some sort of job-creation tax credits. Some target wages, as Georgia’s does; others target types of businesses: in 2010 California and Connecticut both enacted credits for small businesses that hire full-time workers.

Others, such as the relatively small $275,000 that went toward voestalpine’s site development, are discretionary, meaning they go to specific companies for specific purposes—most often to large companies relocating or expanding in a state. The largest source of discretionary funds is probably the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF), which Rick Perry, the governor, created in 2003. Texas calls this a “deal-closing” fund, critics a slush fund for the well-connected; either way, it provides grants that have ranged between $194,000 and $50m to companies choosing between a site in Texas and one in another state. Companies must promise to hire a lot of people (at least 75 in cities and 25 in rural areas) at wages above the county average. Since 2004 the TEF has dispersed $487.4m. Texas also offers grants to technology companies through its Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which has given nearly $195m to 137 businesses since 2005.

Texas’s free hand has inspired copycats: all its neighbours now have discretionary deal-closing funds, as do several other states. They have come into vogue even as cash grants have generally grown scarcer. Companies may prefer cash grants to help them hedge risks and defray costs during a major expansion or those tenuous first few years, but in recent times states have tended to prefer credits and abatements, which have little or no upfront cost and have impacts that can be spread over several years.

The downturn has also led to demands for greater accountability for recipients of incentives and greater scrutiny from state legislatures. Many states now have clawback provisions written into their incentives. A 2012 study by the Pew Centre on the States found that (only) 13 states rigorously assessed their economic-development incentives, and used the results of those assessments to inform policy decisions (see map). Without such measures costs can balloon. Louisiana, for instance, brought in an extraction-tax exemption for horizontal drilling in 1994, when that was a newish technology. In 2007 it cost the state $285,000. By 2010 horizontal drilling had become a common method of getting natural-gas deposits from the Haynesville Shale in northern Louisiana, and the exemption cost the state $239m. Such scrutiny may have helped inspire the welcome trend away from film-tax credits, which have limited lasting effect; the number of states offering them fell from 40 in 2010 to 34 in 2012, though that is still a lot more than four in 2001.

Even supporters admit that there is no simple way to determine how effective incentives are. Take Texas. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, between June 2009 and June 2011 the state was responsible for nearly half of all jobs created in America. How much of that is due to the generous incentives it offers, and how much to other factors? Texas, after all, is a state where union closed-shops are banned, and with a lot of cheap land; a company could relocate there from Chicago, Boston or New York and come out ahead on land and labour costs alone.

A study by Angelou Economics, a consultancy headed by Angelos Angelou, a former vice-president of economic development for the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce, in April 2012 found job growth correlated less with the amount of incentives states offer than with rates of entrepreneurship, retention of young professionals and overall business climate. States with an ageing population and high corporate taxes, such as Maine, may need to be more generous with incentives than young, low-tax states such as Georgia or Texas. Some may not like it, but brisk interstate competition is far better than none.

BOSTON SUSPECT'S DEFENSE TEAM GETS MAJOR BOOST

Apr 29, 6:41 PM EDT

by suzanne gould and biodun iginla, bbc news

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BOSTON -- The defense team representing the Boston Marathon bombing suspect got a major boost Monday with the addition of Judy Clarke, a San Diego lawyer who has managed to get life sentences instead of the death penalty for several high-profile clients, including the Unabomber and the gunman in the rampage that injured former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

The appointment of Clarke, based in San Diego, Calif., was approved Monday by U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler.

Bowler denied, at least for now, a request from Miriam Conrad, the public defender of 19-year-old suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to appoint a second death penalty lawyer - David Bruck, a professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Tsarnaev has been charged with using a weapon of mass destruction during the April 15 marathon. Three people were killed and more than 260 injured when two bombs exploded near the finish line.

The suspect's lawyers could renew their motion to appoint another death penalty expert if he is indicted, the judge said.

Clarke's clients have included the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski; Susan Smith, who drowned her two children; Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph; and most recently Tucson, Ariz., shooter Jared Loughner. All received life sentences instead of the death penalty.

Clarke has rarely spoken publicly about her work and did not return a call seeking comment Monday. However, at a speech Friday at a legal conference in Los Angeles, she talked about how she had been "sucked into the black hole, the vortex" of death penalty cases 18 years ago when she represented Smith.

"I got a dose of understanding human behavior, and I learned what the death penalty does to us," she said. "I don't think it's a secret that I oppose the death penalty."

Bruck has directed Washington and Lee's death penalty defense clinic, the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse, since 2004.

