Newt Gingrich: Union Leader endorsement a big boost in New Hampshire (The Christian Science Monitor)

Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign just got a big boost in New Hampshire – the state holding the first Republican primary election.

The Union Leader, the state’s most prominent publication and a leading voice in conservatism, says it’s backing Gingrich over Mitt Romney.

Romney, who holds a commanding lead in New Hampshire polling, is still the man to beat there. But the Union Leader’s rejection of his candidacy is a blow nonetheless – particularly since Gingrich has vaulted past his GOP rivals to claim neck-and-neck status with Romney in national Republican polls as well as likely-voter surveys in other states.

RECOMMENDED: Election 101 - Ten questions about Newt Gingrich as a presidential candidate

The newspaper’s endorsement – spread across the top of the front page in the Sunday edition and signed by publisher Joseph W. McQuaid – carries a granite-like tone typical of a publication prominent in Republican politics. Four years ago, its endorsement of John McCain helped propel McCain passed Romney to a win in New Hampshire and to his party’s nomination.

"We are in critical need of the innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership that Gingrich has shown he is capable of providing," the newspaper wrote in its editorial.

"We don't back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers,” the paper declared in obvious reference to Romney. “We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent-minded, grounded in their core beliefs about this nation and its people, and best equipped for the job.”

"We don't have to agree with them on every issue," the newspaper wrote about Gingrich, some of whose positions (on immigration, for example) have rankled conservatives. "We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear."

Writes Maggie Haberman at Politico.com: “It's the most significant and impactful endorsement in the GOP race so far, and solidifies Gingrich's standing as the alternative to Romney as the race heads into the final pre-Iowa caucuses stretch.”

While the Union Leader’s endorsement shakes things up, Romney remains the clear front-runner in New Hampshire, a state where he owns a home and where he’s well-known because of his time as governor of neighboring Massachusetts.

The WMUR-University of New Hampshire Granite State poll last week showed Romney with 42 percent support among likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire. Gingrich came in second with 15 percent, followed by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas with 12 percent, and former Utah Gov. John Huntsman with 8 percent support.

Gingrich’s campaign nearly crashed and burned earlier this year when most of his staff quit in protest of what they saw as his lack of on-the-ground campaigning. And the former House Speaker’s effort has been dinged by reports of lucrative consulting work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac and the health care industry, his and his wife’s $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany’s, and continuing mention of his three marriages and acknowledged adultery.

But his campaign has regained strength and momentum – particularly in the critical state of New Hampshire.

Associated Press political writer Philip Elliott reports that Gingrich hired tea party leader Andrew Hemingway to lead his efforts, and his team has been contacting almost 1,000 voters a day.

“Hemingway's team of eight paid staffers in New Hampshire has been adding more than 100 volunteers each day, campaign officials said,” Elliott writes. “Gingrich's team already has lined up leaders in the major cities and has started identifying representatives in each ward in the state. Gingrich also has opened three offices in New Hampshire – in Manchester, the state's biggest city; in Dover in the eastern part of the state; and in the North Country's Littleton – and plans two more.”

The Union Leader’s endorsement by no means ensures success.

In 1999, the statewide newspaper endorsed Steve Forbes over George W. Bush (who publisher McQuaid referred to as “an empty suit”). Still, the newspaper’s backing carries significant weight, and not just in its formal endorsement.

"The Union Leader's style is we don't just endorse once," McQuaid told The Washington Post in 1999. "We endorse every damn day. We started endorsing Reagan in 1975 and never stopped."

RECOMMENDED: Election 101 - Ten questions about Newt Gingrich as a presidential candidate

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House GOP leader says deficit deal likely (AP)

WASHINGTON – The No. 2 Republican in the House says he's still confident that a bipartisan deficit "supercommittee" will be able to reach agreement even though there's little more than a week to go before its deadline.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor said he knows the panel is under great pressure but he believes its members can succeed by Nov. 23.

The panel is charged with coming up with at least $1.2 trillion worth of deficit cuts over the coming decade but has been deadlocked over taxes and cuts to benefit programs. Failure would trigger automatic spending cuts to the Pentagon budget and a wide range of domestic programs.

The Virginia Republican declined to otherwise comment on the committee's work, including last week's GOP proposal for revenue hikes.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

Despite prodding from President Barack Obama, members of Congress' supercommittee concede no deal is in sight to meet their goal of $1.2 trillion or more in deficit savings over the next decade.

Instead, with only 10 days remaining until a Nov. 23 deadline, the panel is divided along partisan lines and Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., said Sunday the six committee members of his own party "have not coalesced around a plan."

