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Democrat Claire McCaskill in a race long targeted by the GOP as crucial to regaining control of the Senate. But ominous signs were mounting against the six-term legislator from suburban St. Louis, mostly notably the apparent loss of millions of dollars in campaign advertising money.
• Akin went on two conservative radio shows Monday, pledging to keep the campaign alive, even as some people in his own party urged him to step aside.
• The decision has some urgency. Missouri election law allows candidates to withdraw 11 weeks before Election Day. That means the deadline to exit the Nov. 6 election is 5 p.m. Tuesday. Otherwise, a court order would be needed to remove a name from the ballot.
• "I was told the decision has to be made by 5 tomorrow, but I was calling you and letting you know that I'm announcing today that we're in," Akin told radio host Sean Hannity.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday.

• The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.
• Police hoped the Demographics Unit would serve as an early warning system for terrorism. And if police ever got a tip about, say, an Afghan terrorist in the city, they'd know where he was likely to rent a room, buy groceries and watch sports.
• But in a June 28 deposition as part of a longstanding federal civil rights case, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati said none of the conversations the officers overheard ever led to a case.
• "Related to Demographics," Galati testified that information that has come in "has not commenced an investigation."
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