Libya | featured news

The father of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who was killed in an attack on the consulate in Libya last month, says his son's death shouldn't be made into a political football in the presidential race.

Congress elected a human rights lawyer as interim prime minister on Sunday, a week after his predecessor was sacked for failing to present a Cabinet line-up that political factions could agree on.

...Axelrod also said Romney is campaigning and "working hard to exploit" the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others in Libya. He cited the comments of the ambassador's father, Jan Stevens, who told Bloomberg News that "it would really be abhorrent to make this into a campaign issue," and that the matter is under investigation.

The White House is defending Vice President Biden over his debate statement that "we weren't told" about requests for more security at a U.S. Consulate in Libya before the Sept. 11 attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.

A Republican-led House oversight committee opens hearings Wednesday on diplomatic security in Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three others were killed on Sept. 11, adding fuel to a political debate over the issue in the final weeks before presidential elections... GOP lawmakers deny they are trying to embarrass the Obama administration before the election.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

Libya’s prime minister-elect failed a confidence vote by an overwhelming margin on Sunday, removing him from office and throwing the country into yet more political uncertainty as time ticks on an investigation into attacks that killed four Americans last month.

U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon have begun assembling preliminary information about potential targets and militant personnel in Libya that could be struck if President Barack Obama ordered such action.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday vowed to pursue a full accounting of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi "wherever that leads," but cautioned that it could take time for a complete picture to emerge.