Bloomberg News

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Clashes between police and members of an Islamic group demanding the introduction of blasphemy laws left 14 people dead and 250 wounded in Dhaka and surrounding districts.

Police in combat gear patrolled the capital while armored vehicles were stationed in the main business district, footage from local television stations showed. Streets were littered with burned tires and broken bricks.

“A TREACHEROUS LIKENESS.” By Lynn Shepherd. Delacorte Press $26. (United States release is in August and its title will be “A Fatal Likeness.”)

LONDON — When novelist Lynn Shepherd set out to capture the excesses of the Young Romantics, she was able to draw on a previous career in banking in the 1980s.

“They’d have given Byron a run for his money, I’m sure,” the author says of the risk takers and “dominant personalities” encountered while she was working in the City.

HOUSTON — Weeks after the Senate defeated a proposed expansion of background checks on gun purchases, the annual conference of the National Rifle Association here has a celebratory atmosphere.

“I was so proud of the American public, and the NRA, for putting enough pressure on our politicians,” Neil Solt of Cypress said Thursday while waiting to have his World War II heirloom guns appraised at a pre-convention event.

MELBOURNE, Australia — Deep inside a high-security laboratory an hour from Melbourne, scientists working behind air-locked doors inject six-week-old chickens with a virus that has killed one in five people it’s known to have infected.

WASHINGTON — The 100-day mark is a measure for first-term presidents, not re-elected ones. Yet the end of April is a propitious moment for an early evaluation of how President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are meeting the aspirations set out in January.

NEW YORK — Most teenagers who drove under the influence of marijuana said the drug either improves their performance behind the wheel or is no hindrance, according to a survey by insurer Liberty Mutual Holding Co. and a safety group.