Yahoo Politics

The Iowa magic that launched Barack Obama to the presidency four years ago has all but faded.

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney likes to portray himself as a better job creator than President Barack Obama, but he may have a hard time backing up those boasts.

Four years ago, Heather Wilson gave up her House seat from New Mexico to make a run for a rare opening in the Senate. She lost in a bare-knuckled Republican primary. This year she has the luxury of sitting back as the Democratic successor to her House seat takes a similar gamble.

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister David Cameron gave the job of ruling on a multi-billion dollar takeover by News Corp to a minister he knew supported the deal, an inquiry heard on Thursday, reigniting accusations he was in hock to Rupert Murdoch. Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary who was handed the task of deciding whether to support Murdoch's $12 billion bid for BSkyB, had previously sent a memo to Cameron detailing his view that the takeover would be good for Britain. ...

Mitt Romney struggled to find support for his education proposals while campaigning at an inner-city school Thursday, one day after declaring education the "civil rights issue of our era."

GREENSBORO, North Carolina (Reuters) - Jurors deciding whether former U.S. Senator John Edwards broke federal election laws while running for president asked for 20 more pieces of evidence on Thursday, suggesting their fifth day of deliberations is likely not their last. Jurors have nearly four weeks of testimony to consider as they determine whether Edwards, 58, conspired to use more than $900,000 from two supporters to conceal his pregnant mistress, Rielle Hunter, as he chased the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. ...

BOSTON (Reuters) - The son of fallen Chinese politician Bo Xilai graduated from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government on Thursday, capping a tumultuous academic year that also placed him in the center of his homeland's biggest leadership crisis in two decades. Bo Guagua, whose perceived lavish lifestyle overseas has created a firestorm on the Internet back in China, wore a black cap and gown with crimson hood when he accepted his diploma at a commencement ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Support for President Vladimir Putin is sliding across Russia, and pressure for change is so widespread that a political crisis including violent clashes with protesters appears highly likely, a respected think-tank said on Thursday. Putin was elected comfortably to a third, six-year term as president in March, despite huge urban protests last winter against alleged election fraud and the monopoly on power that he and his United Russia party enjoy. ...

GENEVA/BEIRUT (Reuters) - A U.N. investigation on Thursday said both sides in the Syrian conflict had committed serious human rights abuses, with government forces executing entire families in their homes and rebels torturing and killing soldiers and government supporters. The United Nations report into the 14-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad said government forces routinely drew up lists of wanted people and their families before blockading then attacking a village or neighborhood. ...

ALBIREH, Lebanon (Reuters) - A Lebanese Islamist whose arrest on suspicion of helping arm Syrian rebels sparked deadly sectarian fighting in Lebanon says his release shows Lebanese authorities cannot afford to anger Sunni Muslims who back their co-religionists fighting in Syria Shadi al-Moulawi, freed on bail on Tuesday after being charged with membership of a "terrorist group", said authorities had gone too far in pressuring Sunnis in north Lebanon, which Damascus says is a base for attacks inside Syria. ...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who flew to the United States last week, said on Thursday China's handling of the local officials who harassed and abused him and his family will determine whether the country can begin to achieve rule of law. "If authorities can promptly investigate and prosecute those lawless officials who broke China's laws, then possibly China can rather quickly move onto the road of rule of law," Chen told Reuters in an interview. ...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Millions of Egyptians, choosing their leader freely for the first time in their history, voted on Thursday in a fraught contest between Islamists and former officials of President Hosni Mubarak who was toppled in a popular uprising last year. After six decades under authoritarian, military-backed rule, Egypt's 50 million eligible voters may entrust the most populous Arab nation to an Islamist president for the next four years, alongside the Islamist-led parliament they elected earlier. ...

The Iowa magic that launched Barack Obama to the presidency four years ago has all but faded.

Food stamp recipients are ripping off the government for millions of dollars by illegally selling their benefit cards for cash — sometimes even in the open, on eBay or Craigslist — and then asking the government for replacement cards.

ABUJA/LAGOS (Reuters) - A new draft of Nigeria's long delayed oil bill, whose passage is needed to unblock billions of dollars of stalled investment into exploration and production, will be finalized this week, sources close to the matter said on Thursday. A copy of the 200-page Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) obtained by Reuters includes plans to partly privatize and list the state oil firm, tax oil company profits at 20 percent for deep offshore and 50 percent for shallow or onshore, and give the oil minister supervisory powers over all institutions in the industry. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Major League Baseball player David Segui may be called to testify in the perjury trial of ex-pitching ace Roger Clemens, the judge in the case ruled on Thursday. According to prosecutors Segui has been reluctant to travel to Washington for the trial without knowing he will definitely testify. Federal prosecutors had filed a motion to bring Segui as a witness in order to question him about a conversation between Segui and Clemens' former personal trainer Brian McNamee, who has said he injected Clemens with steroids and human growth hormone. ...

TUNIS (Reuters) - The lawyer of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali denied on Thursday that the deposed Tunisian leader had given orders to fire on protesters during last year's revolution and condemned a Tunisian prosecutor's calls for the death penalty. A Tunisian military prosecutor demanded on Wednesday that the death penalty be imposed in absentia on Ben Ali over his role in the deaths of protesters in the central towns where the Arab Spring began last year. ...

Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney likes to portray himself as a better job creator than President Barack Obama, but he may have a hard time backing up those boasts.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The genocide trial of Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic is set to resume at the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal on June 25 four weeks later than initially planned, The Hague-based court said on Thursday. Mladic, who was arrested in Serbia in May 2011 after 16 years on the run, is accused of genocide for his role in the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and for orchestrating the killing of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995; Europe's worst massacre since World War Two. ...

Food stamp recipients are ripping off the government for millions of dollars by illegally selling their benefit cards for cash — sometimes even in the open, on eBay or Craigslist — and then asking the government for replacement cards. The Agriculture Department wants to curb the practice by giving states more power to investigate people who repeatedly claim to lose their benefit cards.