The Justice Department rejected South Carolina’s new voting law, which would have required photo-identification at polls. The Justice Department claimed that the law, which was passed in May, was discriminatory against minority voters and low-income voters, who might not be able to obtain photo identification. However, the department declined to say whether or not the discrimination was intentional. A dozen states have passed similar laws this year.

House Republicans are none too pleased about the last-minute solution to the payroll-tax fight. Some are angry with their counterparts in the Senate, who approved the two-month extension on the tax cut, after House members had almost unanimously rejected it days before. Conservative freshmen were particularly miffed. “The House Republicans made a firm, sound point. And when push came to shove, we lost our way,” said Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kan.), adding that the extension was “bitterly consistent with what happened all year long.” Congressional Dems, meanwhile, cheered the deal. “Everything we do around here does not have to wind up in a fight,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Queen Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, has checked into a hospital for “precautionary tests” after suffering from chest pains, British officials said Wednesday. Buckingham Palace said the 90-year-old Duke of Edinburgh was taken from Sandringham, the queen’s estate in Norfolk, where the royal family spends the holidays, to Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, where he underwent minor surgery to clear a blocked coronary artery.

This doesn’t bode well for Rick Perry: the GOP presidential candidate will not appear in the Virginia primary ballot after failing to submit enough valid signatures, Republican officials announced Friday evening. Perry’s campaign told state election officials that it had submitted 11,911 signatures, but the Republican Party of Virginia confirmed on Twitter that Perry didn’t submit the 10,000 signatures required to qualify. “Hopefully, he will do better in other states,” a chairman of Perry’s campaign in Virginia told the Washington Post on Friday night. Perry was one of four GOP candidates who submitted ballot petitions on Thursday, along with Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Newt Gingrich. Romney and Paul have both been confirmed, and the Virginia GOP is expected to announce whether Gingrich will qualify later tonight.

The streets of Moscow are expected to be taken over by demonstrators by Saturday as more than 50,000 people have announced their intentions to attend a protest. Protesters want the parliamentary election results overturned and for political prisoners to be released, and to encourage people to vote down Vladimir Putin’s potential return to office in the March elections. On Friday, President Dmitri Medvevdev submitted several rules to ease registration of political parties and presidential candidates. But opposition leader Vladimir Ryzhkov has said “it is not an answer – it’s not what Bolotnaya expects and now what Sakharov Prospect expects. Medvevdev didn’t answer a host of our demands.”

Here's some news that will bring holiday cheer to a solid number of people earning minimum wage in America: On New Year's Day, 1.4 million low-income earners across eight states will see their wages get a modest boost. Workers in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington will receive a modest boost of between 28 and 37 cents per hour, due to state laws that require the minimum wage to keep up with inflation. The rate increase will add an extra $582 to $770 a year to the paychecks of full-time workers. Furthermore, the economy could see some improvements as well, as the wage increases are expected to boost consumer spending, add as much as $366 million to the nation's gross domestic, and make room for the creation of more than 3,000 full-time jobs.

Police used pepper spray on Friday to gain control of a crowd who were waiting in line to buy the new Air Jordan Concord XI sneakers in a suburb of Seattle. One person was also arrested. Police at Tukwila, Washington’s Westfield Southcenter mall were so overwhelmed by the crowd that they called for backup. One police officer said, “We used pepper spray on some of the fights to disrupt the crowds. This was not a pro-police crowd. The crowd was less than cooperative with instructions from police to quit fighting and to quit cutting.” Police were also called to other locations around the country to control crowds waiting to buy the same shoe.

If you're planning on spending the holidays out west, we hope you're there already. A heavy snow storm blew into the region late Thursday night, causing flight delays in Albuquerque and Denver. High winds forced dozens of motorists off a major highway in western New Mexico, where more than a foot of snow had piled up by Friday morning. A winter storm warning issued by the National Weather Service was lifted by the afternoon, though meteorologists said snowfall was expected to continue through the night.

Singer Etta James was taken to the hospital on Wednesday after she had trouble breathing, according to her manager, Lupe De Leon. She is now on an assisted breathing apparatus. De Leon says that James’ family is with her at the hospital and she is “in pretty bad shape.” Earlier this week, Doctors announced that the singer is suffering from terminal leukemia.  It is not clear when, or if, the singer will be released.

Simon Cowell made $42 million last year through his deal with Sony that created Syco Entertainment, which controls many of Cowell’s entertainment properties, including The X Factor. According to corporate filings, Sony paid $49 million for a 50 percent share in Syco and $42 million of that went to Cowell. That should be good news for Cowell, because despite all the money spent to create it, The X Factor had fairly dismal ratings this season.

Thousands of Czech citizens and world leaders gathered to pay their last respects to Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president, activist, and writer who died Sunday. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, former president Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Prime Minister David Cameron attended the funeral, held in Prague Castle. Havel, a dissident intellectual, was elected president of Czechoslovakia after helping bring down the Communist regime, and then elected president of the Czech Republic twice after the country was divided in two.

