Alex Altman

A guide to the latest news from the Ferguson case and grand jury investigation

As a St. Louis County grand jury weighs whether to indict Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a series of leaks have provided new information about the skirmish that led to Brown’s death and ignited a national debate about race and police violence. A lot has happened since Brown died after a confrontation with Wilson on Aug. 9. Here’s a guide to making sense of it:

What’s new?

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch obtained Brown’s official autopsy report on Oct. 22, which indicates he was shot near the right thumb at very close range. Medical experts interviewed by the paper said the findings may support Wilson’s contention that Brown was reaching for the officer’s gun inside the police SUV where their original struggle occurred. A separate autopsy conducted for Brown’s family by Dr. Michael Baden, a well-known forensic pathologist, concluded that none of the teen’s wounds indicated he was shot at such close range.

Wilson told investigators that Brown punched him in the face through the open window of the vehicle, according to the Post-Dispatch. In Wilson’s version of events, the punch prompted him to draw his gun and Brown grabbed for it. As they struggled over the weapon, Brown was shot in the hand. According to Wilson, Brown then ran away from the vehicle, so the officer jumped out to give chase. Wilson reportedly told investigators that Brown defied the officer’s command to stop, then turned and ran at him, at which point Wilson fired the fatal shots.

According to the Washington Post, “a half-dozen unnamed black witnesses” have provided testimony to the grand jury that supports Wilson’s version of events. Brown’s blood was found on the gun, on Wilson’s uniform and spattered on an inside door panel of the car, according to the New York Times. Other witnesses have provided divergent accounts of the incident, alleging that Brown was shot with his hands in the air or while fleeing. Protesters pictured with their hands-up became one of the iconic images of the unrest that wracked Ferguson in the weeks after Brown’s death.

What’s not?

In many ways, the leaks amplify what we already knew. From the beginning, the Ferguson police department has said publicly that Wilson shot Brown after the teen instigated a struggle in the SUV that made the officer fear for his safety. Independent witnesses have said there was a scuffle, though they differ on whether it happened in or near Wilson’s vehicle. Apart from detailed forensic information about Brown’s wounds, the autopsy includes a toxicology report indicating the presence of marijuana in Brown’s system. Previously released surveillance video shows Brown stealing a pack of Swisher Sweets, cheap cigars that are commonly used to roll blunts, from a convenience store shortly before the altercation with Wilson. But that incident had nothing to do with the confrontation, which occurred after Wilson ordered Brown and a friend to move onto the sidewalk as they walked down the middle of a street.

How important is this information?

The details of the struggle in the SUV matter. In Missouri, as elsewhere, a police officer has wide latitude to use deadly force if he has justifiable reason to feel his life is in danger. If forensic information and witness testimony support Wilson’s account that Brown grabbed for his gun, the grand jury—or, in the event of an indictment, a trial jury—would ostensibly be more likely to determine that the use of force was justified.

What don’t the leaks tell us?

They don’t explain the origin of the skirmish, which seems to have escalated abruptly. In describing the toxicology report, the Post’s sources say “the levels in Brown’s body may have been high enough to trigger hallucinations,” but there is no scientific link between marijuana and violent behavior.

Most importantly, the leaks do not provide new forensic information about the sequence of fatal shots. “What we want to know is why Officer Wilson shot Michael Brown multiple times and killed him even though he was more than 20 feet away from his patrol car,” Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Brown’s family, said in a statement. “This is the crux of the matter!” The autopsy does not offer any answers.

What’s going on with the grand jury?

Robert McCulloch, the St. Louis County prosecuting attorney, has said that he expects the deliberations to wrap up this month or next. The grand jury process has been unusual in a number of ways, as TIME reported last month.

Prosecutors declined to recommend a specific charge for Wilson, which is rare. Instead, they are presenting evidence as it becomes available, and allowing the grand jury members to determine whether it warrants charges of murder or manslaughter. (There are two options for each charge: first- or second-degree murder; and voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.)

All testimony in the case is being transcribed, which is unusual because it exposes witnesses to future legal proceedings. McCulloch has delegated the task of presenting evidence to two attorneys in his office in an attempt to neutralize allegations that he lacks objectivity. (McCulloch’s father, a police officer, died in the line of duty, and African Americans have criticized his handling of past police shootings.) In another rare move, McCulloch has pledged to immediately release transcripts of the proceedings. According to the prosecutor’s office, these decisions were made in the interest of transparency, though it may also be an attempt to head off criticism in the event that the grand jury declines to indict Wilson.

