Daily Political Wire

George Wenschhof

Obama To Announce New Research Program To Map The Human Brain - President Obama on Tuesday will unveil a new research program to map the human brain, efforts which scientists hope could help develop treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy, according to reports.

A White House official said the BRAIN Initiative would “show how millions of brain cells interact,” according to the New York Times, and compared the program to the Human Genome Project.  TheHill.com has more here.
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Connecticut Poised To Enact Tough Gun Laws - Connecticut lawmakers on Monday said they had reached an agreement on compromise gun control legislation that they said would be one of the toughest in the nation, 3½ months after 20 children and six other people were killed in a mass shooting at an elementary school.
 
The bill includes a ban on large-capacity ammunition magazines like those Adam Lanza used to fire 154 shots in four 4 minutes Dec. 14 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, a new registry for existing high-capacity magazines and background checks for private gun sales, NBC Connecticut reported.  NBC News has more here.
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North Korea To Resume Operations at Shuttered Nuclear Plant - North Korea said Tuesday that it will resume operations of a shuttered nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon facility, allowing the secretive nation to potentially expand its stock of fissile material for nuclear weapons as it threatens war against the United States and its allies.
 
The brief announcement, carried by the state-run news agency, marked a notable escalation from the rhetoric of recent weeks, which has been fiery but until now backed up by little action. The Washington Post has more here.

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Cyprus Concludes Bailout Talks, Aid to Begin in May - Cyprus has concluded talks with its international creditors on the terms of its 10-billion euro ($12.85 billion) bailout and will get its first installment of aid in May, the government said on Tuesday.

"We have concluded on a memorandum. This is a significant development," said government spokesman Christos Stylianides.

Under the terms of the deal, Cyprus will have until 2018 to carry out measures to shore up its finances.

The island's Finance Minister Michael Sarris said financing from lenders would begin in May.  Reuters.com has more here.

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Euro Zone Unemployment Reaches 12% - Unemployment in the euro zone rose to yet another record high in the first two months of the year, official data showed Tuesday, providing confirmation that the economy remains in a deep freeze.

The jobless rate reached 12 percent in both January and February, the highest since the creation of the euro in 1999.  The NY Times has more here.

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