NPR News

Stung by a series of defeats earlier this week, Mitt Romney got a much-needed boost Saturday with a win in the straw poll of the Conservative Political Action Conference and a victory in Maine's nonbinding caucuses.

Yet Romney walked away without delegates and tallied fewer votes there than he did four years ago. This time, he barely beat rival Ron Paul.

Villamayor de Santiago, population 2,500, is a small village just south of Madrid, Spain.

It's famous for three Manchego cheese factories and a windmill that stopped turning decades ago. More than one-third of the town is unemployed.

After Christmas, shopkeepers here decided to jumpstart their economy.

"We realized there's no money here — well, no euros anyway — in the pockets of our customers," says Luis Miguel Campayo, head of the local merchants' association.

There was one little-noticed part of this week's announcement about the $25 billion national mortgage settlement. North Carolina's banking commissioner, Joseph Smith Jr., will take over a new role and serve as independent monitor. He'll oversee the five banks which agreed to new mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure standards.

A year ago today, tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square and celebrated a previously unimaginable achievement: the toppling of Hosni Mubarak.

But one year later, Egypt is far from stable and far from the democratic utopia many activists imagined. Is the nation better off?