President Obama signed the payroll-tax cut deal Friday after both Houses of Congress apprved it in the morning. The two-month extension will keep the $20 a week savings for the average worker making $50,000 a month while Congress negoitates a longer-term solution. Apparently there was no Braveheart rallying speech for "This is good news just in the nick of time," President Obama said before departing Washington for Hawaii. House Speaker John Boehner on Thursday night when he told fellow Republicans that the game was up and they'd have to pass the two-month payroll-tax cut extension. In a conference call, he demanded his members pass the extension and permitted no comments. “Speaker’s decision,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling when introducing Boehner on the call.

Thousands of Egyptians rallied in Cairo and other cities Friday to demand the military rulers hand over power. Seventeen people have been killed during Egypt’s riots in suspected incidents of police brutality, and the image of one woman being beaten and dragged through the streets has caused fury throughout the country—as well as worldwide outrage. “Anyone who saw her and saw her pain would come to Tahrir,” said Omar Adele, 27, a protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Some protesters are demanding the Army bring forward a presidential vote as early as Jan. 25—the one-year anniversary of the uprisings that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak. Others have said Egypt has remained in chaos 10 months after Mubarak’s ouster, and even the Muslim Brotherhood did not join in Friday’s protest. The Army has said it regrets the violence and offered an apology over the woman who was beaten.

Beware comedians bearing gifts. Steven Colbert has offered to give the South Carolina GOP the $500,000 it needs to hold the state's primary, but he wants naming rights to the race. “We would finally raise democracy to the same level as the Tostitos™ Fiesta Bowl and Kardashian™ weddings,” he wrote in an op-ed in The State. Colbert had earlier offered to pay $400,000 in exchange for naming rights and the inclusion of a nonbinding referendum on the ballot asking voters whether corporations are people or “only people are people.” The GOP apparently heard him out before turning him down, and Colbert worked with South Carolina Democrats to get the referendum on the ballot. But he still wants naming rights, purchased through his Colbert Super PAC, and he's willing to pay $500,000 for them.

This is the type of story that will warm even the Grinch’s heart. Seven years ago, Wati, a young girl, was swept into the Indian Ocean by the massive tsunami that killed 230,000 people in the region. Her parents assumed she was dead, along with their two other daughters. But Wati, now 15 years old, showed up at a cafe near her home town in Indonesia earlier this week, saying she had been forced to work as a beggar and had finally escaped. She was led to her grandfather, who brought her to her parents.

Melanie Amaro took home X Factor’s $5 million prize tonight in the finale of the singing competition’s first season. The 19-year-old was kicked off the competition and then brought back later on in the season. Following the announcement, the show’s judge and producer Simon Cowell said, “It couldn’t have been a better ending, the whole story, and the fact that everybody thinks it was something we put together for TV, me bringing her back. It wasn’t. It was a genuine mistake, the irony is she actually won.”

Only 10 months after a devastating earthquake that killed nearly 200, the New Zealand city of Christchurch was struck by several quakes Friday. The earthquake, initially measured to be 5.8 magnitude, hit in the midst of the Christmas shopping rush, sending people into a panic. Several strong aftershocks were also reported. There were instances of rock falls, but no casualties. Dozens of people are being treated for injuries, as well as panic attacks. The previous quake in February was 6.3 magnitude, cost $20 billion, and killed 182.

Fed up with the police force’s corruption and inability to temper drug-related crime the Mexican state of Veracruz fired every police officer in its largest city. 900 officers and 100 administrative workers were let go in the port of Veracruz Wednesday, as Mexico’s Navy took over the city’s security. The mass firing was one of the biggest initiatives to clean up local police corruption stemming from the country’s drug war that’s killed at least 46,000 people since 2006.

The French government said Friday that the tens of thousands of women who received potentially dangerous breast implants should have them removed, and the state will foot the bill. The implants are filled with a type of silicone typically reserved for industrial use. The health minister said the removal is “preventative” and not “urgent." It's estimated that 30,000 women in France received the implants and between 40,000 and 50,000 women in Britain. Though the implants have not been definitively linked to cancer, eight cases of cancer have been reported in women with the implants.

Chinese activist Chen Wei was sentenced Friday to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion” through essays he posted online. Inspired by the Arab Spring, Chen posted several pro-democracy essays online before getting arrested along with hundreds of other dissidents. He will also have his political rights revoked for a further two years. At the conclusion of his two-hour trial, Chen told the court, "Dictatorship will fail; democracy will prevail.”

Maybe marauding Vikings were an apt mascot choice after all. Capital One pursues customers long after personal bankruptcy should have wiped out their debt. An ongoing audit has identified 15,500 allegedly erroneous claims. In one case, Capital One sued a woman for $4,266 in credit-card debt after she'd gone bankrupt, then asked a bankruptcy judge to throw out the woman's countersuit that accused the company of flouting bankruptcy law. The judge refused.

