Democratic sources tell ABC's George Stephanopoulos McCain is ceding New Hampshire and Wisconsin to Obama, "stretching out previous ad buys over more days rather than devote new ad money." The newsman—who is up with a great new blog, George's Bottom Line—writes the McCain camp is not denying the pullout, saying only: "We are on the air in those states." The latest polls put Obama ahead of McCain by 12 percentage points in Wisconsin and 7 in New Hampshire.

A big story buried in today's Times: President Bush has decided to keep Guantánamo Bay open, despite having said publicly he wants to close it, and actually never even considered State Department and Pentagon proposals for transferring the detainees to other prisons. “The effect of Mr. Bush’s stance,” the Times reports, “is to leave in place a prison that has become a reviled symbol of the administration’s fight against terrorism, and to leave another contentious foreign policy decision for the next president.” Both Barack Obama and John McCain have called to close Guantánamo, but neither has outlined how they would deal with the legal repercussions. Dick Cheney and his legal mini-me, David Addington, hope the next president keeps it open in order to validate Bush’s policy.

After weeks of rumors, the Los Angeles Times breaks the news definitively: Sumner Redstone and his wife of five years, Paula Fortunato, are splitting, with the Viacom chief filing divorce papers last Friday. The couple have “amicably ended our marriage,” a spokesman said. Fortunato, 46, will receive at least $5 million of Redstone’s own money—not his troubled company’s. The Times writes: “The merger of Fortunato, a former third-grade teacher in New York City, and Redstone culminated after a blind date arranged by a mutual friend and executive at Bear Stearns & Co, according to the couple’s 2003 wedding announcement in the New York Times. It is worth noting that Bear Stearns also did not survive.”

In light of the news that Barack Obama is cancelling campaign appearances later this week in order to tend his ailing grandmother, Michael Crowley at The New Republic points to an important fact. After his mother’s death, Obama said “the biggest mistake I made was not being at my mother’s bedside when she died.” Obama’s mother died of ovarian and uterine cancer in 1995. “I didn’t get there in time,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004, which, perhaps, makes it all the more important that he be there now.

Bleak forecasts from Texas Instruments and Sun Microsystems pushed stocks down today, though a settlement of Lehman Brothers' credit default swaps was completed without major fallout, giving analysts some hope the credit crunch will be fixed. But don’t despair. “If the total amount of losses is less than the market is expecting, we could see a resumption of an upward trend that could take the Dow back above 10,000 in a short period of time,” Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Avalon Partners, told Market Watch. The S&P dropped 3.08 percent and the Nasdaq 4.14 percent, while the Dow closed down 231.77 points, to 9,033.66. Leading the declines were Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Citigroup, which was downgraded to a sell by Goldman Sachs.

A week after calling small towns "the real America" and "the very pro-America areas," Sarah Palin is offering an apology—of sorts. She told CNN she didn't mean to imply, at a fundraising event in North Carolina last week, that some parts of the country are more patriotic than others. "I don't want that misunderstood," she told Drew Griffin. "If that's the way it came across, I apologize." Palin's next interviews, with NBC's Brian Williams, air Wednesday and Thursday.

Over at Slate, John Swansburg pens a love note to the birthday party—bumper bowling for kids, a nice game of Taboo at home for grown-ups—as he takes down its 20-something iteration, the birthday dinner. “In the moment between earning your college degree and signing your first mortgage, the birthday party transmogrifies into something else. It becomes the birthday dinner,” he writes. A few years out of college, meeting up at a dive bar for a few drinks becomes “a shade déclassé,” so everyone compromises—by inviting friends out to dinner at a restaurant. “Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner,” he writes. “It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar’s mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.”

Those worried about small things like the integrity of voting machines will want to take note of this. The new site DVICE.com has an interactive map that tells you which states are most susceptible to hacking. Among the swing states, Pennsylvania seems fraught: Eighty-two percent of the state’s population uses electronic voting machines, which are more easily hacked than old-fashioned punch cards. Ohio, on the other hand, is rated only “significantly vulnerable.” Phew.

It’s been a long time since last winter, when Oprah hosted rallies for then-underdog, Barack Obama, but, if Matt Drudge’s latest scoop pans out, then the media will soon have cause to reprise the “Oprahbama” meme. According to Drudge’s unnamed source, Oprah has volunteered—is, in fact, “begging”—to produce Obama’s half-hour primetime advertisement that will air on October 29. The Obama campaign denies the superstar’s involvement, and Oprah refused to comment. The potential Game 6 of the Major League Baseball World Series has already been delayed eight minutes to accommodate Obama’s ad.

Over at The Guardian, Clive James pays tribute to the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died Monday of a brain tumor. Kavanagh’s past and present clients included Martin Amis, Robert Harris, Ruth Rendell, and Jeanette Winterson. “Every literary career is different but the same principles apply,” James, a client himself, writes. “The first principle is to have principles. The writer should not expect to have junk published; the publisher should not expect to get away with publishing junk; and the agent should not expect to be praised for extracting a huge advance from the publisher for a piece of junk that will never get the advance back.” Kavanagh is survived by her husband, the novelist Julian Barnes.

