Harvard University revealed this week that it secretly photographed 2,000 undergraduate students attending classes in lecture halls last spring as part of an effort to measure attendance. The study, approved by the university administration, installed cameras in 10 lecture halls that took a photo every minute. The images were then analyzed by a computer program to assess how many seats were taken.

Students and teachers in the classrooms where not told about the study to avoid biasing the results, Harvard administrators said. “Professors whose lectures were monitored were told in August and all gave permission for the data to be used in the study,” Vice Provost Peter Bol, who oversaw the study, told the Associated Press. “Students were not told and the images themselves were destroyed, he said.”

“Prior to beginning the study, Bol said, he was given approval by Harvard’s Institutional Review Board, a federally mandated body that assesses academic research,” the Harvard Crimson reports. “According to Bol, members of that committee said that his work ‘did not constitute human subjects research,’ and, as such, did not require notification or permission of those involved.” A Harvard spokesman told NPR the university is now in the process of informing the students who may have been photographed during the study.

A 49-count federal indictment unsealed on Thursday charges the head of prisons in Mississippi, Christopher Epps, with orchestrating a massive corruption scheme where he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from private prison companies in return for contracts to work in the Mississippi prison system.

Epps, who had served as Mississippi Corrections Commissioner since 2002, is accused of pilfering more than $700,000 since 2008. How allegedly rotten was Epps’ tenure? Here’s how Mississippi’s the Clarion-Ledger described the Shawshank-like operation: “The head of Mississippi's prison system was raking in so much in bribes that he had to launder the money through his home mortgage and a beachfront condo, at one point even driving all over town making $9,000 cash deposits to avoid scrutiny larger amounts of cash would garner, according to a federal indictment.”

Epps is accused of getting kickbacks on sweetheart deals for prison contracts with local businessman Cecil McCrory acting as the middleman. “MDOC [Mississippi Dept. of Corrections] spends hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year in contracts, including more than $371 million for fiscal 2014,” according to the Clarion-Ledger.

Here’s more from the Clarion-Ledger on how the duo orchestrated the scam:

Prosecutors say McCrory, who owned companies doing business with MDOC, paid kickbacks to Epps in exchange for contracts to companies owned by McCrory, or companies who paid McCrory as a consultant. McCrory allegedly secretly paid Epps in cash or checks to banks that held his mortgage or loans, or to investment accounts Epps set up… Epps is accused of steering the contracts to McCrory's companies, sometimes recommending to the state personnel board that companies be given no-bid or sole-source contracts… The conspiracy between Epps and McCrory allegedly started in late 2007, with Epps signing a no-bid MDOC contract for McCrory's company G.T. Enterprises to provide comissary services at state and private prisons… Epps awarded more contracts to companies owned by McCrory or that had paid McCrory.

Epps resigned from his position on Wednesday. Both Epps and McCrory pleaded not guilty to charges of bribery, money laundering, and fraud on Thursday. The charges come as “the Justice Department is investigating treatment of prisoners and conditions at jails,” a person with knowledge of the investigation told the New York Times. “Advocates for prisoners say that stabbings, rapes, beatings and extortion are common in a number of the state’s jails.”

During her ultimately unsuccessful race against Scott Walker for the Wisconsin governorship, one of Mary Burke's campaign consultants was fired for copying parts of Burke's economic plan from work he'd done on behalf of canidates elsewhere in the country. Today that consultant, Eric Schnurer, popped up in The Atlantic to tell his side of the story and discuss the world of policy advising that he's a part of.

...I started a consulting firm to continue doing what I had liked about being chief of staff: policy and the strategy around effectuating it. While we’ve worked primarily with Democrats, we have also served three Republican governors, including two likely 2016 GOP presidential candidates.

Besides developing initiatives in a wide range of areas for state and local governments in a majority of states across the country—or, more accurately, in large part because of that knowledge—my firm also has been hired to provide public-policy advice to people running for office: roughly 75 gubernatorial candidates in almost every state, a dozen U.S. Senate campaigns, mayoral and city-council candidates, and two presidential campaigns.

The creation of Burke's plan was actually an involved task, he says:

Two of us worked nearly full-time—which for us meant 16 hours a day, seven days a week—for several weeks researching and writing the position paper. Practically every line in the paper involved extensive research. As background for four sentences on Wisconsin's water industry, I read studies by its Water Council, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Harvard Business School; in response to a question from the candidate about the transferability of community-college credits, we located the University of Wisconsin’s internal policy document on the subject.

The copied passages, he claims, were only included by mistake and had been "extensively rewritten" in the draft that should have been released. It's not clear why no one on his team noticed the mistake before BuzzFeed did, but that's not really the point of his piece, which is more about the irony of getting fired for re-using ideas when, he says, old ideas are what most politicians want anyway:

When I started providing policy guidance to politicians, officeholders were eager to develop and champion ”new ideas” that could serve as their historical legacy. Not anymore. Today, politicians and their advisers are deathly afraid of untested ideas that might cost them the next election. We developed an internal slogan: “Every politician wants to be the seventh to do something.” In a relentlessly negative political environment where the slightest misstep is hammered with attack ads, there is little value in taking a risk on leadership.

