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December 30, 2011 | | MISTY-EYED While campaigning in Iowa on Friday, Newt Gingrich started crying when asked to describe a memory of his late mother, Kit Gingrich. “I get teary-eyed every time we sing Christmas carols,” he explained. “My mother sang in the choir and loved singing in the choir. And I don’t know if I should admit this, but when I was very young, she made me sing in the choir and we had pictures of me at a very young age singing in the choir.” Kit raised Gingrich alone for the first five years of his life before she remarried; she also suffered from bipolar disorder. She passed away in 2003. Watch video of Gingrich’s humanizing moment. UNREST An estimated half a million people reportedly protested across Syria on Friday against President Bashar al-Assad. There were reports that the government’s security forces killed 32 people by shooting at the crowd, and one human-rights group said nail bombs were fired at the protesters. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that protesters “hurled stones” at the security forces as the troops fired on the crowd. Activists say at least 40 people were killed in clashes with security forces Thursday, despite the presence of Arab League monitors. The U.S. State Department said it was concerned by the continuing violence. Meanwhile leaders in the anti-Assad army say they’re holding their fire and want to meet with the monitoring team. CRACKDOWN Germany has summoned Egypt’s ambassador in Berlin to protest against raids on pro-civil-rights groups in Cairo on Thursday, including Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and two pro-democracy U.S. groups. Egypt’s military rulers stormed the offices of 17 civil-society groups in the country’s capital. Germany’s Foreign Ministry called the raids “unacceptable,” while human-rights leaders in Egypt compared them to Mubarak-era tactics used to silence anti-government protesters. The United Nations also condemned the attacks as “unnecessarily heavy-handed” and “clearly designed to intimidate human rights defenders.” The raids were part of an Egyptian investigation into foreign funding of its pro-democracy groups. CHARGES Michele Bachmann is sticking to her guns that her former Iowa chair was bribed by Ron Paul’s campaign to endorse him. Bachmann’s aide, Kent Sorenson, initially denied that he was bribed and then quit her campaign. “He told me that he was offered money, he was offered a lot of money by the Ron Paul campaign,” Bachmann told reporters in Iowa on Friday. “No one else knows about the conversation other than Kent Sorenson and myself.” Bachmann said he told her about the bribe money during a phone call on Dec. 27, though she wouldn’t say how much money was involved. Sorenson, an Iowa state senator, decided yesterday to endorse Ron Paul, who is currently one of the top contenders to win Iowa’s January caucuses. ENTERPRISING China released plans for its space program this week, and the agenda includes building space stations and eventually putting a man on the moon within the next several years. China launched its space program in 2003, and is now the third country to put a man in space. One professor at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at Beijing University said, “With economic progress also comes the need for scientific development and exploration. By investing in space exploration, China wants to contribute and be a major player in the world on more than one level.” | | 
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