Economy in the spotlight as Republican hopefuls face off in debate

REPUBLICAN presidential hopefuls faced off in Iowa on Wednesday three weeks before the State decides on the Republican presidential candidate for the 2008 election.

There was a new front-runner.

Polls show former governor Mike Huckabee — a Baptist pastor who played a role in the release of a rapist who went on to murder a woman, and who wrote in the 1990s that Aids patients should be quarantined — had overtaken former governor Mitt Romney, a Mormon, as the poster boy of social conservatives.