Is there a motive for the leaks?

It’s a criminal act to leak information about grand jury proceedings, so the number of leaks the investigation has sprung in recent days is conspicuous. The Department of Justice, which is conducting its own inquiry into the shooting, has condemned the trickle of information.“There seems to be an inappropriate effort to influence public opinion about this case,” it said on Oct. 22.

The leaks have also raised questions about whether sources connected to the investigation are spreading this information to prepare the community for the possibility that the grand jury declines to indict. The information that has leaked suggests the likelihood of that may be greater than protesters realize.

How is Ferguson reacting?

The daily demonstrations are ongoing. Protests tapered off in the weeks after Brown’s death, but the Oct. 8 killing of Vonderrit Myers, a black 18-year-old shot by an off-duty St. Louis police officer, rekindled the community’s fury. (Cops say Myers fired at the officer first; forensic evidence released by the police department, including lab results that reportedly show gunpowder residue on Myers’ hand and in the waistband of his jeans, appear to corroborate that version of events. Myers’ family says they believe he was unarmed.)

Thousands of people massed in St. Louis in mid-October for coordinated protests following Myers’ death. There were some arrests and sporadic clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement, but nothing on the scale of the August riots. But it was enough to upset the fragile peace that had set in during September and on Oct. 21, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced the formation of a commission to address issues like race relations.

The recent autopsy and other leaks have fanned the flames in Ferguson. That anger is likely a mere preview of how the community will react if Wilson is cleared. “If there is no indictment,” said one protester, “all hell is going to break loose.”

Read next: Mourning Ferguson

Officials are weighing the possibility in the wake of failures in Dallas, but there is only room for 19 patients

Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola case diagnosed in the U.S., was a warning to hospitals that a patient infected with the deadly virus could walk into their emergency room at any time. Hospitals from New York City to Seattle are now running Ebola drills, testing their staffs to ensure they are prepared to diagnose the disease without putting healthcare workers at risk of contracting it.

“Every hospital in the country needs to be ready to diagnose Ebola,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a news conference on Tuesday.

The question is whether every hospital is equipped to care for a patient who tests positive for the disease, which has killed nearly 4,500 people in West Africa. During this outbreak, the most deadly since the disease was first discovered in 1976, the mortality rate is about 70%, according to statistics compiled by the World Health Organization. Health care workers are at particular risk for infection, which is transmitted through contact with a symptomatic patient’s bodily fluids, like blood or vomit.

Those risks have been born out in Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where Duncan was admitted on Sept. 28 and died on Oct. 8. Early Wednesday, the hospital said a second healthcare worker who administered care to Duncan had tested positive for the disease. The hospital’s stumbles have prompted critics to question whether the additional infections were avoidable—and whether future patients should be cared for at specialized hospitals with the expertise and facilities to treat Ebola cases.

Frieden said Tuesday that the second healthcare worker would be transported to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, which has a specialized isolation unit for treating diseases like Ebola and has successfully cared for patients with the virus in the past.

Some doctors say moving future Ebola patients to specialized hospitals makes sense. “Given some of the complexities, patients who have this disease are probably best cared for by those who have experience caring for it, and whose healthcare workers are highly trained and drilled in self-protection,” says Dr. Gabe Kelen, the director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response. “It’s not appropriate to think that each and every hospital in the country could bring the resources, the intense training for the healthcare workers that is required.”

There are four hospitals in the U.S. with special isolation units designed to contain biohazards like Ebola. In addition to Emory, they are the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, in Bethesda, Md., a hospital at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mt. The facilities in Atlanta and Omaha have successfully treated Americans infected with Ebola overseas without any healthcare workers contracting the virus.

Though transporting future cases to these facilities may be prudent, they have limited beds: only 19 between them, according to CNN. Exclusively using specialized hospitals to treat Ebola is only an option so long as the number of cases in the U.S. remains extremely low.

A CDC spokesman said the agency may announce further measures for Ebola on Wednesday.

-Additional reporting by Zeke J. Miller

Could a second upset be brewing on the prairie?

If Democrats hold the Senate in November, it could be due to surprising success in states the party never expected to be competitive.

Just weeks after independent candidate Greg Orman surged in a Kansas Senate race that had been chalked into the Republican column, Democrats have spied another unlikely opening on the prairie. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) on Wednesday pumped $1 million into the surprisingly competitive South Dakota Senate race.

