After sweeping through the Caribbean and killing an estimated 60 people in its wake, Hurricane Sandy is posed to hammer the Eastern Seaboard as early as Monday. The sped of Sandy has declined, but is expected to pick back up and hit between Delmarva Peninsula and Rhode Island before blowing through eight states en route to Canada. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has already ordered evacuations of coastal areas and the casinos.

A series of attacks targeted Iraq’s Shiite community Saturday, despite increased security for the four-day religious holiday Eid al-Adha. The country was rocked by a string of bombings and shootings, including an explosion on playground equipment on the outskirts of Baghdad that killed eight, including four children. In the northern part of the country, gunmen broke into two houses, killing a boy and his parents in one home, and a mother and daughter in another.

After almost 40 years of endorsing Democratic candidates, the Des Moines Register has switched its tune and announced Saturday it’s going with Mitt Romney. With a “vigorous debate over this endorsement,” the Register decided Romney was more adept to pull “the economy out of the doldrums.” The editorial explained that “Romney has made rebuilding the economy his No.1 campaign priority—and rightly so.” So far, 18 newspapers nationwide have backed Romney, while 23 have come out in support of President Obama.

Election gimmicks? The White House is reportedly mulling a new tax cut that would replace the payroll tax cut when it expires, sources close to the administration said. The Obama administration is reportedly worried about the state of the economy, and hopes that a stimulus that would boost Americans’ take-home pay would help. If approved, the new tax cut would provide hundreds of dollars more per year to workers, similar to tax cuts received in 2009 and 2010, which provided up to $400 for single people and $800 for married couples. Any new tax cut would require approval by Congress—after the election.

No superstorm to stop them, voters in the battleground state of Florida showed up at the polls on Saturday as early voting kicked off for the Sunshine State. Early voting begins four days earlier this year than in 2008—with Sunday in particular expected to have high turnout, as many black churches across the state have organized “souls to the polls” events to get voters out. Early voting will end next Saturday, after state lawmakers eliminated early voting on the last Sunday before the election. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney campaigned with Florida Gov. Marco Rubio on Saturday, while a Tampa Bay Times poll of political analysts said Romney is likely to the win the state’s 29 electoral-college votes. 

The president certainly can make a joke out of something that (unbelievably) continues to shadow his tenure, thanks mostly to Donald Trump. In a New Hampshire speech slamming Romney for raising taxes and fees in neighboring Massachusetts, Obama made a veiled quip about his oft-questioned certificate of birth. “He raised fees to get a birth certificate, which would have been expensive for me,” the president said, to laughter. The president also made clear he is prioritizing the tracking and handling of Hurricane Sandy as he campaigns in the coming days, ensuring there are “no unmet needs as states continue to prepare.”

It takes more than a fraud conviction to keep Silvio Berlusconi out of politics. The former Italian prime minister told Italian TV on Saturday that he wants to “reform the justice system” and vowed to stay in politics—despite having been barred from holding office for five years. On Friday a judge sentenced Berlusconi to four years in prison for tax fraud, although he won’t have to serve the time until his last appeal, which could take years. Earlier in the week, Berlusconi had vowed to stay out of politics, saying he would instead give “advice, expertise, speaking and judging without intruding”—but he clearly could not keep to that very long.

Indonesia’s antiterror squad on Friday and Saturday arrested 11 people suspected of planning bomb attacks on the U.S. embassy in Jakarta and several other places. National police spokesman Maj. Gen. Suhardi Aliyus said the suspected terrorists belonged to a new group called the Sunni Movement for Indonesian Society, or HASMI. They were allegedly planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, a plaza near the Australian Embassy, the local office of the U.S. mining company Freeport-McMoRan, the U.S. Consulate in Surabaya, and the headquarters of a special police force in Java.

Guess what everyone? Racism is still thriving in the U.S., according to an Associated Press poll released on Saturday—and Americans are even more racist now than in 2008, despite electing the country's first black president. Fifty-one percent of Americans now hold racial prejudices against blacks, compared with 48 percent in 2008, the poll finds. In the poll, respondents were asked questions to measure explicit racism, such as what words they used to identified people who are black or Hispanic. In terms of the election, the poll found that President Obama could lose up to 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote due to racism—although he does stand to gain 3 percentage points based on people voting for him because of his race.

Apology necessary. Posting an open letter on his website Friday, the recently hitched pop sensation apologized for the “silly, unsavory” wedding video made as a joke by his friend. The video—which made its way onto Gawker Wednesday—featured an odd variety of people, from homeless men to transsexuals, giving their wedding wishes to the newly married Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel. In his defense, Timberlake swears he had no knowledge of the video and that, contrary to reports, it was not shown at the wedding.