Despite the difficulties, Clyburn and Republicans on the deficit panel all said they haven't given up hope of a deal by the deadline.

"But if this was easy, the president of the United States and the speaker of the House would have gotten it done themselves," said Rep Jeb Hensarling of Texas, the Republican chairman of the committee.

Obama mentioned his own unsuccessful negotiations with Speaker John Boehner in passing at a news conference in Hawaii on Sunday where he urged the members of the committee to show more flexibility. "It feels as if people continue to try to stick with their rigid positions rather than solve the problem," he said.

"There's no magic formula. There are no magic beans that you can toss on the ground and suddenly a bunch of money grows on trees," Obama added. "We got to just go ahead and do the responsible thing."

Despite some concessions, the two sides remain divided over the same basic issues that thwarted earlier deficit reduction efforts — finding a mutually agreeable blend of tax increases and cuts in the largest government benefit programs.

Democrats on the supercommittee say they are willing to make significant reductions in programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid only after Republicans agree to higher tax revenue, including a larger bite out of the income of the wealthy.

Republicans say that the soaring deficits result from too much spending, and not from a shortage of revenue to the Treasury, and tax increases would crimp efforts to create jobs.

In an offer they said marked a significant concession, GOP members on the panel offered last week to raise taxes by $250 billion over a decade as part of an overhaul of the tax code that simultaneously would cut the top rate from 35 percent to 28 percent.

Democrats swiftly rejected that as a tax cut for the wealthy in disguise, and separately jettisoned an earlier proposal that would have slowed the growth in cost of living increases under Social Security.

There has been little, if any, indication of progress in the talks since then.

But Hensarling seemed to suggest in an interview Sunday that the two parties could find a way around the fast-approaching Thanksgiving deadline by coming to a general understanding with respect to raising new revenue, without actually having to agree on a process or specific remedy.

"There could be a two-step process that would hopefully give us pro-growth tax reform, which by the way, every other bipartisan effort that has said that some revenues have to be raised in this method," he told CNN in an interview. "That is again broaden the base, historically this is how we both produce jobs and more revenues for the government."

For the most part, however, officials in both parties seem to be positioning themselves publicly for political advantage in case the talks falter.

Hensarling said the panel has a goal of cutting deficits by $1.2 trillion, but added it also has a duty.

"The duty is to put forth legislation that actually addresses long-term structural debt. Now the president himself has said that the drivers of our debt are Medicare, Medicaid and health care. Nothing else comes close," he said, adding that Republicans have done that.

But Obama described the situation differently at a news conference after wrapping up an economic summit with leaders of Pacific-region nations.

"If we've got to raise money, it makes sense for us to start by asking the wealthiest among us to pay a little bit more before we start asking seniors, for example, to pay a lot more for their Medicare," he said.

Nor do the two sides agree about a fallback plan already in place to make sure deficits are reduced even if the panel fails to reach an agreement.

Obama said twice over the weekend Congress shouldn't count on being able to change the automatic spending cuts that would take effect beginning on Jan. 1, 2013.

About $450 billion in cuts would come from defense and the same amount from domestic accounts, with savings on interest payments making up the balance of a $1.2 trillion total.

Republicans, joined by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, say the Pentagon couldn't sustain reductions of that magnitude, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., said there would be a "lively debate" in Congress on changing which programs the cuts would affect.

Clyburn and Toomey appeared on Fox. Hensarling was interviewed on CNN.

_____

AP reporter Erica Werner in Hawaii contributed to this story.

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Polygamist leader gets life in prison for assault (AP)

By PAUL J. WEBER, Associated Press Paul J. Weber, Associated Press – 37?mins?ago

SAN ANGELO, Texas – Polygamist leader Warren Jeffs was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for sexually assaulting an underage follower he took as a bride in what his church deemed a "spiritual marriage."

The head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints also received a 20-year sentence for the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl.

He stood quietly Tuesday as the decision of the Texas jury was read, giving him the maximum sentence on both counts. They are to be served consecutively. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said the 55-year-old will be eligible for parole in 35 years.

Prosecutors had asked the jury for the life sentence after presenting their painstaking and sometimes graphic case, and rejected Jeffs' contention that he was being persecuted for his religious beliefs.

"The evidence in this case shows that this isn't a prosecution of a people," prosecutor Eric Nichols said in his closing argument. "This is a prosecution to protect people."

During the trial, prosecutors used DNA evidence to show Jeffs fathered a child with the 15-year-old and played an audio recording of what they said was him sexually assaulting the 12-year-old.

Jeffs, who had insisted on acting as his own attorney during the earlier part of the trial, was convicted Thursday.

