Today in Iowa Mitt Romney sought to project the image many have of him—a wealthy man out of touch with everyday Americans—onto Obama. He quipped to a Huffington Post reporter on his campaign bus today, "When the president's characterization of our economy was, 'It could be worse,' it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: 'Let them eat cake.' " Romney was referring to a speech Obama made at a Wisconsin town-hall meeting in 2010 when he said, "It's hard to argue sometimes, things would have been a lot worse" without his stimulus plan. Romney seems focused on digging into the president as the Iowa caucuses approach.

The Obama administration is considering transferring Mohammed Fazl to Afghan custody in an effort to further a peace deal with the Afghan government. Fazl, a senior Taliban official who is currently being held at Guantanamo Bay for suspected human rights abuses, is considered a "high-risk detainee." His potential transfer from the military prison (where he's been since 2002) has sparked concern from many in Congress and U.S. intelligence, although it has been assured that he—and five others—would not be set free but moved to a different form of custody. Fazi is believed to have been behind thousands of Afghan Shi'ite deaths from 1998 to 2001.

Yesterday her Iowa campaign chair quit to join Ron Paul’s camp, and today Michele Bachmann's political director Wes Enos stepped down. Still, Bachmann is brushing off reports of her campaign’s imminent collapse. “Our campaign organization is very strong,” she said in Des Moines today, after appearing with her new chairman. Bachmann claimed that former Iowa campaign chairman and state legislator Kent Sorenson flipped to Paul simply because he was offered “a lot of money.” Still, the Bachmann team hasn’t had a good week. A pro-Bachmann super PAC just switched allegiances to Mitt Romney, and a South Carolina endorsement that her campaign bragged about turned out to be a progressive Democrat who said Bachmann’s nomination would ensure an Obama win.

It was the equivalent of telling the world community to talk to the hand. A day after Kim Jong-un was named Supreme Leader of North Korea, the country’s leadership announced there would be no changes in its approach to domestic or international issues. How the younger Kim would rule has been the subject of much debate since his father, Kim Jong-il, died, but it appears as though North Korean officials are coalescing around Kim Jong-un as a leader. The National Defense Commission issued a statement taunting both the United States and South Korea, calling the latter a puppet regime.

Several hundred Russians rallied Thursday in Moscow to protest the detention of Sergei Udaltsov, a prominent civil-rights activist, and several other political prisoners. Udaltsov, the leader of the Left Front movement, has been detained since the tainted Dec. 4 election on charges of staging an unsanctioned rally and then resisting police. He has denied the charges and spent much of the month on a hunger strike. Despite not being state sanctioned itself, Thursday’s rally got off to a peaceful start.

Egyptian government troops on Thursday raided the offices of 17 nonprofit firms that specialize in civil rights—including at least three financed by the U.S. The Egyptian government said the raid is part of an investigation of its claim that “foreign hands” are causing the latest protests against military rule. Witnesses reported that heavily armed men wearing the security police’s black uniforms tore through boxes while preventing the employees from leaving—and the security police took files and computers with them as they left. Human-rights groups have urged the ruling Egyptian military to drop this investigation into foreign groups, which prosecutors have claimed is treason.

Maybe this will go the way of Bank of America’s $5 banking fee? An internal memo leaked Thursday revealed that Verizon plans to charge customers $2 for every bill they pay online or by phone. The new fee will go into effect on Jan. 15. Customers who use autopay or pay their bills with an electronic check will not be charged, and neither will customers using a standard paper check, a money order, Verizon Wireless gift cards, or rebate cards. Verizon said that customers will be notified of the fee before they complete their transactions.

CNN reports that earlier this year a trusted Al Qaeda jihadist was sent to Libya as the nation was undergoing revolution, according to a Libyan source. The man is a trusted comrad of leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and was arrested in Britain under terrorism suspicion in 2005. Known as “AA,” the man has recruited nearly 200 fighters in the eastern part of the nation, by Egypt’s border. Western intelligence agencies, however, are reportedly aware of his presence.

Five protesters from a group called Occupy the Caucuses were arrested at Ron Paul’s Iowa headquarters on Thursday. The group said they were protesting Paul’s proposal to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency. They said they arrived at his headquarters to find the doors locked, and police said they were arrested for trespassing. Thursday’s arrests came one day after 10 Occupy protesters were arrested at Mitt Romney’s headquarters and Wells Fargo. The group says it plans on protesting at the offices of all the presidential candidates, including President Obama.

The best NBA player of all time is ready to lace up his shoes again—and get married. Michael Jordan is engaged to his girlfriend of three years, Cuban-American model Yvette Prieto. Jordan, now the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats, got engaged to the 32-year-old over the holiday weekend. Interestingly, he proposed to her on the five-year anniversary of the announcement of his divorce to his previous wife Juanita. It’s unclear whether songs from the Space Jam soundtrack will be played at the wedding.

