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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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buried lead
King Abdullah to America: Beware the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood
It's a story we think isn't getting enough play elsewhere. President Obama is racking up the air miles, on his first trip to the Holy Land as commander-in-chief. Everyone's talking about that, but what they're not talking about is the fact that the president will also be visiting Jordan, where that country's leader, King Abdullah II, will have a pretty stark warning to the president.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg broke this story in his article, "Monarch in the Middle," where the king warned him of a Muslim Brotherhood crescent rising over the Middle East.
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world lead
White House's Denis McDonough: Chemical weapons in Syria would be a "game-changer"
Seventy thousand people have already been killed in Syria's two-year long civil war, and now there are reports that forces there have started using chemical weapons. As of now these reports are unconfirmed, it's not clear who fired them - each side blames the other.
If the reports are substantiated, "this is a game-changer and we'll act accordingly," said White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
"This is something we take very, very seriously. We had teams up working on this overnight, as you might suspect, and we'll continue to trace this," McDonough continued.
For more of our interview, click on the video.
politics lead
Sen. Marco Rubio: No "special pathway" to citizenship
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is the Republican party's point person on immigration reform. But his idea for a pathway to citizenship is nuanced, to say the least.
"What I've never been for is a special pathway to citizenship," said Rubio.
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pop lead
Does Justin Timberlake still make music? Or is it just a side job?
Over the past 7 years, we've seen Justin Timberlake just about everywhere - on Saturday Night Live, on the big screen, on the cover of People magazine with his new Hollywood bride.
But where Timberlake hasn't been, until recently, is inside a recording studio.
The New York Times speculated that he only recorded his latest album "The 20/20 Experience" to fulfill his contract with RCA.
Timberlake and his fellow pop brethren are all multi-tasking millionaires. What remains unclear is whether it's the music propping up their side-jobs or the other way around.
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sports lead
Numbers guy Nate Silver predicts March Madness
Nate Silver makes stats sexy, he is the "Good Will Hunting" of political prognostication. Silver rose to prominence when he called the 2008 presidential election correctly in 49 out of 50 states.
In 2012, when he predicted that President Obama would win a second term, he won praise from liberals, but conservatives, clinging to what turned out to be a false belief in their own anachronistic polling, made Silver their personal whipping boy. When Silver tweeted out an offer to bet $1,000 on an Obama win, he further antagonized the right. But then the results rolled in.
Anyone who doubted Silver and his analytic model had to eat their words, after he called the 2012 presidential results correctly in all 50 states.
Now he's trading politics for sports. When it comes to the NCAA bracket, last year Silver's March Madness forecast model showed Kentucky was the favorite to win. Sure enough, 20 days later, the wildcats were cutting down the nets at the Superdome. And now he's out with a new bracket for this year.
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