He asked to be excused under protest during the sentencing phase, which ended Tuesday with him refusing to answer when the judge asked if he wanted to make a closing statement. A defense attorney told the judge Jeffs had instructed his attorneys not to speak for him.

Jurors deliberated less than half an hour.

During the trial, prosecutors played other tapes in which Jeffs was heard instructing as many as a dozen of his young wives on how to please him sexually — and thus, he told them, please God.

"If the world knew what I was doing, they would hang me from the highest tree," Jeffs wrote in 2005, according to one of thousands of pages of notes seized along with the audio recordings from his Texas ranch.

Nichols referred to that in his closing.

"No, Mr. Jeffs, unlike what you wrote in your priesthood records ... we don't hang convicts anymore from the highest tree. Not even child molesters," Nichols said.

Jeffs claimed his religious rights were being violated. Representing himself after burning through seven high-powered attorneys, he routinely interrupted the proceedings and chose to stand silently in front of jurors for nearly half an hour during his closing arguments. He called just one defense witness, a church elder who read from Mormon scripture.

The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a radical offshoot of mainstream Mormonism that believes polygamy brings exaltation in heaven, has more than 10,000 followers who consider Jeffs to be God's spokesman on Earth.

He spent years evading arrest — crisscrossing the country as a fugitive who eventually made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list before his capture in 2006, said Nichols.

Several former members of the church testified that Jeffs ruled the group with a heavy and abusive hand. Jeffs also allegedly excommunicated 60 church members he saw as a threat to his leadership, breaking up 300 families while stripping them of property and "reassigning" wives and children.

In an audiotape played during the sentencing phase, Jeffs was heard softly telling five young girls to "set aside all your inhibitions" as he gave them instructions on how to please him sexually. Jeffs is heard telling the girls that what "the five of you are about to do is important."

Prosecutors suggested that the polygamist leader told the girls they needed to have sex with him — in what Jeffs called "heavenly" or "celestial" sessions — in order to atone for sins in his community. Several times in his journals, Jeffs wrote of God telling him to take more and more young girls as brides "who can be worked with and easily taught."

FBI agent John Broadway testified that fathers who gave their young daughters to Jeffs were rewarded with young brides of their own. Girls who proved reluctant to have sex with Jeffs were sent away, according to excerpts from Jeffs' journals that prosecutors showed to the jury.

Police raided the group's remote West Texas ranch in April 2008, finding women dressed in frontier-style dresses and hairdos from the 19th century as well as seeing underage girls who were clearly pregnant. The call to an abuse hotline that spurred the raid turned out to be a hoax, and more than 400 children who had been placed in protective custody were eventually returned to their families.

Jeffs is the eighth FLDS man convicted since the raid on Yearning For Zion, in the town of Eldorado, 45 miles south of San Angelo. Previous sentences ranged from six to 75 years in prison.

The church's traditional headquarters is along the Utah-Arizona border, but it established the Texas compound in 2004. Jeffs once faced criminal charges in Arizona and was convicted of accessory to rape in Utah in 2007. But that was overturned by the state Supreme Court and he was extradited to Texas in December.

Willie Jessop, a former FLDS spokesman, who railed against the raid but has since disavowed Jeffs, said the first priority of the church would be tearing down the guard tower and the gate at the ranch.

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Afghan leader sobs alongside slain brother's body (AP)

By MIRWAIS KHAN and SOLOMON MOORE, Associated Press Mirwais Khan And Solomon Moore, Associated Press – 2?hrs?38?mins?ago

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Pushing through a ring of his security men, President Hamid Karzai climbed into his slain half brother's freshly dug grave Wednesday and sobbed alongside the coffin at a funeral attended by thousands of mourners.

Overcome with grief, the president appealed to his countrymen to stop the violence.

Hours later, a bomb attack killed five French soldiers and an Afghan civilian in the east of the country.

The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, who was shot a point blank range by a close confidant a day earlier, left Afghanistan's leader without a powerful ally in the southern province of Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban and site of recent military offensives by the U.S.-led military coalition.

The radical Islamic movement claimed responsibility for the killing, and the president, speaking later at a somber press conference, challenged his insurgent adversaries to give up violence.

"My message for them (the Taliban) is that my countrymen, my brothers, should stop killing their own people," Karzai said. "It is easy to kill and everyone can do it, but the real man is the one who can save people's lives."

In a land of big men, warlords and gangsters, Wali Karzai was all of these. He was the president's bulwark against the Taliban's forces in the south and the enforcer of Karzai's tenuous rule over the Pashtuns who predominate the insurgency.

To the international community, Wali Karzai offered indispensable reach and ruthlessness, but he was also an embarrassment — a partner whose other partners included opium dealers and smugglers.