In other developments in the Boston case:

- FBI agents visited the Rhode Island home of the in-laws of the suspect's brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and carried away several bags. The brother was killed in a gun battle with police.

Katherine Russell, Tsarnaev's widow, has been staying at the North Kingstown home and did not speak to reporters as she left her attorneys' office in Providence later in the day. Attorney Amato DeLuca says she's doing everything she can to assist with the investigation.

- President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed terrorism coordination Monday in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings. Obama expressed his "appreciation" for Russia's close cooperation after the attack.

The suspected bombers are Russian natives who immigrated to the Boston area. Russian authorities told U.S. officials before the bombings they had concerns about the family, but only revealed details of wiretapped conversations since the attack.

Affirmative action in Brazil's Slavery's legacy

by Enrique Krause and Biodun Iginla, BBC News and The Economist

TO SUM up recent research predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few centuries, he says, we will all "look like Brazilians". Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they displaced. But with many more free blacks during the era of slavery, no "Jim Crow" laws or segregation after it ended in 1888 and no taboo on interracial romance, colour in Brazil became not a binary variable but a spectrum.

Even so, it still codes for health, wealth and status. Light-skinned women strut São Paulo's upmarket shopping malls in designer clothes; dark-skinned maids in uniform walk behind with the bags and babies. Black and mixed-race Brazilians earn three-fifths as much as white ones. They are twice as likely to be illiterate or in prison, and less than half as likely to go to university. They die six years younger—and the cause of death is more than twice as likely to be murder.

Such stark racial inequality is actually an improvement on the recent past (except for the gap between homicide rates, which has grown with the spread of crack cocaine). A strong jobs market, better-targeted government spending and the universalisation of primary schooling have brought gains to poor Brazilians, whatever their colour. Even so, Brazil's government is turning to affirmative-action programmes to hurry change along—just as the United States considers abandoning them.

During the past decade several public universities have introduced racial preferences piecemeal. Last April the supreme court decided that they did not contravene constitutional equal-rights provisions—which was all that the government had been waiting for. In August it passed a law mandating quotas for entry to all of the country's 59 federal universities and 38 federal technical schools. The first cotistas, as beneficiaries are known, started their courses this year.

By 2016 half of all places in federal institutions will be reserved for state-schooled applicants. Of these, half must go to students from families with incomes below 1017 reais ($503) a month per person—a cut-off that is much higher than the Brazilian average. Each must allocate quota places to black, mixed-race and Amerindian students in proportion to their weight in the local population (80% in Bahia, a state in Brazil's north-east; 16% in Santa Catarina in the country's south). Some states are considering similar rules for their own universities.

Brazil does not require private universities to take race into account. Nor does it require private companies to do so when hiring. A few states have racial quotas when hiring civil servants, and there is talk of something similar at the federal level. But the real action, for now, is in public universities.

Going to university in Brazil is not a mass experience, as in the United States. And only a quarter of places are in public institutions. Other government education programmes, such as creche-building in poor neighbourhoods, better literacy training for teachers and subsidies for poor students who attend private universities, will improve the lives of many more black Brazilians than the quota programme. But public universities are more prestigious—and barred from charging fees by the constitution. That their places have long gone disproportionately to the 12% of Brazilians who are privately educated, most of them rich and white, is hard to swallow.

The supreme court decided that quotas were an acceptable weapon in the fight against the legacy of slavery. That view is now mainstream in Brazil. Just one congressman voted against the new law, and a recent opinion poll found nearly two-thirds of Brazilians supported racial preferences for university admissions (though even more were keen on reserving places for the state-schooled and poor with no regard for colour). But even supporters worry that by encouraging Brazilians to choose sharp-edged racial identities, quotas will create tensions where none existed before.

Brazilians' notions of race are indeed changing, but only partly because of quotas, and more subtly than the doom-mongers fear. The unthinking prejudice expressed in common phrases such as "good appearance" (meaning pale-skinned) and "good hair" (not frizzy) means many light-skinned Brazilians have long preferred to think of themselves as "white", whatever their parentage. But between 2000 and 2010 the self-described "white" population fell by six percentage points, while the "black" and "mixed-race" groups grew.

Researchers think a growing pride in African ancestry is behind much of the shift. But quotas also seem to affect how people label themselves. Andrew Francis of Emory University and Maria Tannuri-Pianto of the University of Brasília (UnB) found that some light-skinned mixed-race applicants to UnB, which started using racial preferences in 2004, thought of themselves as white but described themselves as mixed-race to increase their chances of getting in. Some later reverted to a white identity. But for quite a few the change was permanent.

