The week at a glance...United States

Centennial, Colo.

Capital case: Prosecutors this week announced that they would seek the death penalty for James Holmes, the neuroscience graduate accused of killing 12 people and injuring almost 60 more in a mass shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in July. “For James Eagan Holmes, justice is death,” said the district attorney for Arapahoe County, rejecting a deal floated by Holmes’s lawyers in which their client would have pleaded guilty in exchange for life imprisonment. The decision to pursue capital punishment automatically pushes the trial date back to February 2014, and means that the trial could last at least five months. Holmes’s defense is likely to rest on his mental state; although he has not entered a plea of insanity, he saw a psychiatrist weeks before the killings, and any records of mental illness will form a central part of the case.

Memphis

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Klan thwarted: More than 1,000 people turned out last week to overwhelm a Ku Klux Klan rally called to protest the renaming of several parks that once honored Confederate heroes. About 75 white supremacists, decked out in pointed white hoods and waving flags with the letters “KKK” on them, had gathered near the Shelby County Courthouse to protest the city’s February decision to rename three parks, one of which honored the slave trader and Confederate cavalry officer Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK’s first national leader. But the racist group was vastly outnumbered by a nearby anti-KKK crowd, which drowned out the Klansmen with chants of “KKK out of Memphis” and “Ku Klux cowards go to hell.”

Charleston, S.C.

Second chance: Former Gov. Mark Sanford moved one step closer to political redemption this week when he defeated Curtis Bostic in a Republican runoff election in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, setting up a fight against Democratic nominee Elizabeth Colbert Busch for the House seat. The former congressman and two-term governor fell from grace in 2009 when he vanished from the state for five days, only to reappear and admit in a news conference to an extramarital affair with Argentine María Belén Chapur. Sanford’s wife, Jenny, divorced him and he became engaged to Chapur, who appeared at his side during his victory speech. “I’m both humbled and grateful for the response of the voters here tonight,” Sanford said. He now faces a tough opponent in Colbert Busch—sister of comedian Stephen Colbert—who has been steadily gaining name recognition and campaign funds.

Washington, D.C.

Brain science: President Obama this week unveiled a $100 million initiative to map the brain in hopes of securing new insight into neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy. Under the project, called Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies—or BRAIN—public and private sector scientists will investigate how the billions of cells within the brain interact with one another. “As humans we can identify galaxies light-years away and study particles smaller than the atom,” Obama said during a White House event. “But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears.” It is unclear how receptive Congress will be to the funding request, which comes as both parties are demanding significant spending cuts.

New York City

Dirty politics: Democratic New York state Sen. Malcolm Smith and five Republican party bosses were charged this week with bribery in a bid to rig the ballot for the city’s November mayoral race. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the scandal underlined the “downright pervasive” corruption in New York politics. Smith is accused of paying up to $100,000 dollars to the five Republicans in order to get the Republican nomination to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The details of the bribes were allegedly worked out in a series of secret meetings in restaurants and hotels across the city, in the presence of an undercover FBI agent posing as a corrupt developer. Republican city Councilman Daniel Halloran allegedly set the terms between Smith and other GOP officials. “Money is what greases the wheels,” Halloran said, according to a witness. “Good, bad, or indifferent.”

Hartford

Anti-gun bill: The Connecticut General Assembly prepared this week to pass the strictest gun laws in the country in response to December’s Newtown massacre. The legislation, submitted by a bipartisan legislative task force, would add more than 100 types of guns to the state’s list of banned assault weapons, limit the capacity of ammunition magazines, require background checks for all weapons sales, and make Connecticut the first state to establish a registry for people convicted of crimes involving dangerous weapons. The law would also expand mental health research and training for teachers. “Nobody will be able to say this bill is absolutely perfect,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams, “but no one will be able to say that this bill fails when it comes to being the strongest and most comprehensive in the country.”