Today's weather & top news

Today, partly sunny. Widespread frost early in the morning. Highs in the lower 60s. South winds up to 10 mph. Tonight, mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of rain showers. Lows in the upper 30s. South winds up to 10 mph. Friday, partly sunny in the morning then clearing. Highs in the mid-60s. West winds up to 10 mph shifting to the north in the afternoon. ... HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (AP) — John McCain repeatedly assailed Barack Obama’s character and campaign positions on taxes, abortion and more Wednesday night, hoping to transform their final presidential debate into a launching pad for a political comeback. “You didn’t tell the American people the truth,” he charged. Unruffled, and ahead in the polls, Obama parried each accusation, and leveled a few of his own. “One hundred percent, John, of your ads, 100 percent of them have been negative,” Obama shot back in an uncommonly personal debate less than three weeks from Election Day. “It’s not true,” McCain retorted.

“It absolutely is true,” said Obama, seeking the last word. McCain is currently running all negative ads, according to a study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But he has run a number of positive ads during the campaign. The 90-minute encounter, seated at a round table at Hofstra University, was their third debate, and marked the beginning of a 20-day sprint to Election Day. Obama leads in the national polls and in surveys in many battleground states, an advantage built in the weeks since the nation stumbled into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. With few exceptions, the campaign is being waged in states that voted Republican in 2004 — Virginia, Colorado, Iowa — and in many of them, Obama holds a lead in the polls. McCain played the aggressor from the opening moments of the debate, accusing Obama of waging class warfare by seeking tax increases that would “spread the wealth around.”

The Arizona senator also demanded to know the full extent of Obama’s relationship with William Ayers, a 1960s-era terrorist and the Democrat’s ties with ACORN, a liberal group accused of violating federal law as it seeks to register voters. And he insisted Obama disavow last week’s remarks by Rep. John Lewis, a Democrat, who accused the Republican ticket of playing racial politics along the same lines as segregationists of the past. Struggling to escape the political drag of an unpopular Republican incumbent, McCain also said, “Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. ... You wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

Obama returned each volley, and brushed aside McCain’s claim to full political independence. “If I’ve occasionally mistaken your policies for George Bush’s policies, it’s because on the core economic issues that matter to the American people — on tax policy, on energy policy, on spending priorities — you have been a vigorous supporter of President Bush,” he said. ... WASHINGTON (AP) — Fear and loathing is spreading as signs mount that the economy is in danger of losing its balance.

And a fresh batch of economic reports due out Thursday is likely to show more problems for the already stumbling economy. Industrial production is expected to have dropped in September, underscoring the plight of troubled auto makers as well as manufacturers of furniture, construction materials and other goods that have been hard hit by the collapse of the housing market. The number of new people signing up for unemployment benefits last week may dip slightly but is still expected to top 400,000, a level that usually points to an ailing labor market. Consumer prices probably will nudge up in September, but will be up sharply over the past year, further pinching Americans already smarting from dwindling nest eggs and sinking home values. “Given the likely drawn-out nature of the prospective adjustments in housing and financial markets, I see the most probable scenario as one in which the performance of the economy remains subpar well into next year and then gradually improves in late 2009 and 2010,” Donald Kohn, vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, concluded Wednesday evening. Worries about the economy sent the Dow Jones industrials down a staggering 733 points earlier Wednesday, erasing any hopes that the convulsions that have shaken Wall Street for a month were over.