The DSCC poured in the cash just hours after a new poll showed Republican Mike Rounds locked in a three-way contest with independent candidate Larry Pressler and Democrat Rick Weiland. The SurveyUSA poll released Wednesday showed Rounds with 35%, Pressler with 32% and Weiland with 28%. The race also includes a Tea Party candidate who could siphon votes from the GOP frontrunner.

The survey could be an outlier. Rounds still boasts an average 12-point lead in recent polling, and South Dakota is a conservative state. “If I was a betting man, I would still put money on Rounds,” says Bob Burns, a veteran political analyst in the state.

But the DSCC’s move, first reported by Bloomberg Politics, underlines the dramatic changes in a race that both sides had written off as a cakewalk. Even this summer, as Democrats desperately searched for ways to hold their majority together, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was frank about the party’s chance in South Dakota. “We are going to lose,” the Nevada Democrat said.

But as in neighboring Kansas, something strange is happening in South Dakota. Rounds, a former governor, has been dogged by a controversy over the state’s EB-5 program, a federal visa program that grants green cards to wealthy immigrants who invest at least $500,000 in economic development project. As governor, Rounds was a booster of the program, which has drawn criticism for mismanagement and lack of transparency after it was privatized by one of the governor’s allies.

Democrats believe the issue may have made Rounds vulnerable. The Republican’s campaign did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Democratic money will go toward field operations and ads attacking Rounds. In a sign of how strange the three-way entanglement is becoming, Mayday PAC, the quixotic super PAC whose stated goal is to reverse the tide of big-money politics, has dumped $1 million into the race in support of Weiland, whom not even Reid is supporting. Meanwhile, the wild card is Pressler, 72, a three-term former U.S. senator who represented the state as a Republican from 1979 through 1996.

Nearly 20 years later, after stints as a college professor in the U.S., Italy and France, Pressler has launched the kind of quixotic campaign that is typically run by quirky obsessives, not former senators. He has one paid staffer, slaps together homemade yard signs with magic markers, and relies on his wife as his driver when he barnstorms the state. When he returned a reporter’s call himself Wednesday, he had just been informed that his campaign website did not include a mailing address for supporters to send in contributions.

“It’s bare bones,” he says. “My wife was very doubtful.”

In part that’s because of his fundraising deficit. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, Pressler has spent just $50,000, a sum dwarfed by Rounds’ $3 million. “I’m like a sitting duck with no clothes on out on the firing range,” he says. “We won’t be able to answer any negative ads.”

Pressler says he hasn’t decided which party he would caucus with if elected. But with the GOP’s lurch to the right, the former moderate Republican now sounds more like a Democrat. He voted for Barack Obama. He supports balancing the budget in part by raising taxes on millionaires, a new gas tax and the elimination of some corporate deductions. He wants to raise the minimum wage and teacher salaries, supports gay marriage, and says the U.S. should pare back its military spending. “I’m not an isolationist,” he adds. “I know we have to do some bombing.”

Pressler says he will limit himself to a “one glorious term” if elected, freeing him from the demands of the contemporary senatorial practice of dialing for dollars. Though his shoestring campaign may still be a long shot, Pressler says the moment is right for a post-partisan candidate. “We’ve seeing something very significant happening in American politics,” he says.

At the very least, something strange is stirring out on the prairie.

-Additional reporting by Alex Rogers

Richard Trumka says 2014 momentum is finally starting to build for the labor movement

The head of one of the nation’s most powerful labor federations said Tuesday that it has been a struggle to motivate workers ahead of the midterm elections, but that momentum was growing among the union members that Democrats will need to vote in droves for the party to retain control of the Senate and win a slew of tight gubernatorial races.

Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO, said global events such as tumult in the Middle East and the Ebola virus scare had diverted workers’ attention from the economic issues that form the cornerstone of the movement’s message.

“It took more effort this time to break through,” Trumka told reporters at the labor giant’s headquarters in Washington. “Our job is made a little more difficult by all those external things: the Middle East, Ebola.”

The AFL-CIO has shelled out more than $6 million in political contributions so far in 2014, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Most of that has been funneled through the AFL-CIO Workers’ Voices PAC. Members are working to drive turnout through traditional ground-game efforts like phone banks, door knocks and leafleting. As a result, Trumka said, voters were beginning to “connect the dots” between Republican policies and the flat wages and slashed pensions that have buffeted middle-class union members.