Opponents of quotas worry that ill-prepared students will gain entry to tough courses and then struggle to cope. Such fears make sense: any sort of affirmative action will bring more publicly educated youngsters into university—and in Brazil, the difference between what they and their privately educated counterparts have learnt is vast. In global education studies, 15-year-olds in Brazil's private schools come slightly above the rich-world average for all pupils. Most of those in its public schools are functionally illiterate and innumerate.

Surprisingly, though, neither the State University of Rio de Janeiro nor UnB—the two earliest to adopt quotas—have found that cotistas did much worse than their classmates. For some highly competitive courses, such as medicine at UnB, the two groups had quite similar entrance grades. And for some of the least selective courses, the overall standard was not high. But even when the starting gaps were wide, most cotistas had nearly caught up by graduation.

One possible explanation is that cotistas with a given entrance grade were in fact more able than non-cotistas, since the latter were more likely to have had intensive coaching in test techniques. Another is that cotistas worked harder: both universities found they skipped fewer classes and were less likely to drop out. "Cotistas take their studies much more seriously than those who thought a university place was theirs by right," says Luiza Bairros, the state secretary for policies to promote racial equality. "They know how important this opportunity is, not just for them but for their whole family."

Brazil's racial preferences differ from America's in that they are narrowly aimed at preventing a tiny elite from scooping a grossly disproportionate share of taxpayer-funded university places. Privately-educated (ie, well-off) blacks do not get a leg-up in university admissions. But since racial quotas are just starting in Brazil, it is too early to say what their effects will be, and whether they will make race relations better or worse.

The White House is commending Jason Collins for coming out as gay.

by Biodun Iginla, BBC News

WASHINGTON -- The White House is commending NBA veteran Jason Collins for becoming the first active male player in the four major American professional sports to come out as gay.

White House spokesman Jay Carney called that decision courageous and says the White House supports Collins. He says he hopes the 34-year-old center's NBA colleagues will also offer support.

"We view that as another example of the progress that has been made and the evolution that has been taking place in this country," Carney said.

Obama announced his support for gay marriage during his re-election campaign last year.

Former President Bill Clinton also voiced encouragement for Collins, asking fans, NBA colleagues and the media to support and respect him in a statement Monday. Clinton said he has known Collins since he attended Stanford University with his daughter Chelsea.

Clinton said Collins' announcement Monday is an "important moment" for professional sports and the history of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Collins is "a good man who wants no more than what so many of us seek - to be able to be who we are, to do our work, to build families and to contribute to our communities," Clinton said. "For so many members of the LGBT community, these simple goals remain elusive."

Chelsea Clinton also tweeted her support for Collins Monday, saying she was proud of her friend for having the strength and courage to be the first openly gay player in the NBA.

Collins announced he is gay Monday in a first-person account posted on Sports Illustrated's website. He has played for six teams in 12 seasons, including this past season with the Washington Wizards. He is now a free agent.

The NBA player also received support from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., his college roommate. Kennedy tweeted Monday that "I've always been proud to call (Collins) a friend, and I'm even prouder to stand with him today."

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MOTHER OF BOMB SUSPECTS INSISTS SONS ARE INNOCENT

Apr 29, 7:45 AM EDT

by suzanne gould and biodun iginla, bbc news

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BOSTON -- The angry and grieving mother of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects insists that her sons are innocent and that she's no terrorist.

But Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is drawing increased attention after federal officials say Russian authorities intercepted her phone calls, including one in which she vaguely discussed jihad with her elder son. In another, she was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, U.S. officials said.

In photos of her as a younger woman, Tsarnaeva wears a low-cut blouse and has her hair teased like a 1980s rock star. After she arrived in the U.S. from Russia in 2002, she went to beauty school and did facials at a suburban day spa.

But in recent years, people noticed a change. She began wearing a hijab and cited conspiracy theories about 9/11 being a plot against Muslims.

Tsarnaeva insists there is no mystery and that she's just someone who found a deeper spirituality. She fiercely defends her sons - Tamerlan, who was killed in a gunfight with police, and Dzhokhar, who was wounded and captured.

"It's all lies and hypocrisy," she told The Associated Press in Dagestan. "I'm sick and tired of all this nonsense that they make up about me and my children. People know me as a regular person, and I've never been mixed up in any criminal intentions, especially any linked to terrorism."

At a news conference in Dagestan with her ex-husband Anzor Tsarnaev last week, Tsarnaeva appeared overwhelmed with grief one moment, defiant the next. "They already are talking about that we are terrorists, I am terrorist," she said. "They already want me, him and all of us to look (like) terrorists."

