ELECTIONS

Local elections were held in Syria on Monday, but will a vote do anything to change the ongoing protests and unrest in the country?

Newt Gingrich, the Republican front runner for 2012 U.S. presidential election, is indeed emerging as a colorful personality. After initial campaign setbacks he faced due to his personal history, Gingrich surged to the top of the contenders’ list. But his emergence as a serious contender also raises interesting questions.

President Dmitry Medvedev ordered an investigation on Sunday into allegations of fraud in Russia's parliamentary election, one day after tens of thousands of protesters demanded it be annulled and re-run.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell predicted on Sunday that Congress will renew a popular payroll tax cut, but it remained unclear how lawmakers will resolve deep differences before the Dec. 31 deadline.

Manuel Noriega, Panama's ruthless drug-running military dictator of the 1980s, is to be returned home on Sunday, headed for a jungle prison to serve a 20-year term for the murders of opponents during his rule.

A referendum issue that Ohio Democrats hope could help President Barack Obama's chances of winning the battleground state will appear on the November 2012 ballot.

President Barack Obama blasted his Republican foes and Wall Street on Tuesday as he portrayed himself as a champion of the middle class and laid out in the starkest terms yet the populist themes of his 2012 re-election bid.

Ignoring the U.S.'s major economic/social problems won’t make them go away. And neither will voting against liberals or Obama. On the contrary, those latter two actions will make the problems worse, leading to more disenfranchised Americans -- the others -- and even bigger economic/social changes in the years ahead.

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets across Russia on Saturday to demand an end to Vladimir Putin's rule and a rerun of a parliamentary election in the biggest opposition protests since he rose to power more than a decade ago.

Awarding this year's Nobel Peace Prize, the head of the selection panel forecast that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would succumb to a wind of history blowing through the Arab world and be forced to accept democratic change.

Despite some recent signs the sluggish U.S. economy might be improving, President Barack Obama warns it could be years before the country is on a sound footing in an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes program that will air Sunday,

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's opponents hope to bring large numbers of people out onto the streets across Russia on Saturday for rallies that will test their ability to channel outrage over allegations of election fraud into a powerful protest movement.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers skirmished on Friday over plans to extend a payroll-tax cut seen as crucial to a fragile U.S. economic recovery, but aides predicted a last-minute deal.

After calling for elections to be held in Zimbabwe next year, the country's long-time ruler, President Robert Mugabe, expressed confidence Thursday that his party can win because voters support his party's progressive economic ideas.

Only 20 percent of Americans told Gallup that Congressional incumbents deserve to be re-elected, the lowest percentage in the organization's 19-year history of asking that question.

Of the 30 companies analyzed in the report, all of them aside from FedEx didn't pay any federal income taxes from 2008 to 2010.

UPA government led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seems to be in trouble after failing to implement its retail reform.

Police are spread out across Kinshasa while 20,000 soldiers are on stand-by at military bases.

The health secretary overruled government scientists and refused to bring the controversial morning-after pill from behind the pharmacy counter and onto drugstore shelves.

The Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, accused the U.S. of encouraging protests over the country's recent Parliamentary elections. He said hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign funds were used to influence the vote.

With a number of protests targeting the ruling party in Russia and alleging them of election fraud, the past few months have been less than smooth for the Russians. Whatever the case may be, the F-word is probably the last thing one would expect to appear on Twitter, particularly in the feed of a top international leader, in this case President Medvedev.