* Yesterday's GOP victory began months ago, when Republicans realized they had to quell the extremism within their party. * How the GOP did it. * The Senate now has enough votes to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. * Penal reform passes in California, downgrading some nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors, and potentially
* Winning the Senate might be GOP's worst nightmare: pressures of governing could tear obstructionist element asunder. * Non-Republicans will be watching elections across the country for polling place irregularities—i.e., voter ID problems. * See also: A reading of US newspaper opinion sections shows the misinformation at the
* Latest UN climate change report predicts if emissions ceased, climate change effects will "continue for centuries." * Why scientists know humans cause climate change: The rate carbon dioxide absorbs heat doesn't match our temperature increase. * Cory Gardner might win Colorado by embracing birth control, college loans, and
It's time once again for our annual Halloween ritual, where we dust off a classic urban legend and reanimate it with a few new endings.
* Police find accused sniper Eric Frein in a Poconos airplane hangar after a 48-day manhunt. * With Frein captured, Halloween officially resumes in Barrett Township. * Ebola threatens to derail the legacy of Liberia's Sirleaf, Nobel Peace Prize winner and the first woman elected president of an African country.
* In the past five years, since the financial crisis, the world's number of billionaires has more than doubled. * Goldberg: Netanyahu's "chickenshit" behavior undermines US-Israel alignment at the highest levels. * Until mid-century, hundreds of thousands of Swiss kids were taken from home and
* Unmanned rocket explodes over Virginia in first accident since NASA began outsourcing to private contractors. * Stunning highlights from the 45,000 photos astronaut Chris Hadfield took while on the International Space Station. * The FBI created a fake online news story in a Seattle newspaper to hack a suspect in 2007.
* In a rare, school-specific survey, 17% of female MIT students and 5% of male students report being sexually assaulted. * Ebola vaccines must be tested, but administering frontline workers a placebo could be unethical. * In distancing themselves from an unpopular president, midterm candidates have succeeded only in disowning their own
* For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, the pro-Russian Communist Party failed to win the votes needed to enter parliament. * Latin America has the highest concentration of compulsory-voting states—a policy suppressed elsewhere for fear of union power. * Following controversial Ebola quarantine of health worker
* New York City has an Ebola patient; officials tracing every contact he made, including while bowling in Williamsburg. * Health workers in Texas use Tabasco during training for its tingling properties, to say if they've been contaminated. * Confessions of an Ebola thrillist. * Some US hospitals considering whether to withhold