Here’s some news to ponder while traveling for the holidays: Delta is facing a class-action lawsuit for not fulfilling its contractual obligations to let customers know about compensation if their luggage is lost. Federal airline regulations allow you to collect up to $3,300 for lost luggage, and the lawsuit alleges that Delta has “uniformly ignored its contractual obligations” so they could “pocket millions and millions it would have had to pay out if it had abided by its contracts with passengers.” While it may not seem like it would make a major impact, look at it this way: An estimated 130,000 bags are “mishandled” by all the airlines a year, and about 2 million people have filed complaints about in mishandled bags—or nearly four out of every 1,000 passengers.

Looks like Joe Biden isn’t letting all the criticism over his Newsweek stop him from getting some jabs in at Mitt Romney. Biden attacked Romney on Friday in an editorial in the Des Moines Register, saying Romney had “misled voters.” “How can anyone forget the economic catastrophe brought on by the same policies Mr. Romney’s proposing,” Biden wrote. The Obama re-election campaign has attacked Newt Gingrich recently, but has focused much of their efforts on Romney, who has been presumed to be the Republican nominee. Biden criticized one of Romney’s speeches on Tuesday that said the government had become too involved in health care, finance, energy, and other industries—which, Romney claims, has led to overspending. Romney on Wednesday took a swipe at Biden’s comments to Newsweek, saying that they were “one of the strangest comments ever to be uttered from the lips of a vice-president.”

An ominous development in Syria: the capital was rocked by twin suicide bombings Friday—one day after a team of Arab League observers entered the country. An estimated 40 people were killed in the blasts, which occurred in security and intelligence buildings. State-run media quickly blamed the double car bombings on al Qaeda, but activists say they were a government plot to influence the observers. The bombs went off within minutes of each other in an upscale district in Damascus and targeted a state intelligence building and security building, according to state TV.

George Michael on Friday tearfully said that he would have died from pneumonia had it not been for the work of his doctors at a Vienna hospital. In a 10-minute speech outside his London home, the singer said it was “touch-and-go” while he was in the intensive-care unit, and the hospital “spent three weeks keeping me alive basically.” Although Michael, 48, said he feels “amazing,” he appeared to have lost weight since falling ill and seemed out of breath during his speech. Michael spoke about “waking up” 10 days ago, suggesting that he was in a coma, and he said he had received a tracheotomy to clear up his breathing passages. Very few details were released during Michael’s hospital stay, and he acknowledged his representatives had “played it down.”

Jon Huntsman got an important endorsement in New Hampshire, from the small but still influential newspaper, the Concord Monitor. Huntsman has been trailing in the polls and has spent much of his time campaigning in the state. In an editorial, the paper wrote that “the choice of Huntsman should be clear … Huntsman, a consistent but never doctrinaire conservative, would present the greatest challenge to Obama.” While it’s a big win for Huntsman—the Monitor covers the state capital—it still probably won’t be as influential the more conservative paper, the Union Leader’s, endorsement of Gingrich in November. But it wasn’t all good news for Huntsman on Friday, as he failed to qualify for the Virginia Super Tuesday primary. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum also did not qualify, all three did not submit enough signatures by the Thursday-night deadline.

In a post on Facebook, the website explained how it uses ads to make money. The new Timeline profiles appear to be organized chronologically by month, but they are actually organized by an algorithm called “Graph Rank,” which measures direct payments to Facebook and app/user popularity to determine the order of the profile. Additionally, Facebook users will now appear in highly personalized ads targeted at their friends called “sponsored stories.” Facebook says, “If you’ve liked that business’s page, the story about you liking the page (including your name or profile photo) may be paired with the ad your friends see.”

Let’s hope this becomes as popular as the Volkswagen Beetle. Volkswagen has agreed to deactivate email on staff BlackBerries in certain German plants outside of working hours. Under the agreement, staff will receive emails on the smartphones from a half hour before work until half an hour after work, but will receive no emails the rest of the time. The company said, “mobile communication devices offer a great amount of freedom, but also embody the risk of no longer being able to switch off.” While many applauded Volkswagen—and the German goods-making company Henkel announced they would impose a BlackBerry-free week for the management board—there has been some backlash, especially since Germans are proud of their work ethic—despite burnout being responsible for some 10 million sick days a year.

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani accused the military on Friday of plotting the overthrow of his government in incendiary comments on the floor of the National Assembly. He said that “conspiracies are being hatched to pack up the elected government” and that the military “cannot be a state within a state.” Pakistan's Army said that it will continue supporting democracy and says it is not planning to take over power. Rumors of a coup have been swirling for months, ever since claims surfaced that the government had sought American support against the military following the killing of Osama bin Laden.