The conditions in Syria continue to devolve as at least 100 people were killed across the country Wednesday, despite a United Nations-ordered ceasefire. The fresh violence prompted Alain Juppé, France’s foreign minister, to demand the U.N. Security Council consider military action if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime doesn’t stop attacking its citizens. Juppé also said that U.N. monitors must be in place in two weeks instead of three months. If the situation isn’t resolved by May 5, France will take further action, but he didn’t say what such action would look like.

The economic forecast is grim and unemployment rates are skyrocketing, but Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has stressed that the Fed is “entirely prepared to take additional balance sheet actions” if economic recovery is in danger. In other news, stocks surged to record heights for 2012. For now, the Federal Reserve Market Committee has decided not to continue efforts to spur growth, with Bernanke arguing that it would be “unwise” to risk boosting inflation rate with further action. The FOMC announced on Wednesday that it will conclude its latest effort to spur growth in June and will wait to see whether the economy picks up steam, though it acknowledged that it will likely weaken further before it gains strength.

Ousted Chinese Politburo member Bo Xilai has been linked to the wiretapping of fellow Chinese politicians, including President Hu Jintao, leading to an investigation by the government and his subsequent removal from office. Until recently, the story of Bo has been one of a Communist Party official who was ousted because he pushed too hard for populist reforms (with a curious twist of his wife being suspected of murdering a British businessman). The wiretapping accusations were left out of the public account of Bo’s removal from office. Bo's brother resigned as an executive from the corporation Everbright on Wednesday while his son penned a letter defending his lifestyle.

It’s on. Now that Mitt Romney has cleared all challengers in the GOP presidential primary, President Obama has scheduled his first campaign rallies. On May 5, he and the first lady will visit Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Va. The president has already been traveling quite a bit recently, pushing his plan to help students with college-loan debt—making campaign-like stops along the way. At an event in North Carolina this week, Obama told attendees that he’s been in their shoes. "I just want everybody here to understand," the president said,  "I didn't just read about this."

Andrew Young offered scathing testimony Wednesday against his former boss John Edwards and orders keep his mistress hidden. Saying it was described as “the most important job on the campaign,” Young explained that he and his wife were told to keep Rielle Hunter from the press and details about how they traveled the U.S. with her and paid for everything with checks marked as payments for furniture. Young said that they kept her hidden even after Edwards left the race, because he wanted a shot at the vice presidency. Young was instructed to keep her hidden “until the Democratic National Convention.”

What a difference a couple of months makes. When Texas Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in January, he threw his support to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Now that Gingrich is preparing to abandon his campaign, Perry has endorsed Mitt Romney for president. “Mitt Romney has earned the Republican presidential nomination through hard work, a strong organization, and a disciplined message of restoring America,” Perry said in a statement Wednesday.

Even though many Israeli leaders believe Iran is racing towards building a nuclear bomb, Israel’s top military man is saying he doesn’t believe the regime in Tehran will choose to go down that path. Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said Wednesday that international sanctions are working and they could relieve some pressure on the Obama administration. His comments were in sharp contrast to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who have repeatedly said diplomacy will not stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons.

Supreme Court justices seemed broadly sympathetic to an Arizona immigration law that entered oral arguments before the high court Wednesday. The controversial law essentially authorizes ethnic profiling by police who suspect illegal immigration. The same two lawyers who argued last month’s Obamacare hearing represented the two sides, and several justices asked why states would not have the right to enact a law like Arizona’s.

A 4-year-old girl who had to undergo a pat-down at a Kansas airport last week became hysterical after agents yelled at her and called her an uncooperative suspect, the girl’s grandmother said Wednesday. The Transportation Security Administration defended its actions as the incident has garnered media attention, saying that it had explained to the family why the additional security measures were needed and that the agents did not believe or suggest that the child was carrying a firearm. Prior to the incident, new procedures were put in place to reduce pat-downs of children. “They yelled, ‘We are going to shut down the airport if you don’t grab her,’” the girl’s grandmother said of the agents when the child tried to run from them.


