So much for an Islamist majority. A day after Egyptian election results gave Islamists a 65 percent majority in parliament—the Muslim Brotherhood held 40 percent and the ultraconservative Salafis took a surprising 25 percent—the Brotherhood denied there was any alliance. The move is thought to be symbolic to assure liberals in the nation and Western governments that there should be no anxiety about the new regime. The Brotherhood has another fight on its hands: it’s expected to try to name a new prime minister—though the current military government isn’t keen on this at all.

Herman Cain and his wife have a lot to talk about. Cain admitted on Thursday that his wife, Gloria, did not know about his friendship with Ginger White, until she went public with her allegations on Monday. He acknowledged that he gave White financial help, but that his wife, "did not know that we were friends until she came out with this story." Earlier on Thursday, Cain admitted that he had not seen his wife since White came forward with her story, and that he’s waiting to decide whether to continue his presidential campaign until he talks with her. "Since I've been campaigning all week, I haven't had an opportunity to sit down with her and walk through this with my wife and my family. I will do that when I get back home on Friday," Cain said at his New Hampshire campaign office. "I am not going to make a decision until after we talk face to face."

Following the worst friendly-fire incident in 10 years of war with Afghanistan, U.S. officials have revealed that their counterparts in Pakistan had actually permitted the American airstrikes that killed 24 Pakistani troops on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pakistani officials at the border-control center had given the U.S. permission to fire back when attacked by who they thought were Taliban militants. It turned out, according to U.S. officials, that it was Pakistani military personnel who’d fired at the American commandos. Pakistani representatives, however, deny that any of the country’s military forces were in the area when officials gave the U.S. the go-ahead for attack.

This sounds like a challenge. A day after global banks pledged to boost the financial system by providing cheaper funds for European banks, European Central Bank President Mario Draghi hinted at a “new fiscal compact”: if government leaders deal with structural flaws that let nations like Greece spiral financially and risk taking the global economy with it, the bank could bolster its support for the economy. This intervention in bond markets—no actual details were revealed—would avoid undercutting Germany, a nation that opposes ECB bailouts of Greece and Italy, and would not be awarding nations that have failed financially. The ECB will not buy securities as the Federal Reserve did. Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for more budget discipline. He is scheduled to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel before the EU summit.

Thursday the Senate voted to kill two plans, highlighting a divide among Senate Republicans. The minority party killed President Obama's plan to push payroll tax cuts--and make them more generous for workers--through the end of next year as well as GOP leader Mitch McConnell's effort to renew a 2 percent payroll tax cut. The dual defeats suggest potential for compromise within the Senate on the Social Security payroll tax cut which is a key part of the president's jobs program. The Senate has also approved a $662 billion defense spending bill that would require suspected terrorists, including those captured in the U.S., to be held by the military. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, FBI Head Robert Mueller as well as the White House all oppose the costly bill, which would significantly increase the military’s role in dealing with terror suspects. Though the measure passed with flying colors in the Senate (93-7), the President has threatened to exercise his right to veto.

When Warren Weinstein went missing in Pakistan last August it was unknown who was responsible for his disappearance. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Qaeda leader, has just made it clear, in an audio message made in support of Qaeda and Taliban members, that he is responsible for the capture of the 70-year-old American. Zawahiri stated several demands that he wanted completed before Weinstein could be released, including removing the blockade between Egypt and Gaza, ending all U.S. bombing attacks in the Middle East, releasing Guantánamo prisoners and anyone else charged with Qaeda or Taliban affiliation. “Your government is torturing our prisoners, and we have never tortured your prisoner,” he insisted. “Your government signed the Geneva Conventions, and threw it in the rubbish bin, and even though we did not sign the Geneva Conventions, we are honoring your prisoner.”

Watch out, Mitt. A new Rasmussen poll has Newt Gingrich surging to a sizable lead over Mitt Romney, 38 percent to 17 percent. Support seems to be draining from Rick Perry and Herman Cain, who come in with 4 percent and 8 percent, respectively. In a matchup with President Obama, Gingrich has a slight lead, 45 percent to 43 percent. In that scenario, the Rasmussen poll is a bit of an outlier, with a Real Clear Politics composite of seven major polls showing Gingrich trailing Obama by nearly 6 points. Meanwhile, Gingrich isn't modest: He told ABC News that he would be the GOP nominee.

