Winners

Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership: The economic development group launches www.yourstorymadehere.com, a website that highlights northeast Indiana’s amenities, quality of life and opportunities.

Curbside recycling: The city’s successful one-cart program wins the 2012 Governor’s Award for Environmental Excellence in Indiana.

Pennsylvania voters: Judge rules the state’s new photo ID law wasn’t implemented in time for Nov. 6 election and that some qualified voters could be disenfranchised.

Mitt Romney: First presidential debate has no knockout punches, but most political judges give Romney the win.

Tossups

Workers: The 2 percentage-point reduction in the Social Security tax wage-earners have enjoyed the past two years will almost certainly go away in 2013 – essentially giving workers a 2 percent pay cut. But continuing the cut would hurt the already-shaky long-term sustainability of Social Security.

Winter storms: The Weather Channel announces it will start assigning names to major winter storms, as is done with hurricanes. It beats “Snowmageddon,” but we’ll be no less pleased to meet Blizzard Brutus or Ice Storm Gandolf.

Losers

Mike Tyson: The ex-boxer’s “Down- under” speaking tour is threatened after New Zealand cancels his visa and Australia considers the same action because of his 1992 Indianapolis rape conviction.

USPS: The Postal Service defaults on a $5.6 billion payment to a pension fund for future retirees, the second such default this year. The service predicts a $15 billion operating loss for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Joe Biden: Another day, another gaffe from the veep; this time remarking that the middle class has been “buried” for the past four years.

Chicago: Murder toll hits 391, 25 percent higher than all of last year and more than the much larger New York and Los Angeles.

Milestones

Barry Commoner: A biologist who was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm over the danger of radioactive fallout, he became one of the founders of the environmental movement. He was so linked with ecology that in 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, he was on the cover of Time magazine and called the “Paul Revere of Ecology.” He died at 95.

Facebook: Popular social network site tops 1 billion users.