How will Mitt Romney’s beleaguered campaign explain this ghost in the GOP nominee’s closet? In a video taken at a fundraiser earlier this year, Romney is captured telling some 30 big donors that 47 percent of all voters will vote to reelect the president because “they are dependent on government,” “believe that they are victims,” and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” The anonymous filmmaker posted several clips across the Internet Monday and leaked the video in full to Mother Jones, where Romney can be seen and heard making incendiary remarks about immigrants and Obama supporters “who pay no income tax.” When discussing his background, he said that he’d “have a better shot of winning” if he had been “born of Mexican parents.” Romney's campaign responded in a statement that the candidate wants to "help all Americans struggling in Obama's economy."

Mitt Romney’s leaked comments, recorded by a hidden camera at a closed-door fundraiser, that 47 percent of Americans “believe that they are victims” and prefer President Obama because his politics are “attractive to people who are not paying taxes” quickly lit up the blogosphere Monday—so quickly, in fact, that Romney held an impromptu press conference at 10:30 p.m. that night to address them. In his brief remarks, he doesn’t disavow the argument, instead saying it was “not elegantly stated” and “spoken off the cuff.” He also said that comments were in line with his campaign strategy to “focus on the people in the middle.”

After four American and two British troops were killed in “insider attacks” in Afghanistan over the weekend, the U.S. military has halted joint missions between its troops and its Afghan trainees. Afghan government troops have turned on American soldiers repeatedly this year, killing a record 51. In the attack over the weekend, two Marines were killed, two jet fighters destroyed, and $200 million worth of damage was done to a heavily fortified base. American strategy and eventual withdrawal depends on training Afghan forces to take over security duties once the U.S. has left, but for now that is on hold. "We have got to do a better job at protecting our troops,” one official said.

Maybe bigger screens are better. The new iPhone 5 broke sales records when it was made available for preorder on Friday. Apple says that customers placed more than 2 million orders for the phone on its first day, easily beating out its predecessors. The iPhone 4S received 1 million preorders on its first day last year, while the iPhone 4 had only 600,000 on its first day. Sales were so brisk for the new device that Apple had to start delaying deliveries just over an hour after it began accepting preorders. Apple is expected to sell 6 to 8 million phones when the device is released this weekend.

One year after it vaulted to international attention by exploiting a gray area in Manhattan’s zoning laws, Occupy Wall Street marked its anniversary with demonstrations in New York City on Monday. Hundreds of protesters gathered in the area surrounding Wall Street, clogging intersections and leading to about 100 arrests. OWS’s last major attempt at a resurgence, on May 1, failed to return the protest movement to the prominence it achieved before being kicked from its home in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan last November.

A video of Mitt Romney behind closed doors blasting the 47 percent of Americans he says don’t pay income tax has gone viral so quickly that the most wicked influenza strains are undoubtedly jealous. Now, New York’s Daily Intel reports that former President Jimmy Carter’s grandson is to blame—or thank, depending on your view. James Carter IV is credited as a research assistant on the Mother Jones piece that broke the story. Carter spends time “almost every day” searching for video clips of Republicans. Once he unearthed today’s infamous footage, he put the source in contact with Mother Jones, who he has worked with before.

Crowds protested in Kabul on Monday, the latest Muslim-world demonstration in an outpouring of anti-American sentiment, as the militant group Hizbullah called for more unrest. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the militant group based in Lebanon, said that Muslims “would not be silent in the face of this insult.” Police officials in Afghanistan said 3,000 to 4,000 demonstrators marched in the capital city Monday and succeeded in burning some police cars, but were mostly contained by security forces. “We will defend our prophet until we have blood across our bodies,” one protester told reporters. “Americans will pay for their dishonor.”

Jerry Sandusky in many ways went about his sex abuse in a textbook manner, and that’s partly why he managed to hide it for so long. The former Penn State football coach managed to get away with sexually abusing young boys for years, shrouded both by the pigskin loyalties of Happy Valley and a veil of social respectability. In The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell explores the ways in which child molesters build their lives and those of the people around them to accommodate their behavior. “Horsing around in the shower?” Gladwell writes. “It did not occur to them that the goofy, horseplaying Sandusky they thought they knew was another of Sandusky’s deceptions.”