Kim Kardashian makes every VIP list in Los Angeles and New York, and now, it seems, Washington, D.C., as well. The reality star will attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner this year, as one of the many celebrities invited by Fox News. She will be joined by her mother, Kris Jenner, Real Housewives of New Jersey stars Caroline and Al Manzo, and Gossip Girl''s Chace Crawford. Kardashian had gone to the dinner last year as a guest of Greta Van Susteren. This year, however, Van Susteren will be joined instead by actress Lindsay Lohan. Trading up, Greta!

The Daily Beast has learned exclusively that Sandra Fluke, the law student made famous by Rush Limbaugh calling her a “slut” on his radio show earlier this year, is engaged. Fluke’s fiancé is Adam Mutterperl, a Los Angeles-based comedy writer and producer. Many conservative commentators have noted that Mutterperl’s father is William Mutterperl, a major donor to the Democratic Party.  Limbaugh, meanwhile, mentioned Fluke again on his show again Tuesday, accusing Fluke of “coordinating” with President Obama to “scare students about the interest rates on their loans.” Fluke and Mutterperl told The Daily Beast exclusively that, "having dated for over eight years, we're just excited that our friends and family were kind enough to pretend to be surprised at our engagement. We're really looking forward to spending the next eight years planning our wedding." They plan to settle in Los Angeles after Fluke finishes at Georgetown Law School.

It’s a lot for a 24-year-old to handle. Harvard University student Bo Guagua, son of China’s Bo Xilai and Gu Kailai, said that he was “deeply concerned” about the murder scandal that’s embroiled his family—and defended his alleged “party boy” lifestyle. Guagua sent his first statement since headlines broke to the Harvard Crimson. He says he never drove a Ferrari and never used his famous name to make money. Guagua is currently in an undisclosed location, having gone into hiding shortly after his father was booted from the Central Committee and Politburo and his mother was arrested.

The so-called Fox Mole, Joe Muto, tweeted Wednesday that his laptop has been seized by a “polite” crew from the New York district attorney’s office. Muto tweeted that officers took his iPhone, laptop, and some old notebooks as part of a grand-larceny investigation, according to the warrant. Muto famously wrote about Fox News as the “Fox Mole” for Gawker until being outed and fired, but has written some posts since then. Muto posted unaired Fox footage, which Gawker publisher Nick Denton reportedly paid $5,000 for—five times the minimum for grand larceny.

People magazine named Beyoncé their Most Beautiful Woman in the World, just a few months after the birth of her daughter, Blue Ivy. “I feel more beautiful than I’ve ever felt because I’ve given birth,” Beyoncé said. “I have never felt so connected, never felt like I had such a purpose on this earth.” She added that she “loves” changing diapers. Beyoncé is already back to her prebaby weight and is getting ready for her first postpregnancy concert, which will take place Memorial Day weekend in Atlantic City, N.J.

The U.N. peace mission in Syria isn’t exactly working, if recent reports are to be believed. More violence flared in Damascus, as the regime seems to have relaunced assaults on opposition areas—especially after monitors leave. Meanwhile, the U.N.’s Kofi Annan pushed for a quick deployment of the 300 monitors outlined in the latest resolution. Some residents have reported that  they are not able to tell monitors what’s really going on, out of fear of reprisals.

Metta World Peace, the Los Angeles Lakers forward formerly known as Ron Artest, will miss the next seven games after he threw a bruising elbow in a game Sunday night. NBA Commissioner David Stern handed out the punishment Tuesday, which will put World Peace off the court through the end of the regular season—which has just one game remaining. World Peace’s hard foul came while he was celebrating a dunk in a game against the Oklahoma Thunder. James Harden, who was fouled, wound up with a concussion. The suspension means World Peace will miss the first six games of the playoffs. In 2004, he was suspended for 86 games for fighting fans.

Reince Priebus has made it official with Mitt Romney. The Republican National Committee chair said Wednesday that the party will put all of its resources behind Romney as the presumptive Republican nominee for president. The move comes less than 24 hours after Romney swept five major primaries on Tuesday, including the delegate-rich Pennsylvania and New York, as well as the battleground state of Delaware. So far this year the RNC has raised $35.5 million, and finished March with $32.7 million in the bank and $9.9 million in debt.

