A new CNN/ORC International poll found that 52 percent of registered voters now back President Obama, while just 46 percent still back his challenger, Mitt Romney. The president received a 4-point bump following the Democratic National Convention last week. President Obama’s favorability rating rose to 57 percent last week, which is the highest it has been since 2010. Mitt Romney’s favorability rating rose to 53 percent after the Republican National Convention, but it fell to 48 percent one week later.

Close to 30,000 Chicago teachers went on strike Monday for the first time in 25 years, according to their union. The educators have been locked in a struggle with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration over reforms to city education Emanuel wants to implement. “We have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike,” said Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis on Sunday. “In the morning no CTU members will be inside our schools.” It is estimated that 350,000 students will be affected. On Monday morning officials told The Associated Press that measures were being taken to ensure student safety.

President Obama’s campaign raised a stunning $114 million in August, outpacing the GOP in the race for cash for the first time in months. Mitt Romney’s campaign took in $111 million last month. “No celebrating, because they’re going to have an even bigger September,” the Obama campaign tweeted, warning supporters off the idea that the Republicans may be on the run. “But now we know we can match them, doing this our way.” The Democrats flagged through the summer months as Romney’s camp raised in excess of $100 million each month in June, July, and August.

AIG, the insurer that nearly went belly up in 2008 and required a massive bailout, has recovered nicely. Sunday, the Treasury Department, which has whittled its ownership stake down to 53 percent, announced it would sell a massive slug of AIG stock: $18 billion. AIG is buying back $5 billion in shares, and the rest will be sold back to the public. The move will cut taxpayers’ stake in AIG to less than 20 percent.

It took eight years and five near-misses, but Andy Murray finally won his first Grand Slam title, defeating world No. 1 Novak Djokovic in a marathon U.S. Open final, 7–6, 7–5, 2–6, 3–6, 6–2. Murray took a commanding lead in the first set as Djokovic struggled with the high winds on the court. But it ended in a grueling tiebreak that lasted 25 minutes before Murray won 12–10. Murray remained in charge, winning a tiebreak for the second set, until a break by Djokovic in the third put the Serb back on track. Djokovic took command for the next two sets, sending the match into its fifth hour and fifth set. Murray broke Djokovic’s serve three times in the final set to win the thriller. His victory was the first Grand Slam win for a British player in 76 years, and followed his home-turf triumph at the London Olympics in July.

Save the economy? There may be app for that. JPMorgan is predicting that the release of Apple’s feverishly anticipated iPhone 5, expected to be unveiled Wednesday, could significantly boost GDP growth. According to JPMorgan’s Michael Feroli, the launch of the iPhone 5 could add between 0.25 to 0.5 percent to annualized economic growth in the fourth quarter. He says that the numbers from the blockbuster release last year of the iPhone 4S supports the lofty projection. At least 8 million iPhone 5’s are predicted to be purchased in the next three months.

What's the latest front in the political battle to win the White House? Big Apple Pizza's Yelp page. After the establishment's owner, Scott Van Nuzer, bear-hugged the president in front of photographers, people from all over the country and across the political spectrum have taken to Yelp to voice their feelings about his support for the Obama campaign. One poster from California noted, "you won't get mine or anyone else's business for your treachery." Another from New York said, "These reviews demonstrate that the right-wingers DON'T support small businesses." The restaurant is in Florida.

GoDaddy was an absent father on Monday. The web-hosting juggernaut was the victim of a possible hacking attack, resulting in outages for its millions of clients. A message on the GoDaddy.com website Monday read, “Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.” Many of GoDaddy’s clients are small businesses. The outage began around 1 p.m. EST. Though the hacking collective Anonymous was initially blamed for the attack, someone named “Anonymous Own3r” tweeted, “The attack is not coming from Anonymous coletive, the attack is coming only from me.’

Whatever happened to that recovery? The Federal Reserve announced Monday that consumer credit shrank by $3.28 billion in July, the first time it's gone down in 11 months. The decline indicates that Americans are buying less on credit cards and taking out fewer student loans. Consumer borrowing had been booming since the end of the recession, but the July number—which undershot economist estimates by more than $12 billion—marks a dramatic change. It’s very bad news for the economic recovery, since consumer purchases account for two-thirds of GDP. It also coincides with a slowdown in hiring. According to the Labor Department, the economy added only 96,000 jobs in August, as thousands dropped out of the workforce.

Casino billionaire Steve Wynn came out on top Monday in a courtroom brawl with Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis, winning $20 million in a two-year-old defamation suit against the soft-porn mogul. While the two have allegedly been feuding for years, this specific fight started in 2010 when Francis told a judge that Wynn threatened to kill him with a shovel and bury him in the desert over a $2 million gambling debt. Wynn’s attorney said Francis “committed character assassination” because he “didn’t want to pay his debt,” though Francis maintains the threat was real and that a friend of Wynn’s had tipped Francis off about Wynn's alleged assassination plans in an email. Needless to say, the email was never produced in court.

Dutch politician Geert Wilders received financial backing from American groups that feared the spread of Islam, according to a new Reuters report. Wilders’s Freedom Party, which campaigns against immigration from non-Western countries and seeks to ban the building of mosques in the Netherlands, operates under Dutch funding regulations that do not require it to disclose its donors. Wilders received funding from the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum when he faced charges of inciting racial hatred in 2010 and 2011. Wilders has received either financial or moral support from conservative activists in the United States including David Horowitz and Pamela Geller, according to the report.

