European leaders agreed on a permanent rescue fund for the euro zone Monday as they met in Brussels to finalize a comprehensive compact to deal with the continent’s sovereign-debt crisis. Leaders of 25 nations agreed to the deal, but the U.K. abstained once again. But some differences still need to be worked out. The summit declaration is also expected to be overshadowed by the negotiations in Greece, where a deal between the government and the private sector to write off half the debt still needs to be reached in order for the country to avoid default. Europe's stocks fell on the news.

So much for Florida, Newt. The New York Times predicts that Romney has a 97 percent chance of winning the state. In today's poll, Romney leads Gingrich in votes by a projected 15 percent. Meanwhile, CNN reports that the Gingrich campaign is “strongly suggesting” it will cede Michigan and Nevada to Mitt Romney. Spokesman R.C. Hammond lowered expectations for the large battles, saying it will be difficult for the former speaker to win those states. Romney won both Nevada and Michigan in 2008. Instead, the campaign is preparing for March, and the Southern states—Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi—that will award a “huge delegate treasure chest.”

President Obama would like to use the Google+ hangout to set the record straight: drones are not bad! On Monday, the president fielded questions in a video chat with Americans. Obama called a recent New York Times piece about surveillance drones in Iraq “overwritten,” and said that drones have not caused an unusual number of civilian casualties since they are a “targeted, focused effort.” The president added that the drone force was kept on a really “tight leash.”

Congress has finally decided to do something about its dismal approval ratings. A 93–2 procedural vote on Monday cleared the way for the Senate to pass a ban on congressional insider trading later in the week. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act requires disclosure of stock transactions within 30 days and prevents members of Congress from initiating trades based on nonpublic information. The bill is technically symbolic, because lawmakers are already subject to the same laws as other investors who use nonpublic information to make money, but no one in Congress has been charged with insider trading in recent memory. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid explained that the bill “will clear up any perception that it’s acceptable for members of Congress to profit from insider trading.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday that she will support a United Nations resolution to push for a transfer of power in Syria. A meeting on the resolution, backed by Britain and France, will begin Tuesday in New York. Russia said Monday that the Syrian government is ready to talk to opposition fighters, but talks appeared to have failed while fighting raged in the capital city, Damascus, and in the outlying suburbs. Russia has resisted pressure from Western nations to back U.N.-imposed sanctions on Syria. Syrian forces on Monday raided the Damascus suburbs that have been under the control of opposition fighters. Around 2,000 troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, aided by 50 tanks and armored vehicles, entered the opposition-controlled neighborhoods at dawn. Activists say government forces killed at least 19 people. “It's urban war,” one activist told Reuters. “There are bodies in the street.”

In Washington, D.C., protesters had till noon today to evict their site. That deadline, however, has passed as several protesters refused to leave their home, which was a big blue tarp called the "tent of dreams." While some people have left peacefully, others vow to stay. Police say that so far no one has been arrested. One protesters was shocked with a Taser and arrested yesterday.Twelve people were arrested Sunday in New York in a march meant to show solidarity with Occupy Oakland, which turned violent Sunday when protesters stormed city hall. The group had announced an intention to occupy a vacant convention center as their new headquarters, but when police blocked the move they marched on city hall. Some protesters threw rocks, bottles, and flares at police, and stormed the line with large shields made from corrugated metal. Inside city hall, they smashed display cases and broke windows.

Newt Gingrich is getting nasty in the countdown to the Florida primary, accusing President Obama of promoting antireligious policies, like his requirement that most health insurers cover contraception, including those of religious employers. At campaign rallies in Pensacola and Ft. Myers, Gingrich slammed Obama for waging a “war against Christianity” with his new birth-control regulation, vowing to repeal each and every “Obama attack on religion” if elected to office. He also found a way to drag Mitt Romney into the war, saying that the former governor of Massachusetts imposed a similar requirement on Catholic hospitals. He added that the governor cut off kosher meals for elderly Jewish nursing-home patients to save $5 a day, though Romney’s camp said the spending cut was made during a fiscal crisis and that the money was later restored.

Warning for international travelers who watch Family Guy and are planning to party in L.A.: be careful what you tweet. Two British tourists were detained in Los Angeles International Airport last Monday after tweeting that they were going to “destroy America” and “dig up Marilyn Monroe.” The two spent 12 hours in separate cells—with “drug dealers”—before being sent home. The official excuse: “destroy” is British slang for “party,” and the Monroe quote is from the television show Family Guy. Whoops.

The spread of Burmese pythons in Florida’s Everglades has spelled bad news for raccoons, rabbits, and other mammals, leading to a decline of 90 percent or more in sightings of some creatures. The invasive species of snake was brought to Florida as an exotic pet, but in the wetlands the pythons have thrived without fear of predators. Though the government has indicated that it may ban the importation of Burmese pythons, this newest study, which looked at data on mammal populations collected between 2003 and 2011, found that the snakes may have already had a profound impact on the Everglades’ subtropical ecosystem.