“The momentum is starting to build,” Trumka said.

Returning from a tour of battleground states, Trumka said he saw candidate after candidate on the Republican side running against the policies of President Barack Obama, rather than enumerating specific policies of their own. If Republicans seize the Senate, Trumka said, it would result in stalled executive appointments, judicial vacancies and a fresh round of doomed efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “There’s a sense of urgency,” he added.

At least there should be. Unions’ power has been curbed in recent years by a broad campaign to restrict collective bargaining and impose right-to-work legislation. The effort to enact comprehensive immigration reform, one of the labor movement’s top priorities, has been stalled since the summer of 2013; Obama’s decision to punt on the issue until after the midterms incensed labor leaders and has the potential to trim turnout. Looking ahead, many labor leaders aren’t particularly enthused about the potential presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, with concerns that the former New York senator is too close to Wall Street spurring a push for a populist candidate like Elizabeth Warren.

Trumka said he saw positive momentum for pro-labor candidates like Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kentucky. But he was circumspect about his predictions for November. “It’s going to be an interesting election,” he said. “We have our work cut out for us.”

A small team of epidemiologists is leading the fight to stem the spread of Ebola in Dallas

Matt Karwowski is a disease detective. That’s what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) calls the tiny team of epidemic intelligence officers dispatched to stem the spread of the Ebola virus in Dallas. You won’t see him on television, and you’ve never heard his name, but at this moment, Karwowski and his colleagues are the most important sleuths in the country.

As Thomas Eric Duncan was diagnosed with Ebola on Sept. 30, Karwowski was scrambling to pack up his gear and hop a plane from Atlanta. Since arriving that night, he’s spent 18-hour days zigzagging through north Dallas, tracing Duncan’s spiderweb of contacts. One of four CDC disease detectives roaming the community, he was assigned at the outset to tackle the high-priority cases: the handful of people at the greatest risk of getting sick.

That means knocking on doors at the Ivy Apartments, where four of Duncan’s family members are under quarantine, sleeping in the living room as they waited days until a cleaning service finally collected the infectious sheets the patient slept on. It means visiting the medical professionals who may have been exposed to the virus while treating or transporting Duncan. It means explaining containment techniques to frightened parents, and helping to pass out crayons and coloring books to soothe a child who’s too young to know what’s happening but old enough to sense his family’s fear.

Karwowski is what’s known in the medical community as a contact tracer. It is the shoe-leather process of canvassing all the people who may have encountered the virus, a job that is part medicine, part social work and part investigator. “The whole idea with contact tracing is to interrupt the chain of transmission,” says Karwowski, 34, who spoke to TIME at Texas Health Presbyterian hospital, in the first interview granted by a member of the CDC’s contact tracing team in Dallas. “I can’t characterize how important this is.”

Beginning with the patient, the tracers in Dallas divided into teams—usually one CDC detective and one county or state-level tracer—to map the contours of the community’s contact with Ebola. Their task is to identify the people who encountered Duncan while he was sick, and conduct interviews to find the next links in the chain of human contact. Then they locate those people and interview them. The process unfolds in concentric circles, with the original patient at the center. Once the tracers piece together the full network, they conduct daily check-ups to monitor symptoms, take temperatures, answer questions and allay fears. Then rinse and repeat for 21 days, the virus’s incubation period.

Contact tracing may sound simple, but it’s the linchpin in the U.S. government’s strategy to stop the spread of Ebola. As scary as it may seem, there are few ways to prevent the virus from arriving stateside. Experts are leery of cutting off flights from stricken West African countries, because doing so would prevent health workers from snuffing the outbreak at its source. The U.S. can’t stop patients incubating the virus from boarding those planes, because there’s no way to screen for it effectively; Ebola can’t be detected in the blood until its symptoms erupt. So health experts rely on contract tracing, which contained the spread of the virus in Nigeria and Senegal. “Contact tracing is a core public health function,” said CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden. The CDC believes the method can “stop the virus in its tracks.”

The CDC’s 10-member team in Texas is led by Dr. David Kuhar, a senior epidemiologist and infectious-disease specialist. In total, it has three senior scientists specializing in infection control, a communications officer, a public health adviser, and five epidemic intelligence officers like Karwowski. The community contact-tracing operation is led by Dr. Stephanie Schrag, a top epidemiologist, and also includes other young disease detectives like Charnetta Smith and Michelle Chevalier, both OB/GYNS. “I think it’s really every young medical epidemiologist’s dream to have this kind of experience,” Karwowski says.

