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As President Obama unveiled his gun control proposals Wednesday, he highlighted mass shootings at schools in Colorado, Virginia and Connecticut. He also mentioned another group of children, not in school — the ones on the street corners of Chicago.

Chicagoan Annette Holt was at the White House during Obama's address. Her teenage son, Blair, was shot to death five years ago on a Chicago bus as he shielded a fellow student from a spray of bullets.

The Department of the Interior is huge — more than 70,000 employees manage a half-billion acres of public land, mostly in the West. The department does everything from operate national parks to administer Native American social programs and manage wild horses.

Manti Te'o, the Notre Dame linebacker who nearly won the Heisman Trophy this season, is at the center of what Deadspin reports is a "hoax," in which the story of a girlfriend — and her tragic death — was fabricated. The site is questioning the existence of a girl Te'o has said inspired him to new heights. We'll update this post with new information as it emerges.

Update at 9 p.m. Notre Dame News Conference

When President Obama laid out his proposals Wednesday to reduce gun violence, he included a call for Congress to ban "military-style assault weapons."

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And I'm Robert Siegel. If there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try - those words today from President Obama, as he unveiled a far-reaching package of new gun control measures. They fall into two categories: those that require congressional approval, and those that don't.

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There are new and bigger troubles today for the Boeing 787, the airplane known as the Dreamliner. Late today, the FAA grounded the U.S. fleet of 787s for safety checks. The grounding and inspection order will likely be implemented around the world. The move comes after two serious battery-related problems occurred on two different Dreamliners in the past 10 days. Here's NPR's Wendy Kaufman.

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Investigators are trying to figure out why a helicopter crashed in Central London today. Two people were killed including the pilot. Yet the death toll could have been much, much worse. As NPR's Philip Reeves reports, the aircraft came down in the heart of the British capital during rush hour.

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ROBERT SIEGEL: The head of the United Nations has harsh words for whoever carried out an attack on Syrian University students, as they were taking exams. Two explosions at the university in Aleppo killed more than 80 people yesterday and injured some 200. Today, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said such heinous attacks are unacceptable. And he added that deliberate targeting of civilians constitutes a war crime. But who carried out that attack is very much in question.

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Joining me from Las Vegas, where he's attending the annual SHOT Show, a firearms industry trade convention, is retired Army Major General D. Allen Youngman. He is now the executive director of the Defense Small Arms Advisory Council. Welcome to the program, General Youngman.

DEAN ALLEN YOUNGMAN: Thank you, Robert. Good to be here.

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Skin cancer? There's an app for that.

But the same smartphone that brings you Fruit Ninja might not be the best tool for diagnosing deadly melanoma.

Smartphone apps that evaluate moles for skin cancer risk missed threatening moles one-third of the time, according to a study by dermatologists at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Lucas Codognolla's hands shake as he waits in line at the Bridgeport, Conn., DMV for his turn to take the road test.

"I don't know if it's nerves or the excitement, you know?" he says.

The 22-year-old's family emigrated from Brazil when was just 9. When he turned 16 and wanted to get his driver's license, his parents sat him down and told him the truth: He was in the country illegally.

Initially, he lied to his friends about why he couldn't drive, he says. But then, as he got older, driving simply became necessary.

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In Afghanistan today, Taliban militants staged a brazen attack in the heart of Kabul. Their target was the headquarters of the National Directorate of Security or NDS - it's Afghanistan's equivalent of the FBI.

As NPR's Sean Carberry reports, the attack began with a suicide bombing, then five militants tried to storm the compound.

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Algerian Islamists attacked an oil and gas field at dawn this morning in the desert on the border with Libya. They claim to have taken nearly 200 people hostage. In addition to Algerians, they claim to hold seven Americans, as well as French, British and Japanese citizens.

NPR's Eleanor Beardsley in Paris reports the hostage-taking appears to be the first act of retaliation for France's actions in Mali.

JPMorgan Chase reports that its profits were up 53 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012 — but CEO Jamie Dimon's pay will be cut in half, after the bank lost billions of dollars on risky bets made in its London office. The incident tarnished the reputation of Dimon, who had successfully steered his bank through the recent financial crisis.

"This past year has been a bruising one for Dimon," as NPR's Steve Henn reports for our Newscast unit:

States aren't likely to prevent many shootings by requiring mental health professionals to report potentially violent patients, psychiatrists and psychologists say.

President Obama's historic plunge Wednesday into the politics and realities of gun control in America has mobilized advocates on both sides of the issue.

But though his major proposals, from banning assault rifles to more stringent background checks and ammunition limits, are being rolled out in the shadow of the school massacre in Newtown, Conn., their Capitol Hill prospects remain highly uncertain given long-standing resistance to such efforts.

On today's Morning Edition, Shereen Marisol Meraji had a great piece about the memorial of Southern California public-television staple Huell Howser, who died of cancer earlier this month.

On Tuesday, hundreds of people turned out to remember him. As Meraji says, for these fans, Howser was "a man who took them to places they never knew they wanted to go and introduced them to people they never knew they wanted to meet."

What began as a company's suspicion that its infrastructure was being hacked turned into a case of a worker outsourcing his own job to a Chinese consulting firm, according to reports that cite an investigation by Verizon's security team. The man was earning a six-figure salary.

He'll always be best known as "the kindly white adoptive father of two young African-American brothers in the TV sitcom Diff'rent Strokes," as The Associated Press writes.

Conrad Bain, 89, died Monday in Livermore, Calif., his daughter says.

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This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. Rockefeller won't run again, Treasury kills the trillion dollar coin, and the president calls on Congress to pony up. It's Wednesday and time for a...

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CONAN: ...edition of the Political Junkie.

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SARAH PALIN: Lipstick.

A month after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., President Barack Obama announced his proposals for gun control policies during a White House ceremony. He issued 23 executive orders on gun control and urged Congress to pass laws that would tighten requirements on gun sales and assault weapons.

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Two high-profile cabinet nominations go before the Senate soon. Senator John Kerry is expected to face little opposition to become the next secretary of state. Former Senator Chuck Hagel may have more problems. But as mentioned earlier, his nomination as secretary of defense is also expected to win approval.

Zach Sayne was 25 when he died earlier this month at the place that had been his home for 15 years — a children's nursing home in Alabama.

But that was too far away, 200 miles too far, for his mother in Georgia. Nola Sayne was trying to bring him back, closer to her home. The story of why she couldn't reveals the bureaucratic traps, underfunding and lack of choices that plague state Medicaid programs.