Boston Mayor Thomas Menino won’t allow marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev to be buried in the city, his spokeswoman said.

“It would be disrespectful to our residents to accommodate this individual,” Dot Joyce, Menino’s press secretary, told the Boston Globe on Tuesday.

Tsarnaev, 26, died in a shootout with police on April 18, three days after allegedly detonating two bombs near the Boston Marathon finish line, killing three people and injuring 264 others. His 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was captured the next night after a manhunt that virtually shut down the Boston area.

The brothers are suspected of killing an MIT police officer, Sean Collier, before leading police on a pursuit to Watertown which ended with Tamerlan Tsarnaev dead. The medical examiner found the cause of death to be gunshot wounds and blunt trauma to the head and torso. Authorities said Dzhokhar ran over Tamerlan with a stolen SUV while fleeing.

The older Tsarnaev’s body is being held at a Worcester funeral home, while the search for a burial plot continues. Several cemeteries have declined, according to Peter Stefan, owner of the Graham, Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors.

The city manager of Cambridge, where the Tsarnaevs lived, said the community would be “adversely impacted” if the suspect were buried there.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick said Monday finding a gravesite was “the family’s issue,” not the responsibility of the state or federal government.

Tsarnaev’s parents, ethnic Chechens who returned to southern Russia several years ago, have suggested in various interviews and reports that their son should be buried in Cambridge or returned to Russia.

A Worcester resident, William Breault, started a fund to have Tsarnaev’s body sent to Russia, hoping to prevent a burial in Massachusetts.

Worcester police Sgt. Kerry Hazelhurst said the city’s police chief met with the funeral home director Tuesday, and expects to have a resolution soon.

“They’re quite confident that there will be a conclusion to settle this matter within the next couple of days,” Hazelhurst told the Globe. “The chief’s function today was to get the parties involved to meet, discuss, and try to find a solution to the problem. … I think all options are on the table right now.”

“The whole situation is unprecedented,” said David Walkinshaw, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Funeral Directors Association. “The challenge here is that there’s no way to demand a cemetery allow for a burial to take place.”

With additional reporting by Reuters. Follow Metro Boston on Twitter: @MetroBos

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Cyprus clinched a last-ditch deal with international lenders to shut down its second-largest bank and inflict heavy losses on uninsured depositors, including wealthy Russians, in return for a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) bailout.

The agreement came hours before a deadline to avert a collapse of the banking system in fraught negotiations between President Nicos Anastasiades and heads of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Swiftly endorsed by euro zone finance ministers, the plan will spare the

Mediterranean island a financial meltdown by winding down the largely state-owned Popular Bank of Cyprus, also known as Laiki, and shifting deposits below 100,000 euros to the Bank of Cyprus to create a “good bank”.

Deposits above 100,000 euros in both banks, which are not guaranteed under EU law, will be frozen and used to resolve Laiki’s debts and recapitalize Bank of Cyprus through a deposit/equity conversion.

The raid on uninsured Laiki depositors is expected to raise 4.2 billion euros, Eurogroup chairman Jeroen Dijssebloem said.

Laiki will effectively be shuttered, with thousands of job losses. Officials said senior bondholders in Laiki would be wiped out and those in Bank of Cyprus would have to make a contribution.

An EU spokesman said no across-the-board levy or tax would be imposed on deposits in Cypriot banks, although the hit on large account holders in the two biggest banks is likely to be far greater than initially planned. A first attempt at a deal last week collapsed when the Cypriot parliament rejected a proposed levy on all deposits.

Cyprus government spokesman Christos Stylianides said: “We averted a disorderly bankruptcy which would have led to an exit of Cyprus from the euro zone with unforeseeable consequences.”

Asked about the level of losses on uninsured depositors on Bank of Cyprus, he told state radio it was not possible to be specific at this stage. “The assessment is that it will be under or around 30 percent. But that is a bit of an arbitrary estimate.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Cypriot lawmakers would not need to vote on the new scheme, since they had already enacted a law setting procedures for bank resolution.

“It can’t be done without a bail-in in both banks … This is bitter for Cyprus, but we now have the result that the (German) government always stood up for,” Schaeuble told reporters, saying he was sure the German parliament would approve.

Lefteris Christoforou, vice-chairman of the ruling Democratic Rally party, said it was important that Cyprus had avoided a chaotic bankruptcy.

“It is a bad deal, but the extreme scenario we had to contend with was worse.”

Former central bank government Afxentis Afxentiou added: “It’s a new day for Cyprus … I believe that in two or three years Cyprus will find its feet.”