He may seem an unlikely choice to pull the assignment. Originally a pediatrician, Karwowski joined the CDC on July 1. This is not just his first encounter with Ebola; it’s his first field deployment. On Sept. 1, he was assigned to a month-long rotation at the agency’s emergency operations center in Atlanta, crunching data alongside hundreds of staffers working with the CDC’s response to the outbreak in West Africa. On the final afternoon of the rotation, as word broke that Duncan was positive for the virus, Karwowski got the call that he was headed to Dallas. “He is a mature and experienced clinician,” explains Dr. Stephanie Bialek, an epidemiologist helping to lead the CDC’s Ebola response, who says Karwowski was selected in part for his “high level of diplomacy” and communication skills.

Though new to the job, he seems suited to the role. Slim and soft-spoken, with short brown hair and stylish glasses, Karwowski has the kind of calm, empathetic quality that you’d expect to forge trust in a frantic setting. “You want to make sure you develop a good relationship with the contacts,” he says. “You approach them with cultural sensitivity. You want to make sure to develop good rapport, that you convey the impression that you truly are there to safeguard them and the community. That’s a critical portion of contact tracing.” On the job, he wears normal clothes—chinos and a button down. It’s hard to get people to trust you when you greet them in a medical moon suit.

Trust is key, because contact tracing only works if the contacts tell the truth. Eliciting information became a harder task this week, when local officials chose to place four of Duncan’s family members under quarantine. The prospect of being penned up inside for three weeks might dissuade potential contacts from coming forward with information.

“It definitely weighs into the equation,” Karwowski says. “We have to be very sensitive to the message that [quarantine] sends, and make sure that we are communicating why this decision was made, so that folks who are potential contacts are honest with us when we ask them questions about their exposure history. So that they understand that we are not doing this with the intention of putting them into quarantine, but so that we can put an end to this.”

Since they’re asymptomatic, and therefore not contagious, the people being monitored for Ebola are permitted to circulate in their neighborhoods as usual. They’re exhibiting all the emotions you’d expect: concern and confusion and even some chagrin. “They’re not just scared about getting Ebola,” Karwowski says. “They’re scared about how they’re perceived by the community, what it’s going to be like to reenter the community when it’s all over. They’re worried for their children.” People in Dallas are understandably concerned, and the media spotlight has magnified the crisis, making it harder for the epidemiologists and perhaps more likely for locals to shun the afflicted.

The job is grueling for the disease detectives as well. The old saw around the CDC is that the fight against Ebola is a marathon, but at this point in the marathon it’s a sprint. Karwowski is preparing for a two- or three-week deployment that could stretch on longer. More disease detectives will cycle in as the CDC, county and state health officials conduct the painstaking work. Karwowski, who has a wife and two young sons, calls home in his few moments of respite. Asked by a reporter of what the situation was like for his family, he choked up.

“We’re going to be able to contain” Ebola, he promises. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be more cases. “I hope there isn’t,” he says, but “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was.”

Hospital says patient did not acknowledge being around anyone ill in Africa

The Dallas hospital treating Thomas Eric Duncan, the first diagnosed case of Ebola in the U.S., suggested Thursday night that a technical flaw contributed to the decision not to admit Duncan on his first visit despite his declared history of travel to West Africa.

Under pressure for its role in potentially exposing scores of Americans to the deadly virus, the hospital said in a statement that a flaw in its electronic health-records system prevented the doctor attending Duncan from seeing that he had recently traveled from Liberia, which was noted by the nurse who screened him.

“Protocols were followed by both the physician and then nurses,” the hospital said, adding that the system, designed to help nurses administer flu vaccines, prevented the note on Duncan’s travel history from automatically appearing for the doctor.

The hospital said it would amend the system to highlight whether patients had traveled to Ebola-stricken regions. “We feel that this change will improve the early identification of patients who may be at risk for communicable diseases, including Ebola,” the statement said.

The statement comes as the hospital faces criticism for its decision not to immediately admit Duncan late on the night of Sept. 25, when he arrived with a 100.1°F fever, complaining of abdominal pains and experiencing decreased urination. Three days later, Duncan returned to the hospital far sicker, and was placed in isolation as a possible Ebola case. He tested positive for the virus on Sept. 30.