President Obama has announced plans to file a broad suit against China's World Trade Organization, accusing the country of illegal practices regarding its auto trade in a complaint filed Monday. The president used the opportunity to take aim at Mitt Romney, arguing that the GOP nominee contributed to the problem during his time at Bain Capital by relentlessly outsourcing jobs. In response to Obama's jab, Romney said the president's "credibility on this issue has long since vanished." China is a growing exporter of automotive parts, and the White House’s complaint says that from 2009 to 2011 exporters got $1 billion in illegal subsidies that put American suppliers at an unfair disadvantage.

As if a day could go by without a musical reality competition making an announcement about celebrity judges. NBC announced Monday that Usher and Shakira will replace Cee Lo Green and Christina Aguilera on Season 4 of The Voice, to air this spring. (Season 3 got underway earlier this month.) Current judges Adam Levine and Blake Shelton will return for the fourth cycle. “I am a singer and performer first, and I am so excited to get back to that love,” Aguilera said, adding that the back-to-back seasons is too much of a commitment for her. Green also has new music in the works, as well as an NBC comedy based on his life.

Even as Prince William and Kate Middleton prepared to sue one magazine to stop it from printing more photographs of Kate topless, an Italian publication went ahead and ran the images anyway on Monday. Chi, a gossip magazine, printed the photos of the duchess under the headline “The Queen Is Naked.” While Buckingham Palace has tried to squelch interest around the photographs and no British publication has run the images, they are readily available online. Over the weekend, the editor of the Italian celebrity tabloid tweeted that “not even a direct call from the Queen” would stop him from publishing the photos.

Mei Xiang, the National Zoo’s female giant panda, gave birth to a cub on Sunday night; her first since 2005. Experts believed that the chances of Mei becoming pregnant this year were less than 10 percent. And China, which leases all giant pandas in U.S. zoos, had said that it would consider replacing Mei if she did not become pregnant this year. Earlier in September, the zoo had said that Mei had changed her behavior in ways that could indicate a pregnancy, but ultrasounds were inconclusive. Baby pandas weigh only about four ounces and resemble naked mole rats. But as cute as this one is, it will not be seen by the public for several months.

In what may be an important case for the use of DNA evidence, the American Civil Liberties Union will mount a challenge in San Francisco on Wednesday to California’s practice of collecting DNA samples from arrestees. Currently every person arrested on felony charges can be forced by police to supply a DNA sample, even before they are convicted, a practice that has brought the state’s DNA database to about 2 million samples. That number is only growing as law-enforcement officers in California are collecting in excess of 11,000 samples from suspects every month, a practice that the ACLU will argue infringes on citizens’ civil rights.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi will travel to Washington, D.C., this week to receive a medal from Congress, one stop on the leader’s more-than-two-week tour of the United States. The democratic activist from Burma will also travel through the Midwestern states and to California. For many years a prominent dissident in Burma, Suu Kyi was released from house arrest two years ago and has since maintained a high international profile. Her visit is concurrent with a trip by Burma’s president, Thein Sein, who will gather with other world leaders at the United Nations.

Japanese workers at factories in China have been encouraged to stay home Monday after a territorial dispute between the two countries led to violent demonstrations over the weekend. Firms shut down many plants in preparation for prolonged outrage sparked by a territorial dispute over a set of islands in the East China Sea claimed by both countries. The Japanese government moved to purchase the uninhabited islands last week, a decision that inspired talk of damaged trade relations in Chinese media. Many Japanese laborers in China said they would stay off the streets Monday and hope that tensions relax before going back to work.

The protests in the past week betrayed a deep divide between the West and the Muslim world regarding some of America’s most deeply held freedoms, in particular freedom of speech. “We never insult any prophet—not Moses, not Jesus—so why can’t we demand that Muhammad be respected?” one protester in Cairo said, summing up the indignation that seems to have fueled many demonstrators, some of whom engaged in violence. Misunderstandings about freedom of speech are widespread in the Mideast—in Egypt, for example, it is common opinion that there are laws in the United States banning people from talking about the Holocaust.

