A report from government news agency Xinhua said the debate had "turned into a vanity fair for China-bashers."

Both sides are fighting for an advantage over a dramatic moment Tuesday when the moderator corrected an assertion by Romney.

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Your morning global affairs speed-read

Mitt Romney temporarily lost the debate on the Obama administration's handling of last month's attack in Libya during Tuesday's town hall meeting, as even many conservatives have acknowledged. By focusing narrowly on what the administration said and when — and suggesting, without proof, that the president was seeking to cover up the facts about the attack rather than simply responding to incomplete intelligence — Romney painted himself into a corner and allowed Obama to come out ahead.

Numerous questions remain, however, notably regarding lax security in Benghazi and the slow pace of the investigation into the deaths of four Americans, and Romney will be primed to pounce during Monday's debate on foreign policy. He'll also be ready to point out the obvious inconsistency in Obama's insistence that he called the attack an “act of terror” from the get-go: why, then, did his administration continue to point to an anti-Islam video as a “proximate cause” of the violence for several weeks?

As both sides duke it out for political gain, one loser is already emerging: the truth. As Bloomberg argues in a deeply reported piece from Libya, “there is ample evidence neither the Obama administration’s initial accounts nor Republican portrayals of the incident are accurate.”

"It was a passing comment about acts of terror in general," said Ryan of Obama's Sept. 12 comments.

Biden said Romney's strategy was to "make it appear that the president didn’t know or didn’t care or was lying."

Conservatives on television and Twitter say their candidate flubbed what should have been an easy attack on the President Obama's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya last month during his second faceoff with President Obama on Tuesday night.

The first death of an American ambassador since 1979, the administration's shifting explanation of the events of the attack, and the revelation that requests for more security had been turned down were seen as easy ways to cut into the president's lead on national security. 

Instead, Mitt Romney got into an argument over whether Obama called the attack an “act of terror” the very next day – an argument he lost on the debate stage.

“Romney had a huge opening that he missed” on Libya, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer said on Fox.

Syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large at Breitbart.com, said Romney “botched the Libya issue royally.”

Obama said he called the consulate attack an "act of terror" the next morning, and Crowley vouched for him.

The Obama administration has sent more than 20 Defense and Homeland Security officials to Burma, London's Guardian newspaper reports, marking the strongest U.S. overture in decades to a military force that ruled the country until 2010 and prompting concerns from human-rights activists.

U.S. officials say the talks will have a strong focus on human-rights issues such as the protection of civilians in conflict zones as the United States continues to lift sanctions in response to recent democratic reforms. 

A spokesman for the U.S. embassy in Rangoon described it to The Guardian as "an exchange between U.S. department of defense representatives and their Burmese counterparts as part of a broad inter-agency discussion to support continued reform."