In the newest issue of The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin tells the story of Brandon Simms, an 8-year-old boy who has always insisted that he was meant to be a girl. Through Brandon, Rosin explores the growing acceptance of transgender identity. "Around the world,” she writes, “clinics that specialize in gender-identity disorder in children report an explosion in referrals over the past few years." Doctors have recently begun offering controversial treatments to children, such as blockers which prevent the onset of puberty, leaving the children in a suspended state of androgyny. By the story’s end, Brandon is known as Bridget, with pierced ears, a girl’s wardrobe, and the blessing of his conservative Army mother.

Having “trolled the wilds of the Neocon internet without finding anything remotely approaching a smoking gun,” Boris Johnson, the raffish London mayor, has come out for Obama. Johnson says he’s impressed by Obama’s ability—unlike Bush’s—to construct “grammatical English sentences.” But the Tory’s main point: if Obama wins, “we could even see the beginning of the end of race-based politics, with all the grievance-culture and special interest groups and political correctness that come with it.”

"I got diagnosed with herpes since we played." Since 2004, ABC News reports, more than 30,000 people have used the website Inspot.org to send messages like this, an anonymous way of sharing some important information with their sexual partners: you may have an STD. "It's kind of like the Evite for party notifications, but this is for STD notifications," said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, one of the sites developers, who got the idea for the site after tracing an outbreak of syphilis to an AOL chatroom. Inspot.org has been adapted by eight major metropolitan areas, nine states, and two international areas (including Romania) for both homosexual and heterosexual couples, with plans to expand.

Another day, another Madonna-Guy Ritchie bombshell: The Sun reports that the Material Guy believes the Material Girl is using her huge staff to spy on him in the wake of their split. After details of a private “war summit” Ritchie held with his sister and father leaked out, he told a “friend” that Madge’s tactics were like “something concocted by the KGB…This is a divorce, not the Cold War.” At least the divorcing diva has a friend to lean on. Gwyneth Paltrow told reporters in London yesterday: “I speak to her a lot. She’s a dear friend…I’m supporting her in all ways that I can. I’m here on the other end of the phone.” But is the phone tapped?

The lead story from today's Science Times might break much new scientific ground, but for the horror movie fans out there, the opening anecdote is hard to beat. It features renowned entomologist Louis Sorkin and a jar of bedbugs, the parasites that are currently exploding in cities from New York to London. Continue if you dare: "Mr. Sorkin pushed up his shirt sleeve and pressed the mesh end of the jar against the inside of his right arm. Roused to a frenzy by the twin cues of heat and carbon dioxide the insects scrambled toward the lid, thrust out their stylets and began to feed." The rest of the story details a bevy of bloodsucking animals from fleas to finches. Yes, there are vampire finches.

The Bush administration may currently be one of the least popular in history, but at least it can look forward to immortality in art. Outgoing Cabinet secretaries and other elite appointees are, according to Washington tradition, sitting for portraits—a tradition that can cost taxpayers up to $50,000 for a single portrait. "I think most people like the tradition of presidents having their portraits painted," said one critic. "But where does the line get drawn?…[S]omewhere along the way, I'm pretty sure that you'd lose wide public support." How's this for a place to draw the line? A $46,790 portrait of Donald Rumsfeld is currently in production.

Slate’s Daniel Gross proposes “the Starbucks theory of international economics”: namely, the more Starbucks a country has, the more likely that country “is to have suffered catastrophic financial losses.” Caffeine-happy America, with nearly 200 Starbucks in Manhattan alone, obviously supports the point, particularly as Starbucks strategically opened stores on the ground floors of investment banks, to fuel late-night CDO deals. More casualties: London has 265 stores, South Korea 253, etc., etc. Yet Africa, Central America, and Italy do not have a single Starbucks store and have been insulated from the economic collapse. Gross predicts that Turkey, with 67 stores, will be next on the recession list.

First the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. Now CNN’s John King is reporting another retreat. “While Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado are still officially listed as McCain target states, two top strategists and advisers tell CNN that the situation in those states looks increasingly bleak,” King writes. King continues, “‘Gone’ was the word one top McCain insider used to describe those three states.” Polls have shown a relatively tight race in Colorado, but King’s source said the Obama campaign’s turnout operation was superior. If McCain concedes those three states (all won by Bush in 2004), he would have to win at least one Kerry state, like Pennsylvania.

If, in television, ratings are the bottom line, then Rachel Maddow has little to worry about these days. In the six weeks since Maddow took over the 9:00 p.m. hour on MSNBC, she's doubled the timeslot's audience. "I'm pinching myself," Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, tells The New York Times. Griffin used to say it “takes two or three years for a show to find its audience." Maddow retains a remarkable 90 percent of Keith Olbermann's audience. She has already done what many had thought impossible: slain Larry King (in the ratings). Now only if she could similarly defeat Sean Hannity, her competitor on Fox...

Barack Obama will take a few days off the trail starting Thursday to visit his 85-year-old grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, who is seriously ill. Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on the Obama campaign plane on Monday, “In the last few weeks her health has deteriorated to the point where her situation is very serious.” The announcement scuttles planned rallies in Des Moines, Iowa, and Madison, Wis., on Thursday; the Democratic nominee resumes campaigning Saturday in the West.

Back in July, 500 truckloads of white sand were stolen from the location of a planned resort in Jamaica, The Guardian reports. This works out to around 400 meters of beach—quite a heist. Police are taking the investigation very seriously, going so far as to “[test] other beaches for traces of the missing sand.” Though there have been no arrests, there are suspicions that “hotels may have been involved.” The paper says this isn’t the first such incident. In 2007, a Hungarian resort was relieved of its beach, huts, and sun loungers.