What everyone’s talking about:

Erika Brannock, the last Boston bombings victim to leave the hospital, lost her left leg in the blast and broke her right leg. She said that she could have died if it wasn’t for a stranger named “Joan” who made a tourniquet out of a belt to stop the bleeding that day. “It was almost instantaneously … this woman kind of crawled over to me and she grabbed my hand… She said ,‘My name is Joan from California and I’m not going to let you go,’ and she stayed with me the whole time,” Erika told CNN’s Randi Kaye. The preschool teacher was determined to find the woman who helped save her life. After AC360 set up an email account for tips from anyone who knew the good samaritan, Amanda North replied that it was her who had helped Erika. The two met for the first time since the attack in a tearful reunion on Wednesday. CNN’s Randi Kaye was there for the special moment. Amanda also spoke to Anderson about the dreadful day of the bombings and what it was like to see Erika more than a month later.

An audit of the Internal Revenue Service shows that the agency spent at least $4.1 million of taxpayer money on everything from parody videos to event planners’ commissions on a 2010 conference in Anaheim, California. While the focus of the Treasury Department’s inspector general report was on the 2010 conference, the audit also shows that the agency held 225 conferences between 2010 and 2012 at an estimated cost of $49 million. CNN’s Dana Bash reports.

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