WASHINGTON (AP) — House Republicans on Tuesday make their most concerted effort of the year to change federal abortion law with legislation that would ban almost all abortions after a fetus reaches the age of 20 weeks. The "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," expected to pass by a comfortable margin late Tuesday, would be a direct challenge to the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortions up to the time a fetus becomes viable. Fetal viability is generally considered to be at least 24 weeks into the pregnancy. The measure will be ignored by the Democratic-led Senate and the White House, saying the bill is "an assault on a woman's right to choose," has issued a veto threat. Even if the policy were to become law, it would almost certainly face a legal challenge. That's a prospect supporters hope for as part of the ultimate goal of overturning Roe v. Wade. The two sides in the abortion debate agreed at least on the importance of the measure. National Right to Life Committee legislative director Douglas Johnson said it was the "most significant piece of pro-life legislation to come before the House since the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act" that was enacted in 2003. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said the bill "clearly is an attack on women's constitutional right to choose and is one of the most far-reaching bans on abortion this committee has ever considered." Some 11 state legislatures have passed similar measures. Several have been challenged in court and a federal court last month struck down a slightly different Arizona law that banned abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Anti-abortion groups said the time frame in the House bill and other state laws, which ban abortion 20 weeks after conception, is equal to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The sponsors of the bill also cited evidence — which opponents say is disputed — that fetuses can feel pain after five months. House GOP leaders, stymied by a Democratic Senate and a Democrat in the White House, have chosen to focus on economic issues rather than contentious social topics such as abortion. "Jobs continue to be our number one concern," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said last week when asked about the abortion bill. But he said that "after the Kermit Gosnell case and the publicity that it received, I think the legislation is appropriate." Gosnell was a Philadelphia abortion provider who last month received a life sentence for what prosecutors said was the murder of three babies delivered alive. The case energized anti-abortion groups, who said it exemplified the inhumanity of late-term abortions. The original House bill, sponsored by anti-abortion leader Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., was aimed only at the District of Columbia, but was expanded to cover the entire nation after the Gosnell case received national attention. Pro-choice groups argued that the 20-week ban, in addition to being unconstitutional, would affect women just at the point of learning of a fetal anomaly or determining that the pregnancy could put the mother's life in danger. As introduced, the bill provided for an exception to the ban only in cases of a physical condition that endangers the life of the mother. In the Judiciary Committee last week, Republicans rejected Democratic attempts to include rape, incest and other health problems as grounds for exceptions. But Franks, during debate on the rape exception, angered Democrats and drew unwanted publicity to the bill when he stated that cases of "rape resulting in pregnancy are very low." Franks later rephrased his remark, but GOP leaders rushed to impose damage control. A provision was inserted in the bill heading to the House floor including a rape and incest exception, and Franks, who heads the Judiciary subcommittee on the constitution and civil justice, was replaced as floor manager for the bill by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., who is not a member of the Judiciary Committee. Democrats had pointed out that every Republican on the Judiciary Committee that approved the anti-abortion bill was a man. With the changes, said NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue, "the GOP is desperately trying to hide that the party has a deep hostility to women's rights and freedom."

ENNISKILLEN, Northern Ireland (AP) — Laden with foreign challenges, President Barack Obama is welcoming Iran's election results, taking the temperature of China's new leader and acknowledging that nations routinely spy on each other, all the while navigating difficult terrain with allies and Russia over Syria. For Obama, who would much rather be influencing domestic policy at this point in his second term, the issues currently defining his presidency center on his international relations and, by extension, how he deals with threats to U.S. security. In a wide ranging PBS interview with Charlie Rose and in recent days of peripatetic travel, Obama has been in the middle of global developments that illustrate both the extent and the limits of his ability to influence outcomes beyond the U.S. borders. From his meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California a week ago to his participation in the summit of the Group of Eight industrialized economies to Wednesday's visit to Berlin, Obama has been both setting a U.S. imprint as well as reacting to the imprints of others. The G-8 summit unfolded in the midst of awkward revelations that the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ tapped into the communications of foreign diplomats during the 2009 Group of 20 summit in London, including those of Russian leader Dmitry Medvedev. That report, in the British newspaper The Guardian, came on the heels of reports about the high-tech surveillance methods and record-gathering employed by the National Security Agency in the United States. While the disclosures added a layer of controversy to the summit, U.S. officials said heads of state at a summit like the G-8 are perfectly aware that such spying goes on. "Every country in the world, large and small, engages in intelligence gathering," Obama said in the PBS interview, which was taped Sunday before the Guardian revelations. "And that is an occasional source of tension, but it's generally practiced within bounds." That unsurprising assertion was meant to distinguish between such international spying and the kind of hacking that the U.S. says the Chinese perpetrate against U.S. corporations. "There is a big difference between China wanting to figure out how can they find out what my talking points are when I'm meeting with the Japanese, which is standard fare, and we try to prevent them from penetrating that, and they try to get that information," he said. "There's a big difference between that and a hacker directly connected with the Chinese government or the Chinese military breaking into Apple's software systems to see if they can obtain the designs for the latest Apple product. That's theft." It was a remarkably direct accusation coming just a week after Obama met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a desert resort in California. "We had a very blunt conversation about cybersecurity," Obama said of his talks with Xi. Obama went further, describing Xi as a leader who "has consolidated his position fairly rapidly inside of China" and who "is younger and more forceful and more robust and more confident, perhaps, than some leaders in the past." In the interview he prodded the Chinese to accept the responsibility that comes with being a major economic power while approving of China's efforts to confront North Korean belligerence. U.S. officials busy with Syria at the G-8 in Northern Ireland said they were reassured by Iran's election of the relatively moderate cleric Hasan Rowhani as president, not so much because they expect a swift change in policy but because it reflects a desire by the country's people to change course. "The Iranian people rebuffed the hardliners and the clerics in the election who were counseling no compromise on anything any time anywhere," Obama said on PBS. "Now, Mr. Rowhani, who won the election, I think indicated his interest in shifting how Iran approaches many of these international questions, but I think we understand that under their system the supreme leader will be making a lot of decisions." At the G-8, Obama has been forced to defend his decision to arm Syrian rebels, creating a direct confrontation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been providing military support to the Bashar Assad regime. Indeed, the full range of Obama's personal relations with foreign leaders has been on display at the G-8, from his friendly, competitive banter with British Prime Minister David Cameron to the stiff and distant interplay with Putin. To Obama, Cameron is "David," and he teased him Monday during a race to paint a poster designed by school children. Examining his work, he said of the children, "I'm not as good as these guys, but I'm better than David." With Putin, there was no chemistry. Obama's national security aide Ben Rhodes, in diplomatic understatement, described Obama's relationship with Putin as "business-like." Where Obama was cheeky with Cameron, he was self-effacing with Putin. Summing up their two-hour private meeting on Monday, Obama said: "We compared notes on President Putin's expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball. And we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover." Putin, through an interpreter, replied, "The president wants to relax me with his statement of age." ___ Associated Press writers Cassandra Vinograd and Julie Pace in Northern Ireland contributed to this report.