The good news, Schnurer says, is that there actually are good and innovative policy ideas out there that mix liberal and conservative ideas. The bad news is that he also says no politicians want to advocate for those ideas because they're afraid of what will happen if they step over the tried-and-true party line. (The solution to this problem is to let citizens vote not just for Candidate A or Candidate B, but also for a hideous, Frankenstein-like genetic hybrid of Candidate A and Candidate B.) Read his whole piece here.

A lot of the coverage of yesterday's news conference by President Obama was focused, understandably, on his statements regarding immediate policy priorities and hints about how he'll work with a Republican majority in both houses. The event was also relatively long and got bogged down more than once by 1) reporters repeatedly asking the president to analyze how he/the Democrats screwed up the midterms from a political strategy/campaign/messaging perspective, even though he made clear he wasn't going to discuss it, and 2) classic political non-answers to many of the more substantive questions during which the president managed to talk for minutes at a time without saying anything new about his opinions or plans.

But, but! Perhaps due to the length of the press conference, Obama seemed (to this observer at least) to loosen up toward the conclusion of the Q&A, segueing from a question about electoral disappointment into a broad case for American optimism. It's not unusual to hear yay-America rhetoric from a politician, of course, but where many uplift-y speeches (including some of Obama's) are vague and canned—twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom—yesterday's riff seemed off-the-cuff and genuine. And it was convincing—a case built from reasoning and, like, facts, rather than wishful thinking and blandly positive metaphors involving eagles.

Of course, I might just be a sucker, so watch for yourself below or read the transcript here (starting at "But I'll close with...").

That all sounds...very reasonable? "We have all the best cards, relative to every other country on Earth." Maybe we do! Let's keep on twirling, perhaps, and see where it takes us.

A pretty big scoop in the Wall Street Journal:

President Barack Obama secretly wrote Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the middle of last month and described a shared interest in fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, according to people briefed on the correspondence.

The letter appeared aimed both at buttressing the Islamic State campaign and nudging Iran’s religious leader closer to a nuclear deal.

The Journal doesn't indicate that the letter included any specific suggestions of coordination between the two countries, but it does note that one of the United States' recurring goals with regard to ISIS and Iran has been assuring the latter that its fight against the former is only meant to support the Iraqi government and is not an attempt to exert wider influence in the Middle East.

Current relations between the U.S. and Iran are not nearly as bad as they've been in the past, and the Journal says this is not the first time Obama has written Khamenei. The two countries are involved in the nuclear negotiations the WSJ refers to, and the country's current president (Hassan Rouhani) is a relative moderate whose election is thought to indicate a desire by Iranian citizens to reconnect with the rest of the world. Khamenei, though, holds the highest office in the land for life—and recently accused the United States, Britain, and "Zionists" of creating both al-Qaida and ISIS, while week some hardline Iranians celebrated the anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by burning American flags. In summary: Diplomacy is weird.

Also, here's an odd trivia fact: Ayatollah Khamenei has a pro-reform younger brother, from whom he is estranged, who was attacked and beaten severely by hardliners in 1999. 

China says it will contribute 1,000 aid workers and a 100-bed hospital in Liberia to the perpetually underfunded and understaffed battle against Ebola in West Africa. From the Guardian:

Foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei elaborated on the announcement at a regular press conference on Thursday afternoon. “In Liberia, we will build a 100-bed medical centre,” he said. “On 9 November, 160 medical workers will set off for Liberia.” He added that 320 additional workers would arrive at the centre at a later date.

“All the construction materials, construction workers and medical workers are in place,” he said. The centre is scheduled to open in 30 days.

The Guardian wrote last month that, outside of the United States, France, and the U.K., the international community's Ebola response has lagged to point of triggering unusually pointed public criticism from United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon:

... A large question mark hangs over the contributions of China and Russia, the two other permanent members of the UN security council, as well as other emerging powers including the remaining, supposedly up-and-coming Brics countries – Brazil, India and South Africa.

“This is a very serious problem” Ban said, referring to the fact that only $100,000 has been contributed to the UN’s $1bn Ebola fund. “It’s time that those other countries who really have capacity … provide financial and other logistical support,” he said. For the habitually cautious Ban, this was fighting talk.

Two U.S. treatment facilities totalling 125 beds are expected to open in Liberia in the next week with 17 more facilities planned.

Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, the Philadelphia 22-year-old whose kidnapping was captured on video by a surveillance camera, has been rescued in Maryland after authorities tracked her alleged assailant using a GPS system that was installed in his car because he had bad credit and the dealer feared the car would eventually have to be repossessed.