Big changes in store for Thomson Reuters: The news agency announced that at the end of the year Chief Executive Officer Thomas H. Glocer will retire after 10 years at the helm of the organization. Stepping into the position will be James C. Smith, who is currently the chief operating officer. Smith has been with the Thomson Newspaper group since 1987. He’s led the Thomson Newspapers in the U.S. and began his career as a journalist.

Billy Graham is fighting his second bout of pneumonia this year. The 93-year-old Evangelist was admitted to Mission Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina Wednesday and was diagnosed a day later. Graham is known for his long career as an influential Evangelist minister, having served as a preacher for several U.S. Presidents.

Happy Feet Two is having a hard time living up to the original and the resurgence of political conservatism in the U.S. may be to blame. The second installment of the arctic-themed franchise, like the first, emphasizes the effect of global warming through the experiences of penguins. This type of left-wing agenda pushing may have been able to fly in 2006, but this is 2011. Forty percent of American adults consider themselves conservative these days, and they won’t stand for a bunch of penguins dancing around spouting liberal environmentalism to their children. Happy Feet Two isn’t the only movie sequel this year to alienate conservatives. Pixar’s Cars 2 made the oil industry its bad guy, and it paid for it. The movie garnered 22 percent less than the original at the box office.

It’s that time of the year to start gearing up for the Academy Awards again. The first shot might be sounded by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, which on Thursday named Martin Scorsese’s Hugo the best film of 2011. The group, made up of young filmmakers, professionals, academics, enthusiasts, and students, also named Scorsese the Best Director, Tilda Swinton the Best Actress for We Need to Talk About Kevin, and George Clooney the Best Actor for The Descendants. The Oscars will be held on Feb. 26, 2012.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with human-rights activist and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi on Thursday, only hours after meeting Suu Kyi’s oppressor, Burmese President Thein Sein. Clinton has called Suu Kyi a personal inspiration, and while they have spoken by telephone, they had never met before because Suu Kyi has been under house arrest in Burma for much of the past two decades. Prior to the meeting with Suu Kyi, Clinton said the U.S. would reward Burma’s leaders if they kept “moving in the right direction.” She also urged Burma to cut “illicit ties” to North Korea and to end ethnic violence. Clinton is the highest-ranking American diplomat to travel to Burma in more than 50 years, and she is there to test how committed the new civilian government is to its promises of reform.

Patrick Sullivan, the former sheriff of Colorado’s Arapahoe County, is being held in the jail named after him. He was arrested Tuesday for allegedly offering a man methamphetamine in exchange for sex and sent to the Patrick J. Sullivan Jr. Detention Facility. He was sheriff of the county, which includes Littleton, from 1984 until 2002, and he was involved in the state’s methamphetamine-policy task force. The city of Littleton has not yet said if it will rename the jail.

The Grammy nominations are in, showering praise on Kanye West, Adele, Lady Gaga, and more. West led all nominees with seven nods, but his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was conspicuously absent from the Album of the Year category. The albums that did make the cut are Adele’s 21, Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, Rihanna’s Loud, and Bruno Mars’s Doo-Wops & Hooligans. Adele followed Kanye West with six nominations, including Record of the Year and Song of the Year for "Rolling in the Deep."

Hundreds of thousands of households in California were without power Thursday after strong winds toppled trees, downed power lines, and delayed flights. A gust of 97 mph was recorded at Whitaker Peak in Los Angeles County Wednesday night, according to the National Weather Service. The storm is expected to peak Thursday night. “We anticipate that it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said Southern California Edison spokeswoman Vanessa McGrady. Officials said 250,000 were without power in Southern California, along with an additional 26,000 in the northern Santa Cruz Mountains. Twenty-seven flights have been delayed from Los Angeles International Airport due to debris on the runway and severe crosswinds.

