New York, Oct. 14: John McCain may be taking a lot of heat from his critics, but his running mate – Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is not lagging too far behind.

According to Fox News, an array of T-shirts, for instance, displaying the image of Sarah Palin and some variation of the "C-word" are gaining new popularity as Election Day nears.

A group of protesters outside Palin''s fundraiser in Philadelphia Saturday wore shirts emblazoned with the words, "Sarah Palin Is a C--T."

Washington, October 14 : The U. S. Army is funding a new research project to explore the possibility of creating a technology that will enable soldiers to convey messages by thought.

The technology known as synthetic telepathy will be based on reading electrical activity in the brain using an electroencephalograph (EEG), something that is already being marketed as a way to control video games by thought.

The grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives—creating compose a message using "that little voice in the head", and sending it to a particular individual or object.

Washington, Oct. 14 : Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has gained a two percentage point lead over his opponent John McCain in the swing state of Ohio, according to the latest FOX News/Rasmussen Reports Battleground Poll.

This week''s poll shows Obama holding a narrow advantage ranging from two to five percentage points in Ohio, Florida, Virginia and Missouri, and he is tied with McCain in North Carolina.

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 - The Treasury Department was expected to announced later Tuesday that it will buy stakes worth a total of 250 billion dollars in nine major US banks in a further effort to stabilize financial markets.

Numerous reports citing both banking industry sources and government officials had an announcement expected before Tuesday's US stock market opening on Wall Street.

European governments on Monday announced plans to take similar bank stakes.