Federal ATF agents began collaborating with Philadelphia police when they realized that the suspect in Freeland-Gaither's abduction was the same man—37-year-old ex-con Delvin Barnes—they were already seeking in a Virginia rape case. A salesperson who'd sold Barnes his car apparently contacted authorities after seeing his picture in news reports. Via NBC Philadelphia:

Authorities began tracking his gray Ford Taurus through a GPS device placed inside the vehicle by the car dealership where it was purchased, detectives said. The GPS was installed because Barnes had poor credit, officials said.

Agents honed in on his location, in a shopping center parking lot, and moved in to strike.

"He was more surprised than anything," ATF agent Tim Jones said of the arrest.

Barnes and the victim were in the backseat of the car when agents arrived, but he quickly jumped into the driver's seat to try and flee, Jones said. Agents blocked his way and took him into custody.

Freeland-Gaither was taken to a hospital for treatment but has already been released and is back home with her family.

According to exit polling, the top issue motivating voters in Tuesday's Republican-wave midterm election was the economy.

The economy, though, is recovering, as measured both by GDP ...

... and employment.

What's the deal, then? As President Obama alluded to in Wednesday's press conference and the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien explained Tuesday on Wonkblog, the recovery of the economy as a whole has not created wage or income gains for most people. In fact, those gains have gone almost exclusively to the "1 percent" folks you might have heard about.

Indeed, Slate's William Saletan noted that income inequality was one of the typically liberal themes that Republican candidates emphasized in their 2014 campaigns.

Voting for a party whose representatives in Congress are proud of opposing every Obama proposal to increase public-service spending or raise taxes on high-income individuals isn't necessarily the obvious way to address this issue. But we also know that Americans tend to blame presidents for things presidents can't control and don't generally know what's going on in Congress. Add all that together and it kind of starts making sense why the Kenyan socialist in the White House is suffering because the rich are getting richer. 

China has long been accused of fueling the illegal ivory trade in Africa. A new report out this week from London-based NGO Environmental Investigation Agency says the illicit trade implicates even the highest levels of the Chinese government. The organization’s report focuses on Tanzania, the epicenter of the illicit ivory trade, where the elephant population has been decimated with some 10,000 elephants  killed for their tusks last year alone.

In March 2013, Chinese President Xi Jinping made a visit to the country on state business. The presidential visit, as the New York Times reports, kicked off a shopping spree for illegal ivory by the Chinese delegation that caused the price of the smuggled goods to double. Here’s more on what happened from the Times:

[President Xi Jinping] was joined by a large entourage of Chinese government officials and business leaders, officially there to promote a mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries. But according to a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency, a nongovernmental organization based in London, members of the delegation used Mr. Xi’s visit as an opportunity to procure so much illegal ivory that local prices doubled to $70,000 per kilogram, or about $31,800 per pound. In fact, two weeks before Mr. Xi arrived, Chinese buyers went on a shopping spree for illegal ivory, purchasing thousands of pounds of poached tusks, which were “later sent to China in diplomatic bags on the presidential plane,” says the report, “Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants,” which was released on Thursday…

At a time when the Chinese government is trying to prove itself a responsible state actor that is serious about rooting out corruption and abiding by international law, the organization’s report describes a devastating environmental cost of China’s geopolitical rise: Chinese diplomats and military personnel, it says, are colluding with corrupt Tanzanian officials and Chinese-led crime syndicates that send huge amounts of illegal ivory to China, reducing Tanzania’s elephant population by half.

The good news: Spanish nurse Teresa Romero, who tested positive for Ebola last month, is now virus-free and has been released from the Madrid hospital where she spent much of the last month in quarantine. The not-so-good news: She’s still pretty ticked about her dog. Spanish authorities euthanized Romero’s dog—Excalibur—shortly after she tested positive for the virus last month out of fear that it might transmit the virus.

Upon leaving the hospital, Romero’s husband read a statement praising the medical staff, and then took the opportunity to go after the Spanish government for “executing” Excalibur while she was in the hospital. Here’s more from the Associated Press:

Teresa Romero slammed Spanish officials for killing her beloved dog, saying the mixed breed named Excalibur was unnecessarily "executed…" Her husband, Javier Limon, read Romero's remarks about Excalibur as she listened at his side, saying his wife was too emotional to talk about the dog that was like the childless couple's own child. Madrid health officials euthanized Excalibur on Oct. 8, saying the dog posed a potential public health risk for Ebola transmission. But the dog of a nurse who got Ebola in Dallas was simply quarantined and then later reunited with its owner. Killing Excalibur "wasn't necessary," Romero said in her statement. "The worst part of all of this is that our dog was not given a chance."

Romero’s husband said the couple planned to sue the government for its treatment of their pet.