Amid the scrutiny, Tsarnaeva and Anzor say they have put off the idea of any trip to the U.S. to reclaim their elder son's body or try to visit Dzhokhar in jail. Tsarnaev told the AP on Sunday he was too ill to travel to the U.S. Tsarnaeva faces a 2012 shoplifting charge in a Boston suburb, though it was unclear whether that was a deterrent.

Tsarnaeva arrived in the U.S. in 2002, settling in a working-class section of Cambridge, Mass. With four children, Anzor and Zubeidat qualified for food stamps and were on and off public assistance benefits for years. The large family squeezed itself into a third-floor apartment.

Zubeidat took classes at the Catherine Hinds Institute of Esthetics, before becoming a state-licensed aesthetician. Anzor, who had studied law, fixed cars.

By some accounts, the family was tolerant.

Bethany Smith, a New Yorker who befriended Zubeidat's two daughters, said in an interview with Newsday that when she stayed with the family for a month in 2008 while she looked at colleges, she was welcomed even though she was Christian and had tattoos.

"I had nothing but love over there. They accepted me for who I was," Smith told the newspaper. "Their mother, Zubeidat, she considered me to be a part of the family. She called me her third daughter."

Zubeidat said she and Tamerlan began to turn more deeply into their Muslim faith about five years ago after being influenced by a family friend, named "Misha." The man, whose full name she didn't reveal, impressed her with a religious devotion that was far greater than her own, even though he was an ethnic Armenian who converted to Islam.

"I wasn't praying until he prayed in our house, so I just got really ashamed that I am not praying, being a Muslim, being born Muslim. I am not praying. Misha, who converted, was praying," she said.

By then, she had left her job at the day spa and was giving facials in her apartment. One client, Alyssa Kilzer, noticed the change when Tsarnaeva put on a head scarf before leaving the apartment.

"She had never worn a hijab while working at the spa previously, or inside the house, and I was really surprised," Kilzer wrote in a post on her blog. "She started to refuse to see boys that had gone through puberty, as she had consulted a religious figure and he had told her it was sacrilegious. She was often fasting."

Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But she stopped visiting the family's home for spa treatments in late 2011 or early 2012 when, during one session, she "started quoting a conspiracy theory, telling me that she thought 9/11 was purposefully created by the American government to make America hate Muslims."

"It's real," Tsarnaeva said, according to Kilzer. "My son knows all about it. You can read on the Internet."

In the spring of 2010, Zubeidat's eldest son got married in a ceremony at a Boston mosque that no one in the family had previously attended. Tamerlan and his wife, Katherine Russell, a Rhode Island native and convert from Christianity, now have a child who is about 3 years old.

Zubeidat married into a Chechen family but was an outsider. She is an Avar, from one of the dozens of ethnic groups in Dagestan. Her native village is now a hotbed of an ultraconservative strain of Islam known as Salafism or Wahabbism.

It is unclear whether religious differences fueled tension in their family. Anzor and Zubeidat divorced in 2011.

About the same time, there was a brief FBI investigation into Tamerlan Tsarnaev, prompted by a tip from Russia's security service.

The vague warning from the Russians was that Tamerlan, an amateur boxer in the U.S., was a follower of radical Islam who had changed drastically since 2010. That led the FBI to interview Tamerlan at the family's home in Cambridge. Officials ultimately placed his name, and his mother's name, on various watch lists, but the inquiry was closed in late spring of 2011.

After the bombings, Russian authorities told U.S. investigators they had secretly recorded a phone conversation in which Zubeidat had vaguely discussed jihad with Tamerlan. The Russians also recorded Zubeidat talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation with reporters.

The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, they might have been enough evidence for the FBI to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.

Rep. Peter King, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told NBC's "Today" show Monday he believes the FBI investigation of the two young men would have gone much further if the Russian government had informed Washington of "the mother's radicalization, the son's radicalization. .. It definitely would have caused the investigation to go further."

Anzor's brother, Ruslan Tsarni, told the AP from his home in Maryland that he believed his former sister-in-law had a "big-time influence" on her older son's growing embrace of his Muslim faith and decision to quit boxing and school.

While Tamerlan was living in Russia for six months in 2012, Zubeidat, who had remained in the U.S., was arrested at a shopping mall in the suburb of Natick, Mass., and accused of trying to shoplift $1,624 worth of women's clothing from a department store.

She failed to appear in court to answer the charges that fall, and instead left the country.