With a week and a half to go before this madness is over, a new CNN/ORC International poll is showing the president with a substantial four-percentage-point lead in Ohio, arguably the most important battleground state. The poll, out Friday and conducted postdebate this week, has Mitt Romney coming in at 46 percent and President Obama holding 50 percent of the support in the state. Polls conducted last month showed Obama beating Romney by seven to 10 points, but after his poor performance in the first debate, the president’s lead in the state all but disappeared—until now. But don’t place your bets on this latest result just yet: the president’s advantage is still within the poll’s sampling error.

“Together we can bring real change to this country,” Romney told a crowd at a factory in Iowa Friday. “Wait, wasn’t that my line?” President Obama must have been wondering on a campaign bus somewhere. If the last two days of speeches are any indication, Romney seems to have adapted the president’s famous 2008 campaign slogan in order to argue that his rival has strayed from his original promises. Romney’s aides said this new angle will be the GOP candidate’s last new line of attack against Obama. “True to form, Mitt Romney’s most recent ‘major policy speech’ included dishonest attacks and empty promises of change, but no new policy,” the president’s campaign responded.

Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by the Taliban, is recovering well in Britain, her father said on Friday. Reunited with her family at a hospital in Birmingham, Ziauddin Yousafzai, cried when he first laid eyes on her. Talking to a room full of reporters Friday, he called his daughter’s prognosis a “miracle” and said that she will “rise again.” Malala was attacked after writing about the need to improve girls’ education in Pakistan, which inspired an international crusade in her defense.

Who was running this filthy place? The FDA has found mold and bacteria in the clean room where drugs were made at the New England Compounding Pharmacy, the pharmacy linked to the meningitis outbreak. The FDA, which has remained largely quiet on the outbreak until now, delivered an eight-page report Friday on its inspection of the pharmacy, noting that Massachusetts officials also found fungal material at the center. “There was no investigation conducted by the firm when levels exceeded their action limits,” the report reads. Officials also found “greenish black foreign matter” and “white filamentous material” in the steroid linked to the national outbreak, which has killed 25 people and sickened more than 300.

Tsewang Kyab, 23, became the fifth Tibetan in a week to die of self-immolation when he set himself on fire Friday evening. Occurring on the main street of Amuquhu, in the county of Xiah, Kyab’s suicide was a public protest against the heavy-handed Chinese rule that has led many other ethnic Tibetans to do the same. Police are reportedly offering up to $7,700 for anyone who can provide information about the planned self-immolations before they happen. The demonstrations are coming at a pivotal time, when China’s Communist Party is gearing up for a major power transfer in less than two weeks.

Most Syrians didn’t believe President Bashar al-Assad would honor a United Nations–backed four day ceasefire—and they  were right. Opposition activists in Syria’s major cities reported a return of heavy government bombardment Saturday, two days after a supposed truce for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. A short lull in the fighting was shattered only hours after the truce took effect Friday, when a car bomb exploded in Damascus. The cities of Damascus and Aleppo brace for day two of fighting after losing 150 in the first day alone. The country remains embroiled in a seemingly interminable conflict, in which a reported 35,000 people have been killed.

Amherst College has vowed to change its policy toward sexual assaults after the campus newspaper printed a disturbing account of the way the school reacted to her rape case. “Eventually, I reached a dangerously low point, and in my dependency, began going to the campus’s sexual-assault counselor,” writes Angie Epifano in The Amherst Student. She writes that she felt the school asked her “are you sure it was rape?” The response on campus was immediate, and within hours, other Amherst students, both past and present, told their own stories of sexual assault at the school—and called on the school to change its policy. The school’s president, Carolyn Martin, released an impassioned statement declaring things “must change, and change immediately.”

Two days after the horrifying murder of two Upper West Side kids by their nanny, distressing details about the mental state of Yoselyn Ortega have begun to emerge. Living in a tiny apartment that she shared with her teenage son, sister, and niece, Ortega was low on money—and patience. Juan Pozo, a car-service driver who used to rent a room in her apartment, said the Dominican native “felt like she was losing her mind.” Pozo also confirmed that the Krim family—whose 6-year-old and 2-year-old were fatally stabbed in the incident—had taken her to see a psychologist.

The surgeon general is winning. A new study, performed on 1.3 million women, found that those who quit smoking by the age of 30 avoid up to 97 percent of the risk of premature death associated with smoking. Published in The Lancet, a medical journal, the “Million Women Study” showed that women who smoked until the end of their lives died a decade earlier than those who stopped at 30. The study consisted of women age 50 to 65 who were monitored for 12 years on average and routinely given questionnaires about living habits, as well as medical and social factors.