BOSTON (AP) — Mitt Romney faulted President Barack Obama’s original push to require church-affiliated employers to pay for birth control as an “assault on religion,” but as Massachusetts governor, Romney was largely silent about a state law that required virtually the same contraceptive coverage. The Massachusetts law, which essentially mirrored Obama’s proposal, was signed by Romney’s predecessor in 2002, the year before he took office. Romney did not seek its repeal. Despite his silence on the state law, as a... Read more

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not like he wasn’t warned. As President Barack Obama considered a decision on birth control that would turn into an unexpected political nightmare, he heard it from inside and outside his White House: He risked a fierce backlash if he required religious employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their beliefs. Over the course of months, Catholic groups and officials spoke with White House aides, sent letters and wrote opinion columns. Vice President... Read more

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s not like he wasn’t warned. As President Barack Obama considered a decision on birth control that would turn into an unexpected political nightmare, he heard it from inside and outside his White House: He risked a fierce backlash if he required religious employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their beliefs. Over the course of months, Catholic groups and officials spoke with White House aides, sent letters and wrote opinion columns. Vice President... Read more

BEIRUT (AP) — The tensions between the two neighborhoods were building for days in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. On one side live Sunni Muslims who hate the Syrian regime. On the hill above are members of the Alawite sect, Bashar Assad’s strongest backers. Overnight, the tempers exploded. For hours, gunmen in the two districts traded automatic weapons fire and volleys of rocket-propelled grenades across the avenue that divides them, ironically named Syria Street. By the time a shaky... Read more

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Money laundering at the Vatican bank. Corruption in the awarding of Vatican contracts. Even a purported plot to kill Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican is being besieged by near-daily leaks of confidential documents and tabloid-style reports of alleged financial mismanagement, political infighting and gossip about who might be the next pope — all coming out at an exceedingly delicate time for the Holy See and Benedict himself. The frescoed halls of the Apostolic Palace have been... Read more

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Lawyers for a man who was sexually abused decades ago by a priest at a Wisconsin school for the deaf have asked a court to dismiss their lawsuit naming Pope Benedict XVI and other top Vatican officials as defendants. Attorney Jeff Anderson had filed the lawsuit at the peak of a European explosion of the sex abuse scandal in 2010, alleging that the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and his deputies knew about allegations of sexual abuse... Read more

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s political shifting over contraception coverage has united conservative Republicans in protest even as they split over which GOP presidential hopeful should face him in the general election. The candidates themselves, campaigning for votes in the Conservative Political Action Conference’s straw poll Saturday, competed to present themselves as most opposed to Obama’s health care law. It includes a requirement that most religious-affiliated employers cover birth control costs regardless of their beliefs. On Friday, after three... Read more

WASHINGTON (AP) — What birth control debate? A half-century after the introduction of the pill, acceptance of birth control by American women is virtually universal. But that didn’t keep the Obama administration from landing in a political mess over a side issue to a new policy that will soon make contraceptives available free of charge as preventive care for women enrolled in workplace health plans. The big question: how the rules would apply to nonprofit institutions such as hospitals, colleges... Read more

BAGHDAD (AP) — A group of political dissidents created a new Iraqi opposition party Saturday, vowing to act as a check on the government as the prime minister warned that a push for regional autonomy could tear the country apart. About 45 activists announced the creation of the Union of Patriotic Figures and described it as a secular political group of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds from about 27 mostly minor Iraqi parties. “We will be an opposition to monitor both... Read more

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s opposition is now the divided one. For three weeks of heated rhetoric, Republicans cast the president’s new rule that religious schools and hospitals must provide insurance for free birth control to their employees as an attack on individual liberty. The contentious issue united recently fractured Republicans, Catholic bishops and religious groups while badly splitting Democrats who feared an election-year fallout. Obama’s leading Republican rivals — Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — had... Read more