A senior source in the Brussels talks said Anastasiades threatened to resign at one stage on Sunday if he was pushed too far. He left EU headquarters without making any comment.

Conservative leader Anastasiades, barely a month in office and wrestling with Cyprus’ worst crisis since a 1974 invasion by Turkish forces split the island in two, was forced to back down on his efforts to shield big account holders.

Diplomats said the president had fought hard to preserve the country’s business model as an offshore financial centre drawing huge sums from wealthy Russians and Britons but had lost.

The EU and IMF required that Cyprus raise 5.8 billion euros from its banking sector towards its own financial rescue in return for 10 billion euros in international loans. The head of the EU rescue fund said Cyprus should receive the first emergency funds in May.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde said the agreement was “a comprehensive and credible plan” that addresses the core problem of the banking system.

“This agreement provides the basis for restoring trust in the banking system, which is key to supporting growth,” she said in a statement.

With banks closed for the last week, the Central Bank of Cyprus imposed a 100-euro daily limit on withdrawals from cash machines at the two biggest banks to avert a run.

French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici rejected charges that the EU had brought Cypriots to their knees, saying it was the island’s offshore business model that had failed.

“To all those who say that we are strangling an entire people … Cyprus is a casino economy that was on the brink of bankruptcy,” he said.

The euro gained against the dollar on the news in early Asian trading.

Analysts had said failure to clinch a deal could cause a financial market sell-off, but some said the island’s small size – it accounts for just 0.2 percent of the euro zone’s economic output – meant contagion would be limited.

The abandoned plan for a levy on bank deposits had unsettled investors since it represented an unprecedented step in Europe’s handling of a debt crisis that has spread from Greece to Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.

ORDINARY PEOPLE

Among ordinary Cypriots, there was a mood of wariness about the deal.

“How long will it last?” asked Georgia Xenophontos, 23, a hotel receptionist in Nicosia. “Why should anyone believe anything this government says?”

Cyprus’s banking sector, with assets eight times the size of the economy, has been crippled by exposure to Greece, where private bondholders suffered a 75 percent “haircut” last year.

Without a deal by the end of Monday, the ECB said it would have cut off emergency funds to the banks, spelling certain collapse and potentially pushing the country out of the euro.

Under the bailout agreement, Laiki’s ECB funds will pass to Bank of Cyprus, and the central bank will “provide liquidity to BoC in line with applicable rules”.

Anticipating a run when banks reopen on Tuesday, parliament has given the government powers to impose capital controls.

About 200 bank employees protested outside the presidential palace on Sunday, chanting “Cyprus will not become a protectorate”.

On Tuesday, the 56-seat parliament had rejected a levy on depositors, big and small. Finance Minister Michael Sarris then spent three fruitless days in Moscow trying to win help from Russia, whose citizens and companies have billions of euros at stake in Cypriot banks.

On Friday, lawmakers voted to nationalize pension funds and split failing lenders into good and bad banks – the measure to be applied to Laiki. The plan to tap pension funds was shelved due to German opposition, a Cypriot official said.

The tottering banks held 68 billion euros in deposits, including 38 billion in accounts of more than 100,000 euros – enormous sums for an island of 1.1 million people that could never sustain such a big financial system on its own.

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An 8-year-old girl driving a car at 100 km/h while her parents urged her is the latest viral video hit from Russia.

In the video, Karina Mikulchik, who is not wearing a seat beat, is behind the wheel in an Audi on an icy narrow country road outside St. Petersburg.

Her father, Dmitry, is in the front passenger seat and after his daughter reaches 90 km/h can be heard saying, “Come on! Give some gas! At least, 100 km/h!” Meanwhile, her mother, Elena, is in the backseat filming her daughter’s antics. After the speedometer hits 100, the father promises to put the video on VKontakte, Russia’s popular social network.

Throughout the 5:40 video clip, now viral on YouTube, despite her constant grins Karina appears a little tense, with her father occasionally puts his hand on the steering wheel to correct the direction of the drive.

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  Dad urges 8-year-old girl driving Audi to go faster

Local Russian traffic police are now looking at the video footage. “An examination will be carried out in accordance with the Code of Administrative Offenses,” the press office of the traffic police said in a statement. “Video and all materials will be explored with the involvement and other services.” According to Russia’s traffic code, letting someone unauthorized to drive is punishable by a fine of 2,500 rubles (€63; $82).

“We must clearly identify when this video was shot. Maybe it was filmed last winter. Each article of the law has its own time limit,” a spokesperson for the regional traffic police told Metro.