Bloggers are stripping down in a show of support for Golshifteh Farahani, an actress who’s reportedly been barred from returning to her home country of Iran. The 28-year-old actress, who starred in the 2008 film Body of Lies, was reportedly exiled because she appeared topless and with her hands over her breasts in a photo for Madame le Figaro, a French magazine. Now her fans have taken to posting their own nude portraits on the Internet. Farahani has said her decision to pose for the magazine photo was in protest of restrictions on how Iranian women are allowed to appear in public.

Fox’s The X Factor will have some personnel changes for its second season, the network announced Monday. Judges Paula Abdul and Nicole Scherzinger, and Steve Jones, who was the British import’s host, will not return. “I can’t complain as I’ve had a great time,” Jones posted on Twitter after the news broke. “Good luck to everyone on the show.” The X Factor was brought to America by Simon Cowell, the producer who is best known to American television watchers for his work as a splenetic American Idol judge. No announcements have been made about who might fill the two openings when the singing competition returns to Fox in the fall.

Academy Award winner Shirley MacLaine will join the cast of Downton Abbey for its third season, which is set to premiere on ITV in the U.K. this fall and will air on PBS's Masterpiece Classic early next year. When shooting on the period drama, created by Julian Fellowes, resumes next month, MacLaine (Terms of Endearment) will join the cast of the multiple Emmy and Golden Globe winner, where she will play a new character, Martha Levinson, the mother of American-born Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern). "My late grandfather directed Shirley MacLaine in Gambit in 1966, so it is a delight for me that she will be joining us on Downton Abbey," said executive producer Gareth Neame in an official statement. In the U.S., Downton Abbey's second season, which is up 30 percent in the ratings, is slated to wrap its run on Feb. 19.

Sudanese officials claimed Monday that the military had rescued 14 of 29 Chinese nationals who had been kidnapped by rebels in the south. The Army announced that the road workers, seized in South Kordofan province Saturday, had been “liberated.” But Chinese Embassy officials seemed to doubt the reports that they were freed, saying that all the workers were still missing. The Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North had said that the workers were caught in the crossfire in a battle between them and the Army. But Wang Zhiping, a senior executive at the Power Construction Corp., which employed the workers, said the rebels had attacked them at their compound.

It’s been leaked! Julian Assange will play himself in the 500th episode of The Simpsons, according to Entertainment Weekly. The episode will air Feb. 19. It’s quite a feat: the reclusive Assange, who had to evade authorities while he ran WikiLeaks, is actually under house arrest in England as he fights extradition to Sweden over sexual-assault allegations. Assange reportedly recorded his lines in an undisclosed location. But if the Simpsons team could get Thomas Pynchon on the show, nothing is beyond their superpowers.

Bueller? Bueller? Oh, here he is, back in a … car commercial. A version of the ad that plays off Ferris Bueller’s Day Off can be seen during the Super Bowl this Sunday, but a full-length, two-and-a-half-minute cut was released Monday, and you can watch it here. This time Matthew Broderick plays himself and, of course, fakes being sick. In the original, he hits the town (Chicago) in a 1961 Ferrari 250 GT California. This time, perhaps amid an economic slowdown, he drives around Los Angeles in a Honda CRV. All the spinoffs of memorable lines are here, including Ben Stein’s monotone roll call, replaced by a valet saying, “Broderick? Broderick?” Instead of the Art Institute of Chicago, Broderick has a moment with a walrus at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Instead of “Twist and Shout” and “Danke Schoen,” he sings a Chinese New Year song at a Chinatown parade. The commercial was made by director Todd Phillips and the Santa Monica ad agency RPA. They probably couldn’t get the rights to the original John Hughes classic, but they didn’t have to mention Bueller once to pay homage to the '80s.

The Oscars are getting closer. At the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards Sunday, The Help took home top honors for acting by an ensemble cast, Viola Davis won for best actress for The Help, and Jean Dujardin won best actor for The Artist. Octavia Spencer won yet another best supporting actress award for her role in The Help, while Christopher Plummer won best supporting actor for his work in Beginners. Modern Family took home the award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series. Alec Baldwin won for best actor in a comedy series. Kate Winslet won for actress in a TV movie for her role in Mildred Pierce. Mary Tyler Moore is set to receive the 2012 Life Achievement Award, and Dick Van Dyke will present it to her.

Five large U.S. banks have more than $80 billion of exposure in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece—money the banks could lose if those countries default because of the European financial crisis. Fortunately, they have made use of credit-default swaps, a type of financial insurance, which have allowed the five banks to offset their potential losses by $30 billion. Citigroup has 47 percent of its exposure potentially protected—the highest percentage of any U.S. bank—while Bank of America purchased protection for just 12 percent. A Bank of America spokesperson said, “We carefully manage our risk while still supporting our clients in Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain.”