We need to find intelligent ways to broach the unmentionable subjects when it comes to Medicare, writes Steven Rattner, former counselor to the secretary of the Treasury, in The New York Times. While hyperventilating politicians have done much to cloud the issue, it’s time to take serious measures, Rattner says. With both presidential tickets offering plans for the program, Rattner says that “the big money in Medicare is not to be found in Mr. Ryan’s competition or Mr. Obama’s innovation, but in reducing the cost of treating people in the last year of life, which consumes more than a quarter of the program’s budget.”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is set to say on Monday that he’ll mend America’s immigration woes in a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. The majority of Hispanic-American voters support President Obama’s reelection, and Romney’s speech is a bid to gain traction among the crucial demographic as the campaigns come in to the homestretch of the election season. “Americans may disagree about how to fix our immigration system, but I think we can all agree that it is broken,” Romney plans to say according to excerpts from his speech released in advance to the press.

Joe Ricketts, a billionaire whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, plans to shell out $12 million to support Republican candidates in the next week, with $10 million of that going to ads supporting presidential candidate Mitt Romney. The ads will run nationally, with more targeted spots appearing in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, and Virginia. The move by the 71-year-old Ricketts puts him in the company of other election-year conservative backers like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson, all of whom have been willing to pour millions into their pet causes. Ricketts has also started his own super PAC, the Ending Spending Action Fund.

Instead of bonding over their similarities (trouble with law enforcement, former-child-star status, etc.) Lindsay Lohan and Amanda Bynes are at odds, with Lohan tweeting that Bynes has gotten off easy in her recent encounters with the police. “Why did I get put in jail and a nickelodeon star has had NO punishment(s) so far?” Lohan tweeted Sunday, not long after Bynes had her car impounded for driving on a suspended license. “These are the moments that I appreciate my life experiences, living without regrets and Disney for supporting me as an actress-night all.”

Chicago’s first teachers strike in 25 years enters its second week Monday as Hizzoner Rahm Emanuel scrambled to the courts seeking an order to get the city’s educators back in the classrooms. The Chicago Teachers Union and city leaders seemed close to a deal Sunday, but that fell apart, and teachers opted to return to the picket lines Monday. The strike, which added an extra week to the summer vacations of about 350,000 of Chicago’s children, has left parents aggravated. “You had a whole week,” said Dequita Wade, a mother in the city. “This is beginning to be ridiculous.”

A top Mitt Romney adviser has admitted that the campaign has not given enough specifics about the candidate’s policy plans and vowed to be more specific in the remaining 50 days. Ed Gillespie said that recent polling has indicated that voters want to hear more from Romney about his own plans. “We are not rolling out new policy so much as we are making sure people understand that when we say we can do these things, here’s how we are going to get them done and these are the specifics.” He promised that the rest of the campaign season would see “new emphasis and renewed emphasis” on Romney’s approach to governing.

The Boy Scouts of America hid sex abuse committed among its ranks over more than twenty years, according to the Los Angeles Times. The paper reviewed instances of abuse documented in confidential files that date from the years 1970 to 1991, part of a collection of files maintained by the organization that chronicles allegations of molestation going back decades. The Times reported that in 80 percent of the cases documented in the years it obtained files for, the alleged abuse was never reported to law enforcement. The paper also reported that in several instances alleged sex abusers were able to circumvent the Boy Scouts’ blacklist and remain active in the organization.

A bomb threat caused Louisiana State University to evacuate its campus on Monday, according to the university's website. “A bomb threat has been reported on the LSU Campus. Please evacuate as calmly and quickly as possible,” read a banner on the website. According to local media, the threat was called in to the local 911 line. “We determined there was a need to evacuate the campus,” Associate Vice Chancellor Herb Vincent told local reporters. There was no other information immediately available on the nature of the threat. Classes and a scheduled event were canceled on campus in light of the threat.