The video footage has earned mixed opinions. Svetlana Agapitova, the ombudsman for children’s rights in St. Petersburg, has pointed to child negligence in this case, according to the Piter.Tv news website. But social media users have come to the parents’ defense. “The car is good, the car is in automatic, the father is beside the girl and can always take the wheel, the road is empty. People have gotten hysterical, but in vain,” wrote Yuri on Vkontake.

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Thousands of Russian emergency workers went out on Saturday to clear up the damage from a meteorite that exploded over the Ural mountains, damaging buildings, shattering windows and showering people with broken glass.

Divers searched a lake near the city of Chelyabinsk, where a hole several feet wide had opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large fragments, officials said.

The scarcity of evidence on the ground fuelled scores of conspiracy theories over what caused the fireball and its huge shockwave on Friday in the area which plays host to many defense industry plants.

Nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky told reporters in Moscow it could have been “war-mongers” in the United States. “It’s not meteors falling. It’s a new weapon being tested by the Americans,” he said.

A priest from near the explosion site called it an act of God. Social media sites were flooded with speculation about what might have caused the explosion, if not a meteorite.

“Honestly, I would be more inclined to believe that this was some military thing,” said Oksana Trufanova, a local human rights activist.

Asked about the speculation, an official at the local branch of Russia’s Emergencies Ministry simply replied: “Rubbish”.

Residents of Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow, heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the wall and roof of a zinc plant.

A fireball traveling at a speed of 30 km (19 miles) per second according to Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200 km (125 miles) away.

NASA estimated the meteor was 55 feet across before entering Earth’s atmosphere and weighed about 10,000 tons.

It exploded miles above Earth, releasing nearly 500 kilotons of energy – about 30 times the size of the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added.

“We would expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every 100 years on average,” said Paul Chodas of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“When you have a fireball of this size we would expect a large number of meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there were probably some large ones.”

DIVERS SEARCH LAKE

Search teams said they had found small objects up to about 1 cm (half-an-inch) wide that might be fragments of a meteorite, but no larger pieces.

The Chelyabinsk regional governor said the strike caused about 1 billion roubles ($33 million) worth of damage.

Life in the city had largely returned to normal by Saturday although 50 people were still in hospital. Officials said more than 1,200 people were injured, mostly by flying glass.

Repair work had to be done quickly because of the freezing temperatures, which sank close to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night.

Emergencies Minister Vladimir Puchkov inspected the damage after President Vladimir Putin sent him to the region.

His ministry is under pressure to clean up fast following criticism over the failure to issue warnings in time before fatal flooding in southern Russia last summer and over its handling of forest fires in 2010.

Putin will also want to avoid a repeat of the criticism that he faced over his slow reaction to incidents early in his first term as president, such as the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000 which killed all 118 people on board.

($1 = 30.1365 Russian roubles)

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Over 500 people have been injured after a surprise meteor shower struck central Russia Friday morning. Video reports show a streaking fireball that broke up and rained fragments onto the Urals region.

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  Meteorite crash in Russia

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  Sonic boom blows out windows in Russian school

Most of the injuries are thought to be cuts and bruises but not life-threatening. The shower did serious structural damage, particularly to the city of Chelyabinsk, some 1,500 kilometres east of Moscow, where Metro’s office was damaged with the roof and windows smashed.

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  Meteor shower destroys Metro office in Chelyabinsk

“First there was a blinding flash. My wife and I were in a panic wondering if there was a war,” said Metro Chelyabinsk editor Oleg Lastochkin. “Four minutes after the flash, we felt a shock wave and the apartment windows were shaking. Street car sirens went off and then we heard five or six explosions.”

When the editor arrived at the office, “there was broken glass and one of the staffers was wounded by shrapnel. I drove her to the hospital, which was completely full.”

The lack of information from authorities frustrated Lastochkin. “The police reported that the alleged meteor rain was known in advance. So why not warn people?” he said.

First person account from Metro Chelyabinsk editor Oleg Lastochkin

Armageddon came at 9:30am. I was at home when I first saw a blinding flash. At first, I thought it was a headlight but it blinded me for a moment. Five minutes after that flash, I felt a shock wave. Windows began to shatter, car sirens were roaring. And finally we heard an explosion… five or six of them.

My wife and I started to panic, wondering if a war had begun; we saw a trail in the sky, which was clearly not left by an airplane.

Everyone on the minibus taxi en route to the office were talking about the meteor. Some mobile phone networks stopped working.

When I arrived to the Metro office, there was broken glass all over the floor. The room was filled with flumes of dust. One of my staff was injured by glass shrapnel, so we took her to the hospital.

The police reported that the meteor shower was known in advance. So why didn’t they warn people?

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