Ohio | featured news

The son of Bernard Madoff's longtime accountant, who himself pleaded guilty to securities fraud in the scandal centered on the disgraced financier, has committed suicide in central Ohio, authorities said. Jeremy Friehling, 23, was found dead at his apartment of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday in Columbus, where he was a second-year student at Ohio State's medical school, police there said.

Sporadic problems were reported Tuesday at polling places around the country, including a confrontation in Pennsylvania involving Republican inspectors over access to some polls and a last-minute court fight in Ohio over election software. One Florida elections office mistakenly told voters in robocalls the election was on Wednesday....

Ohio voters are facing extremely long lines at polling locations on Sunday. Early voting in the state has been reduced from the five weekends before the election to only the weekend right before Election Day.

President Obama ripped Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Friday for running a misleading TV ad implying that U.S. auto workers are going to lose their jobs because Chrysler is moving the production of Jeeps for Chinese consumers to China.

...The ad also comes on the heels of Mitt Romney’s mistaken claim in a speech last week that Chrysler was moving Jeep production to China — a statement immediately denied by the auto manufacturer. Yet the story apparently was too good for Romney to give up, because the ad repeats the claim, tweaked slightly to make it more accurate.

President Barack Obama is poised to eke out a victory in the race for the 270 electoral votes needed to win re-election, having beaten back Republican Mitt Romney's attempts to convert momentum from the debates into support in all-important Ohio, according to an Associated Press analysis a week before Election Day....

Under the bright lights of a high school football field in Defiance, Ohio, Mitt Romney's opposition to the 2009 auto bailout reared its head again as a campaign issue that could help decide the result of this critical swing state.

Will you cast your vote this fall on a faulty electronic machine that's partly owned by the Romney Family? Will that machine decide whether Romney will then inherit the White House? Through a closely held equity fund called Solamere, Mitt Romney and his wife, son and brother are major investors in an investment firm called H.I.G. Capital. H.I.G. in turn holds a majority share and three out of five board members in Hart Intercivic, a company that owns the notoriously faulty electronic voting machines that will count the ballots in swing state Ohio November 7. Hart machines will also be used elsewhere in the United States.

Unemployment rates fell or held steady last month in nine key swing states at the center of this year's presidential election. Rates dropped in Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, Colorado, Iowa, Nevada and North Carolina. They were unchanged in New Hampshire and Virginia.

Rock stars of politics and music, respectively, former President Bill Clinton and Bruce Springsteen joined forces here Thursday afternoon for President Barack Obama. Each stuck to his specialty.