Today's Top News 1-10-12

BLOOMBERG

Mitt Romney told voters on the eve of today’s New Hampshire primary that he likes “being able to fire people who provide services to me,” giving ammunition to rivals in the Republican presidential race criticizing him over his tenure as chief executive officer of a private equity company.

Iran began enriching uranium at a fortified nuclear site, the International Atomic Energy Agency said, a move that drew U.S. and France’s condemnation and may accelerate the imposition of stricter sanctions on the country.

The Internal Revenue Service is giving U.S. citizens who have shielded assets offshore a third opportunity to come clean, pay a penalty and avoid criminal prosecution. After collecting $4.4 billion in two so-called voluntary disclosure programs for offshore accounts, the IRS announced plans yesterday to revive the program. Participants will pay as much as 27.5 percent of their most valuable offshore assets or their biggest overseas bank account. They also must disclose the banks and advisers that helped them escape U.S. tax laws.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner will urge Asia’s two biggest economies to cut Iranian oil imports and seek to narrow differences with China on trade and currency disputes on a visit to Beijing and Tokyo this week.

French business confidence climbed from a two-year low last month and industrial output increased in November, indicating the threat of a recession in the euro- region’s second-biggest economy is easing.

China-based hackers rifled the computers of DuPont Co. at least twice in 2009 and 2010, hunting the technological secrets that made the company one of the world’s most successful chemical makers.

Inventories at U.S. wholesalers rose 0.1 percent, less than forecast in November, as distributors struggled to keep up with demand, a sign gains in manufacturing will keep the economy growing.

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan is coming under increasing pressure from a general strike and the legislature to back down on his decision to abolish fuel subsidies and to discuss phasing them out instead.

AP Top Stories

In a rare speech today, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria again blamed the unrest in his country on terrorists, foreign meddling and media bias, criticizingABC News in particular. Russia's space chief says the recent failures of his country's spacecraft may have been caused by hostile interference. Roscosmos chief Vladimir Popovkin stopped short of accusing the United States of disabling Russian satellites, but in an interview published Tuesday in the daily Izvestia he said some Russian craft had suffered malfunctions while flying beyond the reach of its tracking facilities.

Google is sifting through the photos and commentary on its blossoming social network so its Internet search results can include more personal information.

Banks in the countries that use the euro held a record amount of money overnight at the European Central Bank in a sign of stress in the financial system from the eurozone debt crisis. The region's central bank said that overnight deposits from Monday hit $613.4 billion — beating the previous record of euro463.56 billion from the day before.