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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

NPR's business news starts with Apple's giant pile of money.

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INSKEEP: The maker of iPads, iPhones and computers is sitting on almost one hundred billion dollars in cash and securities. And today, Apple announced that it will spend some of that money paying a stock dividend to shareholders and buying back some company stock. NPR's Steve Henn has been following developments, and joins us on the line from Silicon Valley. Steve, good morning.

STEVE HENN, BYLINE: Good morning.

The Associated Press just moved this alert:

"Apple says it will use its cash to start paying dividend of $2.65, buy back $10B in shares."

Here are some of the latest developments concerning the March 11 killings of 16 civilians in southern Afghanistan and the U.S. Army staff sergeant, Robert Bales, who is suspected of carrying out the massacre:

-- Defense attorney John Henry Browne will today "have his first face-to-face meeting with the 10-year Army veteran, who is being held in an isolated cell at Fort Leavenworth's military prison in Kansas," The Associated Press reports.

Now that 911 recordings show how a white Florida man continued to follow a 17-year-old black boy even after police advised him not to — and captured the sound of the man killing the unarmed youth with a shot to the chest — Trayvon Martin's family wants the FBI to take over the investigation into his killing.

The gunman says it was an act of self defense during a Neighborhood Watch patrol.

There are fears in France today that the killings of at least four people outside a Jewish school in the city of Toulouse are linked to earlier murders of three soldiers and that the victims were targeted because they belonged to ethnic or religious minorities.