Polictico | Monday’s presidential debate focuses on foreign policy and Cindy Sheehan has been a vocal critic of American foreign policy following the 2004 death of her son, Casey, while he was serving in Iraq. Sheehan tells POLITICO in an email that, if the president claims to have had a strong term with regards to foreign policy, she’s not going to buy it.

Reuters | The United States and Israel will hold a major missile defense exercise in Israel this month, sending a message of close cooperation as both countries weigh their options over Iran's nuclear program. The three-week exercise, the largest the allies have ever held, will simulate a variety of long and short-range missile attacks that Israel could face during a regional conflict, said the commanders in charge.

RT |  US and UK weapons ammunition were linked to heart defects, brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs, according to a recent study. The report revealed a shocking rise in birth defects in Iraqi children conceived after the US invasion. Titled ‘Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities,’ the study was published by the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. It revealed a connection between military activity in the country and increased numbers of birth defects and miscarriages

TheNewAmerican.com | Defense contractor Northrop Grumman, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and NASA Dryden Flight Research Center reported on October 8 that they are moving closer to the day when drones can stay airborne indefinitely, refueled by other unmanned aerial vehicles without human assistance. The test flights conducted between January 11 and May 30 involved the use of two Global Hawk drones — “one configured as a tanker and the other as a receiver.”

GlobalResearch.ca | In Shakespearean terms, indeed that’s the question. Longstanding regime change plans are known. Means to achieve them have been ongoing for years. A previous article put it this way: Red lines, timelines, deadlines, sanctions, sabotage, subversion, cyber attacks, assassinations, saber rattling, falsified IAEA hype, ad nauseam warmongering, Netanyahu/Barak bluster, spurious accusations, manipulated to fail P5+1 talks, and inflammatory headlines up the stakes for war.

RT | US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has confirmed that US troops have been dispatched to the Jordan-Syrian border to help bolster the former’s military capabilities in case violence escalates in the volatile region. “We have been working with Jordan for a period of time now…on a number of issues that have developed as a result of what’s happening in Syria," Panetta said. He said chief among those issues were the “humanitarian needs” that has developed as a result of the refugee influx into Jordan.

Fox News | Here’s the purported CIA training ground of Osama bin Laden’s hideaway, used by Navy SEALs before they took out the terrorist mastermind. In the book “No Easy Day,” chronicling the May 2, 2011, raid in Pakistan, author and former SEAL Matt Bissonnette (who originally went by the pseudonym Mark Owen) said his fellow commandos practiced invading bin Laden’s pad at a North Carolina training center.

Reuters | NATO said it had drawn up plans to defend Turkey if necessary should the war in Syria spill over their border again as dozens of people were killed across the Arab nation on Tuesday. Fighting between Syrian rebels and government forces could be heard from this Turkish border town following on from several days of clashes in the past week. One Syrian villager said a rebel push on the town of Azmarin was expected soon.

BBC | As the number of Nato troops killed by their Afghan counterparts continues to rise - attacks known as "green on blue" - many are left wondering if the breakdown of this relationship will result in an early exit for international forces in Afghanistan. In a circle of trees at the heart of the international mission's headquarters in Kabul, there are 50 flags. One for each of the coalition countries that make up the force that is fighting the Taliban.

AntiWar.com | The Afghan surge is over, and while US officials insist that the mission was accomplished, the Taliban has not only weather the major increase in foreign ground troops but actually managed to grow by some estimates, remaining a force to be reckoned with across Afghanistan.

Youtube | Bombshell: The Obama State Department withdrew a 16 member SEAL security team from Benghazi one month before the deadly attacks. This was despite the fact that there were 13 attacks in the country in the past several months.

Business Insider | Later this month, experts from the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are going to meet in Arlington, Va., in the hopes of crunching numbers to find a way to predict when someone might commit suicide. Suicide prevention is a big deal to the military, given that in July they lost 56 service members--almost two a day--to suicide.The Army held a "suicide stand down" Sept. 27 to address the ever-growing suicide rate.

RT | Nearly eleven years to the day after US troops went to Afghanistan to begin what has become the United States’ longest running war, senior officials on the ground say America’s chance of achieving a peaceful end anytime soon seems impossible.

AP | In a service-wide "stand down," the Army has ordered soldiers to put aside their usual duties Thursday and spend the day on suicide prevention training as the military struggles with a spike in the number of self-inflicted deaths this year. The plan will focus on making sure that troops know what behavioral health programs are available to them and helping them get over the embarrassment that keeps many from seeking help. There are limited exceptions to Thursday's stand down: Troops with duties such as combat operations in Afghanistan or medical duties in Army hospitals will schedule their training when possible.

NYT |  Insurgent bombs exploded at a Damascus school building on Tuesday, and Syrian government shells landed in the disputed Golan Heights region held by Israel, underscoring the Syrian conflict’s growing scope as it dominated much of the discussion on the first formal day of the United Nations General Assembly. President François Hollande of France called for outside military intervention to protect areas in Syria held by the rebels and told the General Assembly in his first speech there that the government of President Bashar al-Assad, which has been widely accused by Western and Arab countries of brutality in its campaign to crush the insurgency, “has no future among us.”