Arlen Specter, the former Philadelphia prosecutor who played a key role in the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President Kennedy and went on to become Pennsylvania's longest serving member of the U.S. Senate, died at his Philadelphia home Sunday. His death at 82 followed a years-long fight with cancer.

In charging his Republican opponent with putting "two wars on a credit card" in the October 11 vice-presidential debate, Vice President Joe Biden misrepresented his own voting record on the wars in a misstatement of fact that went unchallenged by both the debate moderator and the Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).  

Ron Paul, the maverick Texas congressman who has twice run for the Republican presidential nomination, won't endorse the nominee of his party. Though Paul said last week it was "very unlikely" he would endorse former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, he made it definitive in an interview October 11 on the CNBC program Futures Now. 

Mitt Romney is calling for tougher sanctions against Iran and arms for the rebels in Syria, despite past failure from following those foreign policy remedies.

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.