London, Oct. 14: The chief prison guard of a jail in North Vietnam where Navy pilot John McCain was detained for six years, has claimed that he was not tortured during his captivity, but treated fairly well.

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Nguyen Tien Tran acknowledged that conditions in the prison were "tough, though not inhuman".

"We never tortured McCain. On the contrary, we saved his life, curing him with extremely valuable medicines that at times were not available to our own wounded," the Guardian quoted Tran, as saying.

Washington, Oct. 14: An expert forecaster on developments in Washington has claimed that the November 4, 2008 presidential poll is “almost unwinnable” for Republican candidate John McCain.

Though McCain is still championing the fact that he still fight back the advances being made by Democratic rival Barack Obama despite being six points down, Charles Cook, whose forecasts are among the most watched in Washington, has declared that McCain needs to forget any chances of winning and assess how wide a margin is his loss to Obama going to be.

Washington - John McCain did not mince words in his reaction to an important Supreme Court decision in June on the rights of suspected terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

McCain called the 5-4 the ruling "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," adding that it would result in the courts being flooded by a wave of frivolous challenges.

Washington, Oct 13 : Republivan presidential candidate John McCain and the other US servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques.

None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: "If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay."

Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing, the Washington Post reported.

Washington, Oct. 13 : Barack Obama would like to offer John McCain a job if he becomes president, in what his allies says is an attempt to end the bitter partisan rancour that engulfed the White House race last week.

Both presidential rivals are working behind the scenes to calm the increasingly incendiary atmosphere on the campaign trail.

Scranton (Pennsylvania, US), Oct. 13 : Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Biden has said that the campaign of Republican presidential candidate John McCain has stooped to stunts and “ugly inferences” because it was losing and was out of ideas.

Rousing a crowd estimated by the police at 6,000 on an otherwise quiet day on the campaign trail, Biden said McCain’s campaign had become erratic, a reference to McCain’s changing positions on the financial crisis and his decision two weeks ago to suspend his campaign briefly to deal with it.