The small fleet of U.S. surveillance drones in Iraq to help protect embassies and consulates is provoking outrage among senior Iraqi officials. In a statement, the State department confirmed the continued presence of its small drones, saying, “The department does have a UAV program. The UAVs being utilized by the State Department are not armed, nor are they capable of being armed.” But top Iraqi officials said they had never been consulted about the program. Acting minister of the interior, Adnan al-Asadi, said, “Our sky is our sky, not the USA’s sky.” The State department is reportedly considering using unarmed surveillance drones in “high-threat” countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan in the future.

The Food and Drug Administration intercepted the private emails of nine employees and took screenshots of their desktops after the scientists raised concerns that the FDA was improperly approving dangerous cancer devices. In a suit filed this week, the scientists say they were then fired or harassed until they left. The scientists wrote a letter to President Obama's transition team in 2009, and also to Congress, alleging corruption in the FDA. The letter got some media attention, and the maker of one of the dubious devices complained to the FDA that business secrets had been revealed. Shortly afterward, court documents show, the FDA started monitoring their computer activity, and soon after that the scientists were pushed out. It's not clear whether the monitoring itself is illegal, because FDA computers show a warning when users log on, saying they should have “no reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Officials have been unable to locate $1.2 billion in missing customer money in the three months since MF Global filed for bankruptcy. $6 billion was kept at MF Global before its collapse and about $5.3 billion of that money has been found. But additional customer money may be lost in litigation with other branches of MF Global, which accounts for the higher figure. Authorities now say that it is unlikely that the missing money will ever be recovered. A person involved with the investigation said it is possible that a “significant amount” of money “vaporized” in the week leading up to the collapse. While one customer said, “I’m trying to be optimistic, but as it drags on longer, you become leery.”

Mitt Romney may be giving into NBC's request that he remove an ad that uses footage of the network's nightly news program. The candidate said he might consider removing the ad, which features anchor Tom Brokaw announcing, in 1997, that the House Ethics Committee would punish Speaker Newt Gingrich for ethics violations. But, he insisted on NBC's Today show, "Obviously this was not something taken from hidden files. This was on the evening news. So it should hardly come as a revealing piece for people who watch it." Brokaw has said that the ad made him "extremely uncomfortable" and that "I do not want my role as a journalist compromised for political gain by any campaign." 

Who would want to go on a cruise now anyway? The Costa Concordia shipwreck is expected to cost parent company Carnival Corp. between $155 million and $175 million in income, according to company officials. The disaster, which killed 17 when the ill-fated ship ran aground near Tuscany on Jan. 13, has decreased demand for the company. Carnival slashed its marketing activities in the wake of the tragedy, but believes the incident “will not have a significant long-term impact” on its business.

In a sign that the relationship between the United States and Egypt continues to worsen, the American Embassy in Cairo took the unusual step of opening its doors to U.S. citizens working for nongovernmental organizations. The embassy is offering U.S. workers shelter from a crackdown by Egypt's military rulers on pro-democracy groups. Last week, Sam LaHood, son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and director of International Republican Institute’s program in Egypt, was barred from boarding an international flight in Cairo.

With one day before the Florida primary, Mitt Romney is rapidly putting distance between himself and Newt in the polls. A Reuters poll on Sunday showed Romney with a 12 point lead over Gingrich in the state, while three other polls show Romney ahead by 11 to 15 points. Gingrich continues to slam Romney at campaign stops, calling him a pro-abortion, pro-gun control, pro-tax increase moderate from Massachusetts,” but Romney is reportedly outspending Gingrich 5-to-1 in television ads, according to data a Democratic source showed Talking Points Memo. Meanwhile, Gov. Jeb Bush is standing on the sidelines, despite Romney aggressively courting him for an endorsement.

First it was the iPhone, now it's the e-book. Jonathan Franzen, the author of Freedom and The Corrections, launched a passionate defense of the printed book—and an attack on e-books—at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. “The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it, and it would still work! So it's pretty good technology,” said Franzen. “And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.” Wondering whether nonelectronic print will be around in 50 years, he said he fears that “it’s going to be very hard to make the world work if there’s no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government.”

Iran has reportedly offered to allow United Nations nuclear inspectors to extend their three-day visit to the country beyond Tuesday, as Tehran seems to be trying to lower tensions with the West. Foreign Minister Ali Akba Salehi apparently said during a visit to Ethiopia that “we’ve always tried to put transparency as a principle” and that “the delegation has questions and the necessary answers will be given,” although European officials have said that Iran is making efforts to buy time while continuing to enrich uranium. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency landed in Iran over the weekend and are expected to visit an underground enrichment site in a bunker near Qum.