On Tuesday morning, a sea of mourners surged toward the grave in the Karzai family's home village of Karz in the south. The large wooden casket holding Wali Karzai's body was filled with red flowers.

A tearful President Karzai appeared at the fringe of the throng of thousands and pushed toward the lowered coffin.

He paused at the edge of the open pit, then climbed down in it, partially disappearing from view, and wailed.

He remained there for at least a minute, his grief overwhelming other cries and prayers. Relatives and guards were unable to coax him out, but two men locked their arms underneath Karzai's and pulled their leader out by force.

As Karzai left, his phalanx of guards again powering through the masses, a stream of people dropped fistfuls of dust on the casket.

Wali Karzai's death will transform power relations in the south, where the international military coalition has few friends of stature and none with the sweeping influence of the president's powerful sibling. Karzai will struggle to find an ally resourceful enough in balancing alliances with tribal and political leaders, drug runners and militias in a province where the Taliban still hold much sway.

The assassin was from Wali Karzai's tribe and hometown and traveled with and worked beside him for seven years.

Afghan officials said it's not clear whether he was killed by insurgents, as the Taliban claimed, or died as the result of an internal dispute.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid issued a statement Wednesday saying that insurgent fighters killed Wali Karzai because he cooperated with U.S., British and Canadian forces in the south.

"He was aligned with foreign occupiers," who bombed Afghan villages, Mujahid said.

The Taliban spokesman called Wali Karzai a "puppet" of the West and alleged that he was on the CIA payroll and profited from the illegal seizure of government and private land.

Wali Karzai had denied working for the CIA or being involved in shady business dealings.

Mujahid warned that if other Afghan officials fail to support the insurgency and befriend those aligned with the Afghan government and U.S.-led coalition, they will face the same fate as the slain Wali Karzai.

In Wednesday's insurgent strike in the eastern Kapisa province, an attacker detonated a bomb near a meeting of local leaders that was being guarded by French troops. Five French soldiers and an Afghan civilian were killed, the French president's office announced in Paris.

Four other French soldiers and three other Afghan civilians were seriously injured in the attack in the village of Joybar.

Afghan security forces were a conspicuous presence at the burial, with troops and intelligence agents dispersed around and within the crowd.

Despite heightened security, two members of the Afghan intelligence service traveling to Wali Karzai's funeral with Helmand provincial governor Gulab Mangal were injured when their vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Kandahar's Maiwand district, said Daoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the governor of Helmand.

Rustam Shah, former Pakistan ambassador to Afghanistan, said Wali Karzai's death exposed the fragility of the security infrastructure in the southern provinces, particularly Kandahar where the Americans have boasted of progress in wresting territory from the Taliban.

"It will be a big blow to the government's image in the Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan," he said.

"The president will have to be very careful to move quickly to consolidate and maintain his power structure in Kandahar."

___

Moore reported from Kabul. Associated Press writer Kathy Gannon in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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Man grabs French leader Sarkozy, is detained (AP)

PARIS – A man in a crowd grabbed French President Nicolas Sarkozy by the shoulder Thursday and nearly knocked him to the ground before being tackled by security officers and detained.

The unusually aggressive incident occurred as the president shook hands with a crowd in the town of Brax in southwest France.

The man was not armed, according to the national police service. An official with the service said the 32-year-old Frenchman lives in the Lot-et-Garonne region and works in the theater business. The official was not authorized to be publicly named due to police policy.

The man was detained and being questioned in the nearby town of Agen.

Images broadcast on French television showed Sarkozy reaching over a metal barricade to greet onlookers when an arm grabs his suit roughly by the shoulder and pulls it toward the crowd.

Sarkozy started to lose his balance and fall, then immediately recoiled and righted himself. Security officers pulled the assailant to the ground.

Sarkozy's office would not immediately comment on the incident.

Sarkozy is an outspoken and divisive figure whose poll ratings have been quite low for months. He is expected to run for re-election next year, and his presidential visits to the French provinces in recent weeks have the air of campaign stops.

He occasionally gets heckled by critics, though only verbally. In one 2008 incident, a man was caught on video telling Sarkozy not to touch him as the president walked through a crowd. The man accused Sarkozy of "dirtying me," and Sarkozy snapped back with an insult that mildly translated as "get out of here, you total jerk."

Sarkozy's predecessor, Jacques Chirac, was the object of an assassination attempt in 2002, during a military parade for the Bastille Day national holiday. A far-right activist, Maxime Brunerie, was convicted of attempted murder after he pulled a rifle from a guitar case and shot at Chirac. Chirac was unhurt.

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