The hospital’s decision broadened the pool of people who may have come into contact with the virus. Federal, state and local officials are now assessing about 100 people for possible direct or indirect contact with Ebola. At least four people with direct contact with Duncan have been quarantined in their apartment by order of Texas state officials.

Facing criticism, the hospital in its statement defended its actions, noting that Duncan’s symptoms were “not severe” on his initial visit and “could be associated with many” other afflictions.

The hospital also seemed to be scrambling to cast some blame on Duncan. “When Mr. Duncan was asked if he had been around anyone who had been ill, he said that he had not,” the hospital said. Duncan is thought to have contracted the virus while aiding an Ebola patient in Liberia shortly before embarking on his trip to the U.S. on Sept. 19.

But health officials are reminding the public Ebola is extremely difficult to spread

Texas officials are scrambling to trace Ebola patient's contacts after he was sent home from the hospital

Updated 7:45 p.m. Wednesday

The Dallas hospital patient who has tested positive for Ebola virus indicated on his first visit that he had traveled to the city from West Africa, but was released after that information was not communicated to the entire medical team who treated him.

The patient first arrived at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas late on Sept. 25, complaining of a fever and abdominal pains, hospital officials said at a news conference. A nurse administered a checklist, on which the patient indicated that he had recently traveled from Liberia. Nevertheless, the hospital sent him home.

“The overall clinical presentation was not typical at that point yet for Ebola,” said Dr. Mark Lester, vice president and zone clinical leader with Texas Health Resources, noting that the patient lacked some traditional hallmarks of the disease, which include vomiting and diarrhea. “Regretfully, that information was not fully communicated throughout the full team.”

The patient, who was confirmed Tuesday as the first direct case of Ebola on U.S. soil, was re-admitted two days later and placed immediately in isolation. On Wednesday, the hospital said he was in serious but stable condition. He is being held in a private ward under round-the-clock care.

The Associated Press, citing the patient’s sister, reported that his name was Thomas Eric Duncan. Local officials would not confirm the report in accordance with patient confidentiality requirements.

In a statement Wednesday afternoon, United Airlines said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told the airline the patient flew two legs of his flight from Liberia to Dallas on Sept. 20 United flights, one from Brussels to Washington, D.C., and then from Washington to Dallas-Fort Worth. The director of the CDC said there is “zero risk” of any Ebola transmission to anybody who was traveling on either flight.

The patient’s initial release will raise questions about whether the miscommunication between hospital staff may have increased the chance of additional people becoming infected. Local, state and federal officials have launched a broad effort to trace the contacts made by the patient between the time he began suffering symptoms and his second trip to the hospital, on Sept. 28.

“This is all hands on deck,” Texas Governor Rick Perry said, flanked by a battery of doctors and political officials.

Dr. Christopher Perkins, Dallas County Health and Human Services Medical Director, said 12 to 18 people were being monitored after possibly coming into contact with the sick patient. Of that number, five were members of his immediate household and five were school-aged children.

Mike Miles, the superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District, said the children may have come into contact with the patient over the weekend. The children are being kept out of school, but attended earlier this week, Miles said. None of the potential contacts are currently being quarantined.

The ambulance workers who transported the Ebola patient on his second trip to the hospital are in isolation as a precaution. The hospital is still deciding what precautions to take with the medical staff who had contact with the patient. “Contact and exposure are not the same,” said Dr. Edward Goodman, an epidemiologist at the hospital, who stressed that there was little likelihood that anybody at the hospital has been exposed.

Officials cautioned the public not to panic. While deadly, Ebola is not easy to transmit. It is passed on through contact with bodily fluids, such as blood or vomit, but it cannot be transmitted through the air. Patients carrying Ebola are not contagious unless they are presenting symptoms of the disease.

This story has been updated to reflect new information about the patient’s trip to Dallas and the timing of his visit to the hospital.

"Fowl play" could decide the fate of the Senate

The story starts with chickens.

Last spring, four hens wandered from an adjacent property onto the lawn of Iowa Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley’s lakeside vacation home. Irked by the smell, the Braleys brought the issue to the local homeowners’ association, whose lawyer got involved. No lawsuit was filed, and the neighborly squabble might have ended there—were it not for an enterprising Republican researcher who caught wind of the dispute.