The $1.6 billion that went missing from the brokerage firm MF Global last year was said to be located on Tuesday, though the investigator looking into the case said it would be difficult to return the money to the firm’s clients. A trustee told the Senate Banking Committee that the money that went mysteriously missing was traced, but it would be difficult to determine where the blame lays on how it was misappropriated and how to recover it. The financial disaster in 2011 sparked panic in European markets and led to great public shame for former New Jersey governor Jon Corzine. It was discovered that the firm tapped clients’ money for separate ventures without replacing it over time.

Five states held primaries on Tuesday and Mitt Romney won all five of them, taking victories in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, and the decisive Delaware. Romney essentially claimed the GOP nomination in a speech delivered in New Hampshire beside his wife Ann. “After 43 primaries and caucuses, many long days and not a few long nights, I can say with confidence–and gratitude–that you have given me a great honor and solemn responsibility,” Romnye said. He added emphatically: “a better America begins tonight.” Rick Santorum has already left the race, and Newt Gingrich is expected to reassess his campaign on Wednesday after a demoralizing loss in Delaware.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Nope. It’s just a really, really slow and law-abiding tow truck leading a painfully slow-speed car chase. That’s what happened Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles, when a tow-truck driver got into a fight with police officers at the scene of an accident. The driver jumped in the truck and the chase began, but it was what no one expected. Much to the amusement of car-chase watchers on TV and the side of L.A.’s roads, the driver obeyed traffic laws, stopping at stoplights and mostly keeping to the speed limit. Several LAPD cruisers and helicopters followed the truck, which evaded spike strips twice. The chase wound through the San Fernando Valley, Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Hollywood, and Los Feliz. The driver later told reporters the cops were trying to give him a ticket for no reason.

Adam Smith, special adviser to U.K. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, has resigned over advice he gave to News Corp. executives while the company tried to take over BSkyB. Hunt was charged with overseeing News Corp.’s bid in a “quasi-judicial role.” The emails between the secretary’s office and the News Corp. lobbyist often referred to the lobbyist’s having spoken with “JH,” but the lobbyist says “JH” simply referred to contacts in the secretary’s office, usually Adam Smith. Smith says he resigned because he created the perception that News Corp. had  “too close a relationship” with the culture department.

Hospitals in Minnesota—and possibly across the country—have reached a new low in their debt-collection practices by employing collectors in emergency rooms and elsewhere to badger patients into paying up. The Minnesota attorney general revealed that Accretive Health, one of the nation's largest collectors of medical debt, regularly embedded debt collectors among hospital employees. The collectors, who looked like regular employees and sometimes had access to patients’ medical files, would demand payment before patients received treatment and sometimes discouraged them from getting emergency care at all.

Rick Santorum did a fine job of dodging host Piers Morgan’s questions on Tuesday night, the most common among them: will you be endorsing Mitt Romney for president? Santorum and his wife, Karen, did their best to dance around the questioning, acknowledging that Romney will likely be the nominee after his five-state sweep. “I'm going to be for the Republican nominee,” Santorum told Morgan plainly. “We're going to do what we can to beat Barack Obama." Santorum and Romney are tentatively scheduled to meet on May 4 to discuss conservative issues that the former Pennsylvania senator wants Romney to keep on his agenda.

First the son, now the father. It’s Rupert Murdoch’s turn before the Leveson Inquiry on media ethics, where he’s being questioned about his use of political clout. Murdoch denied asking for or being offered favors by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher when they had lunch in 1981, before he took over the Times newspapers, saying, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything.” Asked whether he wanted to show Thatcher he had the will to crush the unions at the paper, he said, “I didn’t have the will to crush the unions. I might have had the desire, but that took several years.” Murdoch also said that his tweets shouldn’t be taken seriously.

Of the dozen Secret Service members implicated in the Colombian prostitution scandal, three appear to have survived. The Secret Service announced yesterday that three employees would remain, six have resigned, two have been dismissed, and one has retired. But the inquiry is revealing a more complicated story than it initially seemed. While some Secret Service members knowingly took prostitutes back to their rooms, officials tell The New York Times that one officer wasn't aware the woman was a prostitute, and told her to leave when he found out. Another took home a woman who wasn't a prostitute at all. One official says Secret Service rules for misconduct are “kind of vague” when it comes to picking up women in a foreign country. “They said they would have to get back to us on that, and they haven’t.”

