Nearly six in ten watchers say that Obama did a better job in the debate than they had expected, 15 points higher than the 44% who said that the GOP challenger had a better than expected debate performance….

An Intelligencer Journal New Era article “Library officials fret over funding” reports: “The Library System of Lancaster County is looking for new sources of funding. But two officials from Lancaster Public Library, centered at 125 N. Duke St., voiced concerns Wednesday that fundraising efforts by the system will tap resources that might otherwise give to the system’s member libraries.”

Suddenly, Smith, who made a small fortune in western Pennsylvania’s bituminous coal industry and is investing more than $16 million to try to unseat Casey, is close enough in polls to plant seeds of doubt over the outcome of the race…

From the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER: … At the end of September, Corbett approved $10,000 raises for four aides on his 15-person executive and high-level staff, according to payroll records. The increases come just over 20 months into his first term, and as other departments have struggled with layoffs and unfilled positions to accommodate Corbett’s policy of reined-in spending in tough economic times…

“It’s not true that the United States and Iran have agreed to one-on-one talks or any meeting after the American elections,” the statement said. “We continue to work with the P-5 (five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council) on a diplomatic solution and have said from the outset that we would be prepared to meet bilaterally.”…

ALJAZEERA: For centuries, Switzerland has been a peaceful haven; its mountains wrapped in majestic mystery and its banking in centuries of secrecy. But for the world’s tax cheats, Switzerland is now a paradise lost. Foreign governments are prying open the $2 trillion offshore banking business in the country with tax treaties.

From the HUFFINGTON POST: ….Among other things, evidence in the report indicates that the NRC has known for at least the last six years, and perhaps much longer, that failure of a dam upriver from the Oconee Nuclear Station in South Carolina would cause floodwaters to overwhelm the plant’s three reactors and their cooling equipment…

The account it offered of his life — every friendship declared, every photo uploaded, every “poke” or comment or invitation sent or received over three years of casual use — sparked an online sensation when he posted it on a Web site he christened “europe-v-facebook.org.”

“It’s incredibly misleading,” said [Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania], who helped lead the legal team that challenged the state’s voter ID law and won a partial victory in Commonwealth Court that got that requirement put on hold for the Nov. 6 election…

The Sandusky scandal is a criminal matter. It is not an opportunity for those of you who hate college football to opine about the evils of college football. The evils of college football are real enough. And professors are especially sensitive to them: There have been tensions between athletes and intellectuals ever since the first teenage Greek athlete deposited the first teenage Greek philosopher in a high-school wastebasket…

By the fall of 2010, mounting questions and a probing Philadelphia Inquirer series pressured then–Attorney General Tom Corbett, now the state’s Republican governor, to launch an investigation. Since then, the attorney general’s office has confirmed only that an investigation is ongoing, without releasing any further information about its progress. “Normally, an investigation like this would never take that long,” said Randall Roth, a charitable trust and legal ethics expert at the University of Hawaii, who has written extensively on a parallel case in Hawaii involving the Bishops Estate trust. “It’s very surprising that it’s taking longer than two years.”…