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end reminder of how low expectations for Washington sank in 2013, particularly for a president who hoped his resounding re-election would clear the way for progress on immigration, the long-term debt and tax reform.
• The president's advisers say they're still searching for the larger meaning in the bipartisan budget deal, if there is one at all. At best, it could provide an opening for making progress next year on Obama's stalled legislative agenda. It also could be a political play by Republicans to keep the focus on the disastrous rollout of Obama's health care law and avoid another partial government shutdown like the one in October that tanked the party's approval ratings.
• Or it could simply be an isolated move by lawmakers eager to head for the exits after a year that was perhaps even more dismal for Congress than for the president.
• The president's press secretary, Jay Carney, said administration officials were "not getting overexcited because we're not naive about the obstruction that continues to exist and the partisanship that tends more often than not to paralyze Washington and Congress."
• ___

• CAIRO (AP) -- They tirelessly hold rallies, whether at night or under cold rain, chanting for the return of Egypt's ousted Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. They clash with police, hurling back fuming tear gas canisters and getting dragged by their veils and thrown behind bars. At protests in universities, they get into fistfights with rival female students.
• Women supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have stepped into the front line of Islamist protests, one of the few branches of the organization not crushed by a heavy crackdown since Morsi's removal in a July 3 coup.
• Former group members say it's an intentional survival tactic by the Brotherhood, aiming to keep its street pressure alive and betting that security forces are less likely to strike heavily against women -- and that if they do, it will win public sympathy for the Islamists' cause.
• It's a major change in role for the Muslim Sisterhood, as the women's branch is known. Like the Brotherhood's male cadres, its women are highly disciplined and undergo years of indoctrination instilling principles of obedience -- often from childhood -- but in the women's case, they have largely been trained to play a mostly backseat, family-centered part.
• In daily protests the past months, they have proven determined and ferocious.

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