Politics News Headlines

MONTREAL (Reuters) - Quebec students and trade unions on Friday formally challenged a new anti-protest law they say undermines democracy in the Canadian province, which is reeling from three months of demonstrations against planned tuition hikes. Many people are disobeying the law with noisy nightly marches through the …

MADRID (Reuters) - Financial troubles at a big Spanish bank and one of the country's richest regions, Catalonia, piled on problems on Friday for the Madrid government and for investors who question whether it can pay its debts without help from euro zone allies. Bankia SA , Spain's fourth biggest bank and newly nationalized, …

The Senate Ethics committee has slapped the hand of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK., for engaging in communication with an ex-aide of the disgraced former Sen. John Ensign. The committee said there was “improper conduct” between the Coburn and ex-Ensign aide Doug Hampton, by violating the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Regulators have charged a New York fund manager who was running an $11-million Ponzi scheme, federal court filings showed. The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Jason Konior with defrauding investors by promising to match their investments in his fund many times over. In reality, he used $2 …

The Senate Ethics Committee admonished Republican Sen. Tom Coburn on Friday over his contact with a top aide to former Sen. John Ensign, the Nevada lawmaker who resigned in disgrace last year after lying about his affair with the staffer's wife.

After porn stars Brooklyn Lee and Tasha Reign were shooed away from Bill Clinton by a buzzkilling Secret Service agent–who was “not having it,” in their words–the former president called them back over for a photo, the actresses say. Porn actresses Brooklyn Lee and Tasha...

VIENNA (Reuters) - United Nations inspectors have found uranium particles enriched to a higher-than-expected level at an Iranian underground site where Tehran has installed more than 50 percent more enrichment centrifuges, a U.N. watchdog report said on Friday. It said Iran had told the U.N. agency that the traces of highly …

International soccer star David Beckham says he’s sending President Obama a “big box” of underwear from his H&M clothing line after a the president gave it a welcomed plug during a public roasting of Beckham at the White House last week. “To be in the...

by a long shot.

(Reuters) - A private detective working for Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers used a legally questionable tactic to obtain a hotel bill that a New York financier ran up at one of London's swankest hotels, records reviewed by Reuters show. ...

CHICAGO–In the summer of 2010 President Obama heralded the passage by Congress of a sweeping Wall Street reform bill that he claimed would reshape the financial sector and prevent another economic crisis like the one that rocked the country in 2008, but many of those...

The story line on the Republican Senate race in Texas is a now familiar one: A veteran politician supported by the GOP establishment is challenged by a young insurgent backed by national conservative groups.

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptians must choose between a Muslim Brother or an ex-military man in a presidential run-off that highlights the stark rifts in a nation united in euphoria when Hosni Mubarak fell 15 months ago, first-round results indicated on Friday. With most votes counted, the Muslim Brotherhood said its candidate …

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Responding to a complaint by Syria's U.N. envoy, the U.S. Mission to the United Nations said on Friday it was working to ensure that foreign diplomatic missions whose accounts have been closed by U.S. banks are able to get new ones. Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said on Thursday that his mission …

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Tax regulators are preparing for a potential tax hike on profits earned by private equity managers such as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney known as "carried interest," to be ready if the issue flares up in coming months. The tax-collecting Internal Revenue Service will need to write …

PARIS (Reuters) - The French left will comfortably beat the conservative UMP party in next month's parliamentary election, a poll showed on Friday, as rivalries triggered by Nicolas Sarkozy's defeat in the race for the presidency risk splitting the right-wing vote. President Francois Hollande's Socialists and other left-wing …

TORONTO (Reuters) - Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Friday that rising consumer confidence in North America is a more important economic signal than the recent depreciation of the Canadian dollar. "I think consumer confidence is what's important," Flaherty told a reporter from Business News Network television …

OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Canadian government will boost the threshold for reviewing foreign takeovers of Canadian companies to ensure it can focus on the biggest bids, Industry Minister Christian Paradis said on Friday. The review threshold will be raised from the current C$330 million ($320 million) in asset value to C$1 …