Looking to repair the damage in the wake of the Jerry Sandusky child-sex-abuse scandal and the firing of football coach Joe Paterno, Penn State promised Thursday that it will donate $1.5 million in bowl-game proceeds to sex-crime advocacy organizations. University president Rod Erickson and other administrators appeared at a town-hall forum organized by students and faced tough questions from the audience. Penn State finished the season 9-3 and ranked in the top 25 of college teams, and will likely head to the Insight Bowl. But there is still talk that the team could be barred from the postseason. If the school accepts a bowl invitation, Erickson said the proceeds will go to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape and the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

What’s left when the protests end? Garbage—and lots of it—in the case of Occupy L.A. Police need to clean up 30 tons of debris after evicting the group Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of the garbage is personal belongings: books, CDs, mattresses, hygienic products. Still, workers wore hazmat suits to clean it up. The material will be sent to a nearby landfill.

More fallout from the raids that snared Raj Rajaratnam: federal authorities are planning to bring more charges against employees at hedge funds they raided one year ago. Three people from Diamondback Capital Management and Level Global Investors are expected to be arrested in the coming weeks, according to Reuters. So far, about 50 people have pleaded guilty or been convicted in the probe.

John Edwards may not have been the only 2008 Democratic candidate for president who misbehaved. A federal grand jury is investigating former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson for campaign-finance violations from his 2008 presidential run, including an allegation that he had supporters pay off a woman who said she and Richardson had an affair. According to The Wall Street Journal, the woman is a former member of Richardson’s inner circle who considered suing him until she was paid $250,000. The prosecution is arguing that the money amounted to a de facto campaign contribution, since it was meant to aid his presidential run. The jury’s decision is expected within weeks.

Good news for the @Jon2012Girls: Mitt Romney may soon dust off his five sons and haul them out on the campaign trail. According to Politico, Romney will start emphasizing his family more as a quiet way of drawing a contrast with his thrice-married rival, Newt Gingrich. According to The Washington Post, Gingrich’s sudden popularity has caught Romney off guard. While the Post says Romney’s team is still debating whether to take Gingrich on aggressively or see if he self-immolates in the five weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Politico says Romney is “preparing a robust, sustained attack that tags the former House speaker as a Washington insider and serial flip-flopper who can’t be trusted with the nation’s economy.”

If you live in Koblenz, Germany, forget brunch this Sunday. Half the city, or 45,000 residents, will evacuate after officials found one of the largest unexploded bombs in history. The bomb, thought to have been dropped by the British Royal Air Force during World War II, weighs 4,000 pounds—3,000 of which are explosives. The bomb was found in the Rhine River, where the water level has dropped recently. If exploded, the bomb could cause destruction over a radius of more than 70 yards. The bomb will be defused, even though it’s in 16 inches of water, and the detonation fuse is partially blocked.

The English major's tale: what jobs are out there for those who study Flaubert and Dostoevsky—especially in a recession? A new generation of literary wannabes in New York are taking matters into their own hands by creating their own online journal and a literary salon modeled after the 1920s Lost Generation. The monthly journal, called The New Inquiry, is focused on their generation’s cultural criticism—and will be equally concerned with Theodor Adorno and Britney Spears. The founders, three idealistic Web-savvy friends, and the 26-year-old editor, Rachel Rosenfelt, had no trouble finding contributors among their overeducated and underemployed friends. They meet once a month at an unmarked bookstore on New York’s Upper East Side.

Saying sorry is hard for world leaders, too. President Obama will not formally apologize to Pakistan for NATO airstrikes last weekend that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers. The State Department had encouraged Obama to apologize, with the U.S. ambassador arguing it would help defuse growing anger. But the Defense Department balked, saying senior defense officials and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already apologized. According to The New York Times, some Obama administration officials worried that he would expose himself to Republican attacks by ignoring the Defense Department’s advice.

A small church in Kentucky has banned interracial couples after a performance by a white woman and her black fiancé unsettled congregation members. The Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church voted not to accept interracial couples as members after Stella Harville, who was baptized there, returned home with her black fiancé, Ticha Chikuni, and played piano during a service as he sang “I Surrender All.” The church has a typical attendance of about 40 members, and just 15 people voted on the new rule, with nine in favor and six against.