People’s sexiest man alive is apparently off the market. Bradley Cooper is “totally dating” Avatar star Zoë Saldana, according to E! News, and the couple is reportedly starting to tell their friends and family. Saldana and Cooper star together in the upcoming film The Words. She broke up with her boyfriend of 11 years in November; Cooper dated Renée Zellweger for more than a year but split in March.

Turkey killed at least 35 people in an air strike near a Kurdish village inside Iraq on Thursday. The reason for the strike was initially unclear, but the Turkish government later admitted that it had mistaken the group for rebel fighters. The strike apparently ignited several drums of diesel that the targets were carrying. (Fuel, along with cigarettes, is frequently smuggled between villages on the Iraqi border.) A pro-Kurdish party called the strike a "massacre" and said all the victims were under age 20.

Kim Jong-il may have already named his son Kim Jong-un successor to his regime, but the North Korean government has now made it official. Kim Jong-un was named “supreme leader” of the country’s ruling party, military, and citizens during a memorial for his late father. The young Kim wept as he walked alongside his father’s hearse through Pyongyang. The new leader, who is in his late 20s, is the vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the ruling Workers’ Party, and now adds Great Successor, Supreme Leader, and Sagacious Leader to his list of titles.

A new island emerged from volcanic debris in the Red Sea earlier this month—but scientists are still determining how long the island will stick around. According to news reports, fishermen reported on Dec. 19 that lava fountains reaching up to 90 feet were in the Red Sea, and scientists now believe that’s the day the island first sprang up. By Dec. 23, an island had appeared off the coast of Yemen. Volcanologist Erik Klemetti said that while he is surprised at “how quickly the island has grown,” people shouldn’t get too attached to it. “Many times the islands are ephemeral, as they are usually made of loose volcanic debris, so they get destroyed by wave action quite quickly,” Klemetti said.

Maybe the U.S. should reconsider allowing Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh here on a medical visa? According to The Wall Street Journal, some U.S. military leaders believe Yemen fed them bad intelligence last year in order to trick them into killing a local political leader who had fallen out with Saleh. The strike on May 25, 2010, killed six people, including Jabir Shabwani, the deputy governor of Yemen's central Mareb province. While the Yemeni government provided intelligence for the strike, it did not say that Shabwani would be present. “We think we got played,” says one official.

A reminder not to carry your gun across state lines: a woman visiting New York City from Tennessee was arrested Dec. 22 for bringing a gun to the 9/11 Memorial and asking police if she could check it. Meredith Graves, a 39-year-old medical student with a gun license in Tennessee, was carrying a .32-caliber pistol in her purse, which she didn’t think was a problem until she saw a “No guns allowed” sign. After asking police to check the weapon, she was arrested. She’s due in court on March 19 and is facing a charge of felony gun possession, which carries a minimum sentence of three and a half years.

Say it ain’t so! Several experts are questioning whether the chimpanzee who died in Florida this month actually starred in the 1930s Tarzan films and if he was even 80 years old. "You do understand that this chimpanzee could not possibly have been in these Tarzan films," says R. D. Rosen, who wrote a 2008 Washington Post article debunking claims that another chimpanzee was the original Cheeta in the films. "The idea that this Cheeta could have appeared in these films, had this long career, and now had this wonderful retirement is ridiculous." Steve Ross, the chimpanzee expert at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, says, “I’d paint myself skeptical in this case … To say 80 is really pushing it. In this record, there has never been a chimp that has lived that long.” The oldest chimp currently is in her early 70s.

NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne apologized Wednesday for a Twitter rant against public breastfeeding that ended with him calling a woman a “dumb bitch.” On Tuesday, Kahne tweeted that he saw “a mom breast feeding little kid” in a supermarket. Then he tweeted, “One boob put away one boob hanging!!! #nasty” and “I don’t feel like shopping anymore or eating.” When one woman tweeted at Kahne, calling him a “douchebag” and asking where he proposed the baby feed, he replied by calling the woman a “dumb bitch.” He later posted an apology on Facebook, saying, “My comments were not directed at the mother’s right to breastfeed. They were just a reaction to the location of that choice, and the fashion in which it was executed on that occasion. I respect the mother’s right to feed her child whenever and wherever she pleases.”