The Material Girl may be on the other side of 50, but that doesn’t mean she won’t invoke the ultimate teenager outfit: the cheerleading uniform. Madonna will preview her new video on American Idol on Thursday, followed by a full-on release on Friday. Early snippets of the video, “Give Me All Your Luvin’,” revealed that Madonna, who has pushed the fashion envelope throughout her career, is wearing all black leather, while Nicki Minaj and M.I.A sport red and black cheerleader uniforms. Shot in December, the highly anticipated video has already received a lot of press thanks to Minaj's tweeting about a kiss she shared with Madonna on set.

The venture-capital wing of Bain Capital announced Monday that it had raised $600 million for a new fund—its largest to date. Bain Capital Ventures had previously raised a total of $1.48 billion, meaning the new capital will make up about 15 percent of the firm. With its new fund, Bain Capital Ventures, a LinkedIn investor, plans to use its traditional strategy of making investment in enterprise technology, e-commerce, and health care. Monday’s announcement comes around the same time that other Silicon Valley venture-capital firms are bulking up their funds, with several having raised more than half a billion dollars in the past year alone.

Saying his 3-year-old daughter Isabella had a “miraculous turnaround,” Rick Santorum pledged to return to the campaign trail Monday. Santorum had cleared his Sunday schedule to be with his daughter, who suffers from the genetic disorder Trisomy 18 and who was diagnosed as having pneumonia in both her lungs. “She went through a very tough time in the past 48 hours and this afternoon, she really made a remarkable turn,” Santorum said Sunday night in a televised Town Hall. Santorum will be skipping over Florida and instead heading over to Missouri, Minnesota, Colorado and Nevada, all of which will hold caucuses at the beginning of February. He said Isabella will remain hospitalized in intensive care, but doctors are encouraged by her improvement.

Users who put data on the site Megaupload could see their work deleted as soon as Thursday, U.S. prosecutors say. A U.S. Attorney’s office in Virginia has sent a letter to two storage companies, saying they may begin clearing the files this week, after federal prosecutors retrieved the data that they needed. The feds shut down the site and charged seven men, including founder Kim Dotcom, saying they profited from millions of illegal downloads of movies, music and other content. Megaupload’s attorney is working with prosecutors to try to keep the data from being erased.

With one day left before the Florida primary, Newt Gingrich is clearly pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to win over two of the state's key demographics. Gingrich attempted to appeal to Jewish voters Monday, noting a report that surfaced over the weekend about Mitt Romney vetoing an initiative to fund kosher meals for poor Jewish residents in nursing homes. The New York Post reported, however, that those funds were eventually allocated for kosher meals. Gingrich's newest TV ad panders to Florida's many Cuban voters by insisting (in both English and Spanish) that President Obama is putting the country on track to become a socialist or communist country. The Spanish version leaves nothing to the imagination. It features a woman saying, "My family came to this country looking for liberty and a dream. But now the United States is resembling the government they fled."

East Haven, Conn., Police Chief Leonard Gallo held on to his job for a while, but a federal investigation into allegations that four officers from his department engaged in racial profiling finally claimed his career. Gallo, who had been chief for 14 years, announced his retirement Monday through his lawyer. The FBI is investigating whether a handful of Gallo’s subordinates harassed Latino residents. All four have pleaded not guilty to charges of obstruction of justice and deprivation of rights, but Gallo felt it would be best for the community if he stepped down. His attorney maintains that Gallo is not guilty of any wrongdoing and that the department did not condone racial profiling. Gallo was suspended in April 2010 after the FBI launched the investigation but was reinstated in November of that year after his friend won the mayor’s office.

Starbucks Corp. announced Monday that it plans to open its first coffee shops in India by August or September, a year ahead of schedule. The company plans to have 50 cafes open in India by the end of the year through a tie-in with the Tata group, India’s largest business house. The tie-in will allow cafes to open in Tata hotels and retail outlets—a victory for Starbucks, since its original plan to open cafes by the end of 2011 had to be delayed due to difficulty in finding real estate. The first Starbucks will open in Mumbai and New Delhi. Although India is frequently associated with tea drinkers, cafes have been growing steadily in the past couple of years, with local coffee company Café Coffee Day having more than 1,200 locations in the country.

Newt Gingrich may have called Mitt Romney a big liar, but Gingrich would still vote for him if he won the Republican nomination. Despite having lobbed continuous attacks against his opponent in the presidential primary, Gingrich admits he'd rather have Romney in the White House than President Obama. The former speaker gave a somewhat backhanded explanation of his potential endorsement on ABC's Good Morning America on Monday. "I think reelecting Obama is a disaster and I'll certainly endorse the Republican nominee. But I think that Mitt Romney will have a very, very hard time differentiating himself [from Obama]," he said.