This probably isn’t the best way to inspire confidence in your new government. Francesco Braga, a professor in Ontario, Canada, was surprised to hear he was being called back to his former country after 28 years away to be its new junior agricultural minister. He was immediately congratulated by the Parmesan cheese manufacturers’ association, and back in Italy, the agriculture minister said that though he hadn’t met the new junior minister, he knew him by reputation. But Francesco Braga hadn’t been recommended for the job—Franco Braga had, and not even for that job, but for a post in infrastructure. Someone had found a professor with a similar name, whose expertise happened to be in agriculture, and appointed him to that post. A spokesperson for the prime minister said the real Braga had been found and would take his proper post soon. “Everything's fine. He'll take the oath. In a few days.”

Are white cans a bigger bust than New Coke? Coca-Cola announced Thursday that it will stop production on the new white holidays cans just one month after they hit the shelves. Although the company insisted the new cans were well received by consumers, it had already run up a series of complaints varying from customers thinking the soft drink tasted different in the white can to people who thought the new can was too similar to Diet Coke’s silver one. Coca-Cola regularly has a holiday marketing line, with past designs featuring snowflakes and polar bears—which also appeared on this year’s white cans. The company said the red cans will be back in the majority by Christmas, and that there most likely won’t be any left on the shelves by February, as originally planned.

Joran van der Sloot is suing the Chilean government for $13 million, alleging that country violated his civil rights when it extradited him to Peru last year to face murder charges. “We can’t say that because someone is accused of killing a person, you can violate all their human rights,” said van der Sloot’s Peruvian lawyer, Aldo Cotrina, who said he expects to file a similar document next week in Peru. Van der Sloot, 24, has been accused of killing Stephany Flores, 21, last year in a hotel room in Peru, and he was arrested a few days later in Chile. He has long been suspected of the 2005 murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba, and he also faces extradition to the U.S. in Holloway’s murder.

Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is going after the banks, filing suit against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citi, and Ally Financial for unlawful mortgage practices. A statement from her office said the “lawsuit seeks accountability for the banks’ unlawful and deceptive conduct in the foreclosure process, including unlawful foreclosures, false documentation and robo-signing.” Last month Coakley said she was no longer confident that settlement negotiations between lenders and an alliance of attorneys general would be successful.

As early Egyptian voting results filter in, the Islamists are on track to capture a 65 percent majority in Parliament. The Muslim Brotherhood’s party was the big favorite, winning 40 percent of the vote so far. Surprisingly, the ultraconservative Islamists, or Salafis, have nearly 25 percent. In Egypt, where the liberal parties and young activists sparked the revolution, the organized Islamists seem to have taken control. When voting is opened to more conservative rural areas, the Islamists are expected to continue to gain steam. The transfer of power will not be without conflict: the Brotherhood said Wednesday that the Islamist majority would name a prime minister soon, but the military government said that choice remains up to the ruling generals. There are two more rounds of voting before January.

President Obama pledged during a World AIDS Day event in Washington to help 6 million people in countries hardest hit by the virus, promising them better access to antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2013, increasing the original goal by 2 million. “We can beat this disease,” he declared, adding that "countries that haven't made a pledge need to do so. That includes China and other major economies that are now able to step up as major donors." His plan builds on former president George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in 2003. Obama also announced plans to boost spending on HIV treatment in the U.S. by $50 million. There are some 1.2 million Americans living with HIV, according to the White House, and 50,000 people are infected every year. The bulk of the new funding will go to state programs that help patients get access to medicine.

With international pressure on Syria growing, the United Nations is saying the death toll has risen above 4,000 and is likening the situation to a civil war. The Arab League has warned of international intervention if Syria doesn’t stop its violent repression of protests. Nabil el-Araby, the secretary-general of the Arab League, said the Syrian regime can "avoid the dangers of a foreign intervention" if it agrees to an Arab League plan to allow observers into the country to monitor its handling of the unrest. Earlier this week the League voted to sanction the Syrian regime and cut ties to its central bank. The U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said it is raising the death toll to 4,000, but the figure is probably much higher, and that it is characterizing the conflict as a civil war.

Congratulations, Ticketmaster users! Because of a proposed class action settlement with the ticket retail giant, anyone who’s used the site between October 21, 1999 and October 19, 2011 will receive a whopping $1.50 for every ticket purchased during that time. Apparently, several customers caught on to the fact that Ticketmaster was profiting from its processing fees. Following the settlement, Ticketmaster will still be able to profit off its sales, it will just have to make clear that it’s doing so.