After finding evidence that drug cartels were using submarines to ship narcotics in the Pacific Ocean, authorities say they have seen increased use of the craft in the Caribbean as traffickers move away from high-speed boats to smuggle their product. The drug smugglers build the submarines in hidden locations deep in the jungles of South America, and American law-enforcement officials say that the craft they have found in use recently are more sophisticated and less detectable than ever before, capable of traveling from South America to the United States completely underwater.

One of the four victims of a mysterious shooting in the French Alps last week has been identified as the grandmother of the two young girls who survived, police announced Monday. Zaina, 7, and Zeena al-Hilli, 4, survived the brutal shooting by hiding in the car where their mother and father were found dead. A passing cyclist was also killed. On Monday police bomb squads also arrived at the British family’s home, evacuating neighbors after officers found suspicious objects while searching the residence. Police are still working to discover what motivated the murders and who carried them out.

After being sentenced to death in absentia Sunday, Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, who has been in exile in Turkey, maintained his “absolute innocence” and said that the charges against him were politically motivated. The Sunni politician became the target of terror charges in December, and he said Monday that Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had framed him. “The death sentence is a price I have to pay due to love of my country and my loyalty to my people,” al-Hashemi said Monday. “I reiterate that I’m innocent and am ready to stand before a fair judicial system and not a corrupt one that is under al-Maliki’s influence.”

Land in undeveloped residential areas is enjoying a spike in demand as some onlookers see a comeback in the American housing market. “We are coming out of the mother of all housing cycles, and residential land is the best way to play the ultimate recovery,” said Paulson & Co. portfolio manager Michael Barr. With sales of single-family homes up more than 3.5 percent in July and foreclosures bottoming out, hedge funds and investment firms seem to think it may be time to turn the cheap land they bought as the housing market tanked back into cash.

The United States handed over control of the only prison still under its control in Afghanistan on Monday. Bagram prison, which holds in excess of 3,000 Taliban members and prisoners suspected of ties to terrorist groups, was built three years ago near an important American airfield outside Kabul. The handover is a political coup for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a crucial step toward giving control of key institutions to Afghan personnel before most American troops pull out in 2014. The prison came to international attention this year in connection to what has been called the accidental burning of Qurans from the prison’s library by American forces.

Pending decisions in state and federal courts may prove critical to the outcome of the 2012 election as judges rule on balloting procedures. In some states, experts said, uncertainty over whether all ballots were properly counted may lead to a slew of post-election lawsuits that could delay a final result. “In any of these states there is the potential for disaster,” said Lawrence Norden of New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. In Wisconsin, for example, the state attorney general recently appealed two voter-ID cases to the state Supreme Court. “You have close elections and the real possibility that people will say their votes were not counted when they should have been,” Norden said.

It's official, at least according to one source: People magazine is reporting that the 2010 Sexiest Man Alive is now taken. Ryan Reyolds and Blake Lively reportedly wed at Boone Hall Plantation in South Carolina on Sunday night. Florence Welch performed and a DJ played music into the night. The pair recently bought a home in Bedford, New York and have been spotted together around town.

Prince Harry has become one of the Taliban’s No. 1 targets after arriving in Afghanistan to pilot attack helicopters in Her Majesty’s service, Taliban officials have confirmed to Reuters. They even dubbed the plots to assassinate or kidnap the 27-year-old royal the “Harry operations.” Harry previously served in Afghanistan in 2008, but had his tour cut short after news of his location leaked out. “We are using all our strength to get rid of him, either by killing or kidnapping,” Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, told Reuters. “We have informed our commanders in Helmand to do whatever they can to eliminate him.”

When Elizabeth Warren clambered down from the ivory tower and jumped into the fray of national politics, she quickly made herself known in Massachusetts as an academic turned politico who could serve up fully baked justifications for liberal positions. In a new profile in The New Yorker, legal expert Jeffrey Toobin examines the once apolitical Warren’s journey from Harvard Law School professor to the Democratic Party candidate she now is, locked in combat with Republican Sen. Scott Brown. “So now here we are, we’re in this election of 2012,” the ever-erudite Warren says, “and it’s right there on the table: what is the role of government?”

Fifteen thousand more workers joined strikes in South Africa that have rattled the country’s government and upset production at major gold and platinum mines in recent weeks. The thousands of new strikers did not show up for work Monday at Gold Fields International, where management said that the strike began Sunday night. At the Lonmin platinum mine, managers said that only 6 percent of the 28,000-member workforce showed up Monday. Workers at Lonmin are demanding that management double their wages and have threatened violent action against employees who cross the picket line and go to work before a resolution is reached.

Al Qaeda’s No. 2 leader in Yemen was killed in an airstrike Monday, along with five others who were riding with him in a car. Yemeni Defense Ministry officials say that Saeed al-Shihri was killed after leaving a house in the Hadramawt province. The officials believe that a U.S.-operated drone fired the missile, but U.S. officials do not usually comment on drone attacks. The United States has used drones to kill al Qaeda members in Yemen before.

The FBI has arrested Trenton, N.J., Mayor Tony Mack and seven other individuals as part of an ongoing corruption probe. Specific charges have not been announced, but they are expected to be detailed later on Monday. Mack’s administration has faced allegations of nepotism and reckless spending, and the mayor himself has faced questions about how he financed his campaign. In July, FBI agents raided Trenton City Hall, Mack’s home, and the home of one of his top campaign contributors. A former aide said: “This is not a surprise. A lot of people in Trenton were of the opinion—not of if, but when.”