With an ad the opposing camp has denounced as "desperate, nasty campaigning," Republican Rep. Todd Akin has gone on the offensive against Sen. Claire McCaskill in the closely watched U.S. Senate race in Missouri. Akin has taken to the airwaves with a TV ad that accuses his Democratic opponent of profiting by her vote in favor of the Obama stimulus program in 2009.

A network of 77 "fusion" intelligence centers, set up around the country under the auspices of the federal Department of Homeland Security, has over the past decade uncovered little information that could be useful in defending the nation against terrorism. It also created numerous reports on the legal, everyday of activities of ordinary Americans, according to a Senate report released Tuesday.

Did Joe Biden forget momentarily which administration has been in the White House for these last four years? Or did he temporarily lose track of which ticket he is running on? He apparently misspoke when he addressed a crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina, but the gaffe-prone vice president — whom Republicans sometimes call "the gift that keeps on giving" — handed the Republicans a campaign gift October 2 when he referred to "the middle class that has been buried the last four years."  

A suicide bomber on foot attacked a joint patrol of coalition and Afghan forces in the crowded center Khost in eastern Afghanistan Monday, killing three international service members and 16 Afghan police officers and civilians, according to witnesses and hospital officials. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

"The Fourth Amendment does not recognize guilt by association," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Sullivan wrote in ruling the New York Police Department illegally arrested a large number of demonstrators during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York's Madison Square Garden. The ruling from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that police lacked probable cause for many of the arrests, because they had no knowledge or reason to believe that the individuals arrested had broken the law.

The U.S. Supreme Court on October 1 rejected the appeal of a Michigan resident who claimed the use of body-imaging scanners and pat-down procedures by Transportation Security Administration agents at airports throughout the country violate airline passengers' privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. On the first day of its new term, the court refused without comment to consider the appeal of Jonathan Corbett, who publishes a blog called "TSA Out of Our Pants!" Corbett's suit had been dismissed by the U.S. District Court in Southern Florida in a ruling upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Supreme Court justices who raised political storms in the last few years with controversial landmark decisions face no shortage of opportunities to do the same in the new term.

Another killing of an American serviceman by allied Afghan soldiers Sunday brought the death toll of American military personnel to 2,000, and caused a top U.S. general to say he is "mad as hell"  about the situation.

The Obama administration's plans to release $450 million in U.S. aid to Egypt have been put on hold by a member of Congress who insists the relationship between the two countries requires more scrutiny before aid to Cairo is resumed.

Describing the conflicts in the Middle East as "the clash between modernity and medievalism," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned against "the medieval forces of radical Islam" in his address at the United Nations September 27 and repeated his call for a "red line" to be drawn before Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build its first nuclear bomb.