MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The arrest of Mexico's best-known trade union leader on fraud charges has thrown down the gauntlet to powerful interests standing between President Enrique Pena Nieto and his plans to shake up Latin America's second-biggest economy. For a generation, even presidents shied away from taking on teachers' union boss Elba Esther Gordillo, making her Mexico's most prominent female politician and a formidable enemy to those who accused her of fostering corruption rather than education. ...

CHICAGO (AP) — The newly elected Democratic nominee to replace disgraced former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. vowed to become a leader in the fight for federal gun control and directly challenged the National Rifle Association in her victory speech.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Recent mass shootings like the massacre of first-graders and staffers at a Connecticut elementary school and the increasing deadliness of assault weapons makes a ban on those firearms more urgent than ever, the Senate author of a proposal to prohibit them said Wednesday.

CONAKRY (Reuters) - Guinea security forces fired tear gas at thousands of rock-throwing anti-government protesters in the seaside capital Conakry on Wednesday in clashes that wounded more than two dozen people, sources said. The violence in the West African state is a result of soaring tensions ahead of a parliamentary election the opposition says is being rigged by the administration of President Alpha Conde. "We don't know how it started, but the security forces charged the crowd and fired tear gas," said Ousmane Camara, a Conakry resident at the protest. ...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Hackers targeted dozens of computer systems at government agencies across Europe in a series of attacks that exploited a recently discovered security flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software, security researchers reported on Wednesday. Russia's Kaspersky Lab and Hungary's Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, or CrySyS, said the targets of the campaign included government computers in the Czech Republic, Ireland, Portugal and Romania. ...

GENEVA (Reuters) - Sri Lanka accused the U.N. human rights chief on Wednesday of being biased against it for criticizing alleged killings of former Tamil Tiger independence fighters and political dissenters and journalists. In a speech to the U.N. Human Rights Council, a senior official from Colombo also asserted that Western countries strongly critical of the country's record had fallen prey to lies spread by former members of the Tamil Tiger movement. U.N. ...

DUBLIN (Reuters) - An Algerian at the center of the so-called Jihad Jane conspiracy pleaded guilty during an Irish proceeding on Wednesday that may hasten his extradition to the United States on terrorism charges, Irish television reported. Ali Damache, who has lived in Ireland for a decade, pleaded guilty in court to a single count of sending a menacing message by telephone to an American Muslim activist, according to RTE television, reporting from the courthouse in Waterford, Ireland. ...

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Al Baghdadi al-Mahmoudi, a prime minister under deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, is in critical condition after being tortured in a Libyan jail, his Tunisian lawyer said on Wednesday. An officer at the prison where Mahmoudi is held denied this. Mahmoudi was extradited from Tunisia in June, making him the first senior Gaddafi official to be returned for trial under Libya's new leadership. He went on trial in November charged with corruption and ordering mass rape during the 2011 conflict that toppled the Libyan leader and is being detained in a Tripoli prison. ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Federal Aviation Administration has "very limited" flexibility to avoid furloughing air traffic controllers if automatic budget cuts go into effect beginning on Friday, agency head Michael Huerta told Congress on Wednesday. "We've identified a wide variety of savings but I don't think I can absolutely eliminate furloughs," Huerta told the House of Representatives Transportation Committee, in response to Republican suggestions that he could avoid furloughs by shifting agency funding around. (Reporting By Doug Palmer; Editing by Eric Beech)

Is there a love of hip hop in the U.S. Senate?  Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., says he doesn’t find many other senators to discuss the history and trends of hip-hop with. “I’m the only member of the hip-hop caucus in the Senate,” Rubio told TMZ...