KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia ? As the search pressed on Tuesday for a vanished Malaysian airliner, military officials said radar data showed it inexplicably turned and headed toward the Malacca Strait, hundreds of miles off its scheduled flight path, news agencies and Malaysian media reported.

    

A longtime adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton personally sought and secured the funding for what prosecutors say was an illegal shadow operation to boost Clinton?s 2008 presidential bid, according to court papers released as part of a wide-ranging campaign finance investigation.

    

President Obama?s foes have been trying for years to uncover scandal in his administration. But the most damning allegation of wrongdoing was leveled on the Senate floor Tuesday morning ? by a friend.

    

In the first major test of voter attitudes in 2014, Republican David Jolly won a closely watched special election for the U.S. House in Florida Tuesday, handing his party a narrow victory in a battleground district where Republicans and Democrats spent millions of dollars fine-tuning their messages on national issues ahead of the fall midterm elections.

    

A behind-the-scenes battle between the CIA and Congress erupted in public Tuesday as the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee accused the agency of breaking laws and breaching constitutional principles in an alleged effort to undermine the panel?s multi-year investigation of a controversial interrogation program.

    

The battle over men?s clothing is finally over.

Men?s Wearhouse agreed to buy Maryland-based Jos. A. Bank on Tuesday in a deal worth $1.8 billion, ending nearly six months of public hostilities between the menswear retailers.

    

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange penned an open letter to British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who portrays Assange in an upcoming film, praising the actor's talents but slamming his involvement with the film and turning down the actor's invitation to meet in person. Assange, who is currently holed up at the Ecuadorean embassy in London, wrote a letter to Cumberbatch dated January 15, 2013, that was published on Wednesday on the anti-secrecy website ahead of the October 18 theatrical release of Walt Disney Co's DreamWorks film "The Fifth Estate. ...

By Eric Kelsey BEVERLY HILLS, California (Reuters) - Barkhad Abdi, a tall wisp of a man with a narrow face and a wide grin, sat on the sofa in his hotel suite with one eye on the television and another on a view of the Hollywood Hills. The 28-year-old Somali-American, who had worked the past year at his brother's mobile phone store in Minneapolis, could hardly have called himself an actor when he began production in British director Paul Greengrass' thriller "Captain Phillips. ...

By Tom Heneghan PARIS (Reuters) - The French theatre, opera and film director Patrice Chereau, who mounted one of the most famous productions of Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle in Bayreuth in the 1970s, has died at the age of 68. Chereau, who was preparing a production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" when he succumbed to lung cancer, was a restless innovator who began directing at high school in Paris and never looked back. ...

(Reuters) - American actress Scarlett Johansson has been named the sexiest woman alive for the second time by Esquire, the men's lifestyle magazine said on Monday. "The Avengers" star was named sexiest woman in 2006 and is the only woman to have been given the title twice by the publication. The annual recipient of the title is chosen by Esquire editors. Husky-voiced Johansson, who rose to prominence as a teenager in the 2001 cult film "Ghost World," stars in three films this fall. ...

NBCNews.com's political cartoonists take a look back at the past week.

This blog is not dead.

Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: If you can't make it to the South Pacific's eclipse zone to watch the sun turn into a "ring of fire" on Thursday, you can still see the spectacle online.

From ?The Daddle? to ?The Freedom Flask?, Willie Geist offers some really bad ideas for dad this year.