Do you drive a motor vehicle? Then dig this! Oceans of parking, or maybe just some pleasantly sized lakes, have opened in downtown Portland, the city's transportation bureau reports—after a significant tightening of the rules governing so-called "disabled placards" earlier this year.

Governor John Kitzhaber's office seems hellbent on waiting until after next week's election (and charging usurious amounts of money) before releasing all kinds of public records requested as part of various media outlets' investigations into First Lady Cylvia Hayes and whether and how her business mingled with the state's.

The terminally ill woman who grew nationally famous after moving to Oregon so she could avail herself of physician-assisted suicide has postponed the procedure, originally planned for Saturday. She says she's still feeling well enough to enjoy time spent with her friends and family—"but it will come," she adds, "because I feel myself getting sicker. It's happening each week."

Apple CEO Tim Cook has always been privately open about his sexuality. But now he's made it exultantly and wonderfully and perfectly public:

My desire for personal privacy has been holding me back from doing something more important. That’s what has led me to today.

For years, I’ve been open with many people about my sexual orientation. Plenty of colleagues at Apple know I’m gay, and it doesn’t seem to make a difference in the way they treat me. Of course, I’ve had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people’s differences. Not everyone is so lucky.

While I have never denied my sexuality, I haven’t publicly acknowledged it either, until now. So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me.

And in auld-timey news! The very Venerable Game of Base-Ball has a familiar New World Champion this morning. The Giants Ball Club, which plays in the Bay-Side Jewel of San Francisco, displayed great Skill and Fortitude in vanquishing the detestable Royals Ball Club of Kansas City, a most Garish and Gauche Cow-Town on a River. (And then Giants fans promptly responded to the good news by throwing bottles, shooting guns, and burning up their furniture in the middle of city streets.)

Russian fighter jets have come awkwardly close to NATO airspace four times since Tuesday, at times piercing it ever so slightly. The incursions seem to be a deliberately provocative move, threatening to leave relations with the West—already rubbed raw over Ukraine—in even worse shape.

Words like "declaration of war" are bubbling up from Palestine after Israel, reacting to clashes at the Al-Aqsa mosque (also venerated in Judaism as the Temple Mount), shut down access to the site for the first time in 14 years. The last time that happened? It sparked a Palestinian uprising.

Desperate to fend off a Republican takeover this fall, Democrats are waging a tough rhetorical war in the South—hoping to boost turnout among African Americans by linking the GOP with Ferguson and Trayvon Martin and the lingering legacy of Jim Crow laws.

An Ebola-quarantined nurse in Maine—who's totally ASYMPTOMATIC and yet whose home remains under the watchful eye of the state police—defied the paranoiac order keeping her homebound by taking a leisurely bike ride with her boyfriend.

Burkina Faso's parliament is burning down.

The American economy did better last summer than most people expected, growing at a 3.5 percent clip in the third quarter. That's the best three months we've seen in years.

THIS MAN NEVER NEEDED AUTO-TUNE. LET IT BE KNOWN.