The Marines are beginning to integrate women into combat operations, following a new Pentagon policy released in February. The Marines are opening up ground combat battalions once closed to women, and allowing women to attend the infantry-officer school in Quantico, Va. Women still can't serve as infantrymen or Special Operations commandos, but they will be able to work in administration, logistics, communications, and motor transport at the battalion level, a step closer to combat than they were previously allowed to work.

Bradley Manning won’t go free just yet. During a pretrial hearing on Wednesday, a military judge refused to throw out charges against Manning, whose lawyers had sought dismissal on the notion that prosecutors had been slow to provide crucial materials to the defense. Prosecutors countered that they needed time to obtain documents from civilian agencies and comb through them for relevant material. Manning, who is accused of the largest intelligence breach in U.S. history by releasing classified information to WikiLeaks, has been in pretrial confinement since he was charged in 2009.

Soon Google will be able to send you ads as you drive too. Google is talking to major auto-insurance firms about possibly putting its driverless-car technology into upcoming vehicles, and it announced Wednesday that they had successfully completed more than 200,000 miles of “computer-led driving” and that the response from insurance companies has been positive. “They see the opportunities for this technology being really positive," said the program’s project manager. "From their point of view, this technology is not going to be released until it’s safe.” He also said that he thinks the technology could be available to the general public in less than 10 years.

British police said Wednesday they want to reopen the Madeleine McCann case, since new evidence indicates the missing girl may still be alive. McCann, whose ninth birthday is May 12, disappeared when she was 4 years old while her family vacationed in Portugal in May 2007. Since then the case has captivated Britain, and Scotland Yard said that, after sifting through a yearlong Portuguese investigation that netted 40,000 pieces of material, they believe she is still alive. Police also issued a photo of how they believe she would look as a 9-year-old.

President Obama’s next trip to NYC will include a Ricky Martin-hosted event put on by the LGBT Leadership Council, Obama for America and the Futuro Fund. The party, to take place at the Rubin Museum of Art, will try to court two key constituencies the President’s re-election campaign: gays and Latinos and will cost between $5,000 and $35,800 to attend.

Six teenagers in the Los Angeles area have been hospitalized over the past few months after drinking hand sanitizer to get drunk, sometimes using salt to separate the alcohol from the liquid. Doctors are warning that it could signal a new trend, and that ingesting hand sanitizer is extremely dangerous. The liquid is 62 percent ethyl alcohol, the equivalent of a 120-proof liquor. Over-the-counter products have been used as alcohol before, but doctors around Los Angeles said there were no hospitalizations last year.

A Delta Airlines flight from New York to Memphis was delayed Wednesday after a 30-pound Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy escaped its corral and bounded onto the runway at LaGuardia Airport. The dog bolted while it was being loaded onto the plane, and was coaxed back onto the plane after about 10 minutes. The flight departed after a short delay.

In a lively day of testimony before Parliament, Rupert Murdoch said Wednesday he “didn’t believe” in using hacking, calling it “a lazy way of reporters not doing their job.” “We are not perfect, I’m not saying that we are, but we are nothing compared to what you see on the Internet every day,” Murdoch said. Questions mainly focused on Murdoch’s influence over elected officials, but the News Corp. chairman insisted he never got special treatment because of his power—and he said he has never asked for any favors.

Mitt Romney’s five-way win Tuesday made Newt Gingrich realize something: “It’s pretty clear Governor Romney is going to be the nominee. I think you have to at some point be honest with what’s happening in the real world, as opposed to what you’d like to have happen,” he said. But then he said he’s going to continue his campaign in North Carolina—“as a citizen.” What does this all mean? Is he out or isn’t he? According to CNN, senior aides have said Gingrich will officially drop out next Tuesday, but the man himself has confirmed nothing. Update: A National Journal reporter has tweeted that Newt has pushed back his dropout date from next Tuesday to "later in the week." Gingrich's campaign chair also said that the candidate spoke to Mitt Romney today.

It’s official. Sgt. Gary Stein, who took to Facebook to criticize President Obama, question the president’s birth certificate and call him a liar, will be discharged from the Marine Corps. Stein received an “other-than-honorable” discharge Wednesday, which is given to service members who commit a serious offense, because he violated Defense Department regulations that prohibit political conduct. Stein served nine years in the Marines, and said in a statement on his Facebook page that “even though I will be discharged no one can take the title of Marine away from me.”