Michele Bachmann just lost one of her most high-profile advisers to none other than Ron Paul. Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson ditched the Minnesotan and jumped on the libertarian bandwagon, announcing at a Paul rally, “Tonight's a little tough for me; I've been serving as Michele Bachmann's state chair for the last year. And while Michele has fought tremendously for my conservative values, I believe we're at a turning point in this campaign. I believe that we have an opportunity to elect a conservative, someone who holds our values dear.” The two-timing aide had appeared with Bachmann at another event in Iowa just a few hours before he announced his loyalty to Paul. Bachmann, meanwhile, said that Sorenson said he was “selling out” after being offered a large sum of money.

There is a "very strange" bout of cancer affecting several South American leaders, and the U.S. may be responsible, at least according to Hugo Chávez. The Venezuelan president believes that his least favorite government to the north is using cancer as a political weapon. "It's very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America," he said in a speech to the military. "Would it be so strange that they've invented technology to spread cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as Paraguay's Fernando Lugo and, most recently, Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner have all been diagnosed with cancer. Chávez himself has an undisclosed type of cancer and has called for a regional summit of his fellow leaders who are currently suffering from or have battled cancer.

Mitt Romney must be pleased: a new CNN poll shows basically a two-man race in Iowa between Romney and Ron Paul, with Newt Gingrich collapsing to fourth place (and Rick Santorum surging to a surprising third). With just five days until the caucuses, Romney has begun training his sites on Paul, attacking him for his foreign-policy views: “One of the people running for president thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” he told a crowd Wednesday. “I don’t.” Paul, meanwhile, isn’t backing down from his provocative foreign-policy positions: “How long do we have to stay in Korea?” he asked a crowd Wednesday. “We were there since I was in high school.”

U.S. prosecutors are preparing to file the first criminal charges against BP employees for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, says The Wall Street Journal. While the specific targets are unknown, investigators are focusing on several Houston-based engineers and at least one of their supervisors. Prosecutors say these suspects provided false information to regulators about the risks of the oil well while it was still operating. Charges could be brought in early 2012.

With Ron Paul threatening an upset victory in Iowa, his New Hampshire critics are already on the attack. An editorial in the Manchester Union Leader, the influential daily whose endorsement of Newt Gingrich shook up the race in November, trashes Paul as a “dangerous man” who appeals only to the “lunatic fringe (see white supremacists, anti-Semites, truthers, etc.).” Paul has been polling toward the top tier in New Hampshire, but his momentum seems to be surging in Iowa—polls put him neck and neck with Mitt Romney, and his campaign just nabbed a high-profile defector from the Michele Bachmann camp.

Could Yahoo go to China? The Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba recently hired a Washington lobbying firm as it contemplates a bid for the former Internet heavyweight. Yahoo currently owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, but it's considering cutting that share, as well as its stake in Yahoo Japan. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has previously said he’s interested in owning all of Yahoo, but such a move would likely come under scrutiny from the U.S. government; hence the lobbying firm, which is headed by Kenneth Duberstein, President Reagan’s former chief of staff.

After sanctioning Bashar al-Assad’s regime and telling the Syrian leader to stop killing protesters, the Obama administration is preparing options for aiding the Syrian opposition directly. Two administration officials tell Foreign Policy that a small group of representatives from several agencies has convened to discuss extending humanitarian aid to the Syrian rebels and appointing a special coordinator to work with them. They also discussed establishing a humanitarian corridor along the Turkish border, but that would require establishing a no-fly zone, which the officials say is extremely unlikely. Meanwhile, Syrian security forces have killed at least 11 protesters as the Arab League monitoring team continues its visit. 

Afghan police rescued a 15-year-old girl from her husband’s basement, where she had been imprisoned and tortured for several months. Police say Sahar Gul had her nails and hair pulled out, and chunks of flesh cut out with pliers. The girl was married to a 30-year-old man seven months ago, when she was 14 years old. Her parents called the police after they’d been unable to contact her for several months. Police arrested Gul’s in-laws, who she says participated in her torture, but her husband had already fled.

Two people were killed and more than 50 injured in a 40-car pileup on Interstate 10 in New Orleans on Thursday. Twenty-two people were transferred to hospitals with critical to minor injuries, while another 37 people reportedly refused treatment, New Orleans police said. The accident started around 4:30 a.m. in the westbound land of the interstate, and the cause of the pileup remains uncertain. Both the eastbound and westbound lanes of the interstate were closed, and police did not say when it would be reopened.

The U.S. will sell Saudi Arabia $30 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets, the Obama administration said Thursday. The deal comes on the heels of rising tensions with Iran, and is considered essential in strengthening the U.S.’s military relationship with Saudi Arabia. The deal also calls for the production of 84 new aircraft, and the modernization of 70 current aircraft along with “munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics,” according to White House spokesman Josh Earnest. The White House says the deal will help create 50,000 jobs.