Mythili Rao

Last night's Super Tuesday primary vote focused on just four presidential candidates from the Republican party. However, just months ago the field was significantly larger, with nine candidates. After Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry and John Huntsman dropped out of the race, they faded from the campaign trail. When GOP candidate Governor Tim Pawlenty took a disappointing third place finish in the Ames Straw Poll in August, however, he made a different decision by endorsing Mitt Romney for President less than a month later and taking a leadership position with the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign.

Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur have been friends for many years, but you wouldn't know it from listening to the attack ads the two Ohio Democrats have been airing against one another. While Republican voters in Ohio cast their ballots for a presidential nominee, Ohio Democrats in district nine will be picking between Kucinich and Kaptur in a Congressional primary. The race is the product of redistricting in Ohio — and it's just the first of many of its kind. In the coming months, 11 primary contests in states like Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California will similarly pit incumbents against each other.

Voters in 10 states weigh in on the Republican presidential line-up today in Super Tuesday primary elections and caucuses around the country. Four hundred and thirty-seven delegates are up for grabs -- but also at stake is the momentum of the campaign. Who is out there voting today? Is the Republican primary voter demographic in Idaho and Alaska the same as in Tennessee and Georgia? And who are they voting for?

A powerful storm system stretching across a dozen states in the Midwest and the South brought on between 80 to 100 tornadoes over the weekend, leveling entire towns and killing 39 people.  In total, 17 million people were affected by the storms.  The town of Henryville, Indiana was among one of the hardest hit when an "EF4" level tornado with windspeeds of over 175 miles-per-hour tore through the town.

After receiving permission from Syrian authorities yesterday, International Red Cross workers are bringing food and medical aid into the district of Baba Amr in the city of Homs today.  The region has been under siege for nearly a month.  Yesterday, rebel forces announced a “tactical withdrawal” there.  The decision handed a victory of sorts to forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; it also set off a campaign of raids and arrests across the city.  The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported at least 17 people were killed yesterday alone.

It’s the standing belief among most archaeologists that North America remained unpopulated until about 15,000 years ago, when Siberian people traveling over an Asian land-bridge traveled into Alaska and then moved down the West Coast. But in recent years, a series of surprising archeological finds at five sites along the Delaware, Maryland and Virginia coast offered evidence of a different possibility. Prehistoric blades found on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and in Tilghman Island, Maryland, appear to closely match those used by stone age Europeans known as the Solutreans.

A storm system moving across the Midwest Wednesday morning caused tornadoes from Kansas to Kentucky.  At least twelve people were killed; six deaths were reported in the city of Harrisburg, Illinois alone where the most damage occurred. The severe weather also tore through country music resort city Branson, Missouri destructing the heart of the city's tourist district.

According to new research published in the New England Journal of Medicine, daily doses of a drug commonly used to treat Parkinson's disease has shown to improve function in people with brain injuries. The large-scale study showed that the drug, amantadine, can make a measurable difference for patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries. Doctors have experimented with drugs like amantadine to treat such patients, but this is the first time a study proved its effectiveness.

With Super Tuesday approaching, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum used their speeches after last night's primaries in Michigan and Arizona to position themselves favorably. Santorum reached out to women after sparking controversy regarding his position on contraceptives, and Romney drove his message home with a new slogan.

Virginia's state legislature recently voted to repeal a 1993 law capping handgun purchases at one-per-month. The law was designed to help curb interstate gun trafficking along what was known as the "iron pipeline" — the corridor along I-95 from the south to the northeast. In 1991, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had found that 40 percent of guns found at crime scenes in New York had been purchased in Virginia. Two decades later, opponents of the law say that it's become obsolete.

Despite an apology from President Obama, protests and violence following the destruction of several Korans and other religious artifacts by U.S. troops have continued in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 30 people have been killed thus far, including four U.S. troops. As one of the most offensive possible acts, the unrest over this burning shows no signs of stopping.

With high unemployment numbers, a slowly recovering economy, protest movements like Occupy and the Tea Party, the economy has been a hot topic for this election cycle. And for some politicians, the most important economic indicator is the price at the gas pump: last week Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich released a 30-minute ad that faults the Obama administration for rising gas prices.

Over the weekend, two U.S. military advisers were shot dead in their office at the Interior Ministry in Kabul, Afghanistan. The attack is one of many since U.S. troops inadvertently burned several copies of the Koran and other religious materials while clearing out the base at Bagram Air Field last Wednesday. In response to the escalating violence, Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson announced Sunday that NATO had decided to withdraw its advisors from Afghanistan. 

Senator Marco Rubio generated a lot of positive buzz at this year's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in January. A dynamic young catholic Latino from Florida, Rubio charmed crowds with his sense of humor and looked like he could be the perfect young vice-presidential candidate. However, on Thursday BuzzFeed broke the story that Rubio was, for a few years of his life, Mormon.

Since 1992 seven journalists have been killed in Syria, making it one of the most difficult countries to cover. Last Thursday, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Anthony Shadid died of an asthma attack. Then on Tuesday  tragedy hit three more journalists.  A local videographer, Rami al-Sayed, was killed covering a bombardment. Also, two Western journalists — U.S.-born Marie Colvin and French photojournalist Rémi Ochlik — died when their makeshift media center came under fire.

Tommy Jordan, an ordinary dad from North Carolina, launched himself into internet fame when he uploaded an eight-minute YouTube video in response to a whiny letter his daughter posted on Facebook. Viewed 28 million times, Tommy's video outlines his anger with his daughter's online complaints about household chores, and as a finale, he shoots eight rounds at her laptop. The divisive video sparked much controversy across the country around parenting and social media.

For the first time in nearly a month, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich will share a stage in Arizona, at a Republican presidential debate hosted at the Mesa Center of the Arts on Wednesday. The latest poll numbers from CNN have Romney in the lead with the support of 36 percent, and Santorum coming in at a close second with 32 percent of likely voters. While Romney's lead is far from decisive, many Arizona voters have yet to make up their minds.

Abigail Fisher, a white student from Sugarland, Texas, sued the University of Texas after she failed to receive admission. In "Fisher v. Texas," she claims she was turned down even though her application was just as strong as minority students who got in. Sometime in the fall, this case will be heard by the Supreme Court, the first affirmative action case heard in nearly a decade. With more conservative justices on the bench, the case could overturn the 2003 ruling that allows universities to take race into account during admissions as long as they didn't quantify their process.

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, writer Timothy Egan makes this observation about the voters turning out for GOP primary contests around the country: "There is no other way to put this without resorting to demographic bluntness: the small fraction of Americans who are trying to pick the Republican nominee are old, white, uniformly Christian and unrepresentative of the nation at large." He goes on to make this observation about the demographic of the Republican primary electorate: "They are much closer to the population of 1890 than of 2012."

The Associated Press has obtained a new report from the New York Police Department which provides a surprising portrait of just how far the NYPD's intelligence division went in a surveillance program targeting Muslims. The NYPD tracked closely the activities of Muslim student groups at 13 colleges in the northeast, monitoring their e-mails and taking notes on their activities.