A top Lebanese security official who was bitterly opposed to Syrian leader Bashar Assad was killed Oct. 19 in a car bomb in Beirut that also claimed the lives of seven others and left 80 more wounded. Gen. Wissam Hasan, head of the Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces, was one of eight killed in the mid-afternoon attack in the Christian district of Ashrafieh. The blast was the first car bombing in Beirut since 2008. Hasan led the investigation that implicated Syria and Hezbollah in the 2005 killing of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, and he had also been a close aide to Hariri. Al-Jazeera reported that he was believed to be involved in organizing support for the Syrian insurgents. The opposition March 14 coalition accused Damascus of being behind the attack. "Assad has repeatedly threatened to set fire to the region if the noose tightened on him," March 14 leader Fares Souaid told a television station. (Reuters, Lebanon Daily Star, Daily Star, Al-Jazeera, Oct. 19)

You'd never know it from the sensationalist headlines, but the latest supposed near-miss, would-be, almost-was terrorist attack in New York City appears to be yet another highly specious case in which the "terrorist" plot turns out to be a creation of FBI infiltrators. All you have to do is actually read past the headlines, and this is immediately apparent. Let's take a look at the Daily News coverage from Oct. 17—with its typically alarmist lead, followed by implicit admissions that whole thing is almost certainly an FBI-generated scam...

In case you were wondering, the oil and energy industry are hedging their bets by funding both candidates (gee, what a surprise)—but not equally. Politico noted back in April that BP has favored Obama: 

BP and its employees have given more than $3.5 million to federal candidates over the past 20 years, with the largest chunk of their money going to Obama, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Donations come from a mix of employees and the company's political action committees — $2.89 million flowed to campaigns from BP-related PACs and about $638,000 came from individuals.

From the New York Times, Oct. 8:

4 Die in Crash at Notorious Turn on L.I. Road
All five were teenage friends from Queens, and four had been classmates at Richmond Hill High School. Some had started college and were planning for careers years away, and they were all out for a ride early Monday in a car that one of them — a 17-year-old with a learner's permit — had recently started driving.

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled (PDF) Oct. 16 that it will keep Montana's campaign contribution limits in place for the duration of the election season, extending a stay on a lower court decision. The appeals court ruled that changing the finance rules less than one month before election day and after absentee voting has already started would prove unfair to candidates who have followed these rules throughout the present campaign cycle. The court also held that because Montana's campaign contribution limits are among the lowest in the country, removing that limit as a matter of free speech pursuant to the 2010 US Supreme Court decision Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission would drastically alter the playing field. American Tradition Partnership, one of the groups challenging the law, said that while the ruling is a setback, it intends to continue challenging the law and expects to "prevail in the end."

Provincial police have been mobilized to a spot on Highway 138 in northern Quebec where local Innu erected roadblocks outside the town of Sept-Îles over the weekend. Dissident Uashat-Maliotenam band members who say they've been shut out of the province's resource-development plan used trees, traffic cones and debris to block the highway, only allowing emergency vehicles to pass. The Uashat-Maliotenam band council distanced itself from the demonstrators, saying "in the immediate future, the band prefers mediation to resolve this crisis." Protesters say they have been systematically excluded from talks related to Quebec's Plan Nord, a mega-scheme to exploit natural resources in the region. Quebec wants to exploit mining, forest and energy resources in a 1.2-million-square-kilometer zone—an area more than twice the size of France. By the end of 2010, a total of 24 of the 33 First Nation communities in the impacted territory had signed agreements with the provincial government. (Sun News, Canada, Oct. 16)

After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by Israeli human rights group Gisha, Israel's Ministry of Defense turned over a document entitled "Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip—Red Lines," detailing the policy of restricting the entrance of food to the Gaza Strip. Two versions of the document, in the format of PowerPoint presentations, were provided to Gisha over the Sukkot holiday, after the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the state’s appeal against disclosing the document on Sept. 5. The documents, produced in January 2008, established the minimum caloric intake required for the survival of residents. They cited a daily average of 2,279 calories per person, which could be supplied by 4 pounds of food, or 2,575.5 tons of food for the Gaza Strip's entire 1.7 million population. The Israeli Defense Ministry, which fought to keep the Red Lines documents classified, had argued to the court that Israel had a right "to adopt a policy of economic warfare" against Gaza's Hamas leadership. (UPI, Oct. 18; Gisha, Oct. 17)

Obama seemed to score a win in last night's debate by catching Mitt Romney in a lie, or at least an error, over the question of when the deadly attack on the consulate in Benghazi was deemed "terrorism." Obama's snappy come-back "Get the transcript" is already an Internet meme. Here's how the Associated Press "Debate Fact-check" calls it:

Mitt Romney wrongly claimed that it took 14 days for President Obama to brand the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Libya a terrorist act...

OBAMA: The day after [the] attack... "I stood in the Rose Garden and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened. That this was an act of terror and I also said that we're going to hunt down those who committed this crime."