To the GOP, the chickens were a gift. Republicans were looking for ways to attack the character of Braley, the early front-runner in the fight for the Iowa Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Tom Harkin. In short order, the GOP had built a website chronicling the Great Chicken Affair. Operatives handed out giveaway rubber-chicken stress balls to visitors at the Iowa State Fair. The conservative Super PAC American Crossroads cut a Web ad tweaking Braley’s brusqueness. “A true Iowan would have just talked to his neighbors, but not trial lawyer Bruce Braley,” the ad crowed.

The episode cemented a storyline Republicans had been pushing for months: that Braley might be something of a litigious jerk. The suggestion was sparked by an earlier opposition-research score—a video, captured by a conservative tracker, in which Braley questioned whether the state’s Republican Senator, Charles Grassley, would be a suitable Senate Judiciary Chairman given his lack of a law degree. Knocked off kilter, the Democrat’s campaign hasn’t fully recovered: Braley, once a strong favorite, has fallen behind GOP challenger Joni Ernst in recent polls.

Fowl play can make the difference in a close election, and in 2014, it might even determine who controls the Senate. Like Iowa, many of the country’s most important races have been dominated by an emphasis on petty issues and an absence of substantive policy debates. In an election about nothing, one of the dark arts of campaign combat—opposition research, or “oppo” in political parlance—has taken center stage.

Opposition research has become “a lot more important,” says Jeff Patch, the freelance researcher who broke the story of the stray chickens, and who has since become the communications director of the Iowa GOP. “It’s increasingly the way that tech and media play a role in campaigns.”

Growing armies of opposition researchers, employed by campaigns, the two parties and their allies, have exploited a diminished media’s appetite for dishy stories by feeding reporters tips that reshape close contests. It can be hard to determine which hits are the result of journalistic spadework and which are uncovered by outside mercenaries. But many of the most consequential revelations this year have oppo written all over them.

Montana Democratic Sen. John Walsh dropped his re-election bid after the New York Times revealed he had plagiarized sections of a paper he wrote at the U.S. Army War College. Plagiarism allegations have also rocked the campaign of Mary Burke, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin. And they dinged GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby, who also had to fend off a story that surfaced—with the help of a Democratic researcher—alleging she had “stalked” an ex-boyfriend. (No charges were filed in that incident.)

In Illinois, GOP gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner has wrestled with the revelation that he belongs to an exclusive wine club which costs up to $150,000 to join. In Georgia, Democratic Senate candidate Michelle Nunn was the victim of a leaked memo laying out the campaign’s political calculations in all their clinic ugliness.

In Louisiana, Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu was the subject of a Washington Post investigation that noted she didn’t own a residence in the state and crashes with her parents on trips home. Similarly, the New York Times revealed that Kansas Republican Sen. Pat Roberts lives in Virginia and shacks up with a donor when he visits. Roberts managed to escape his primary with the help of an oppo hit that noted challenger Milton Wolf, a radiologist, had posted dead patients’ X-rays on Facebook.

Opposition research has been a “growing force” in national politics for some time, says political expert Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “My guess is it seems more visible now because we have so many high-stakes, high-profile Senate races out there,” Ornstein says. “And because you have no shortage of incumbents who do bonehead things.”

Credit also goes to rival partisan research shops that were formed to fight in the trenches of oppo warfare. On the left, the dominant player is American Bridge 21st Century, a super PAC founded in 2010 by the liberal activist David Brock. In the 2014 cycle, American Bridge has an $18 million budget, which pays for 44 trackers in 41 states, plus more than 20 researchers in the group’s Washington office. It has caught Rauner on video opposing the minimum wage, captured Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter extolling the billionaire Koch brothers, and documented Michigan Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land arguing that women are “more interested in flexibility in a job than pay.”

“American Bridge has been at the forefront of using research and tracking to define Republican candidates,” says spokesman Jesse Lehrich. “As we have demonstrated time and time again, our extensive archive of video footage and army of researchers are here to ensure that Republicans from Terri Lynn Land to Bruce Rauner to Rand Paul are no longer able to hide.”

On the right, the top practitioner is a for-profit research firm called America Rising, which was created after the 2012 election by three top Republican operatives, including Mitt Romney’s campaign manager. Modeled partly after American Bridge, its goal was to close the oppo edge Democrats enjoyed in 2012 while amassing a research archive that could inform the party’s advertising campaigns.

The group has more than 30 researchers in its northern Virginia headquarters and nearly as many trackers roaming the country. Among its oppo hits this cycle are the original Iowa “lawyer” clip that created the Braley narrative and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s off-color remarks about Asians. But its larger project, says America Rising PAC’s executive director Tim Miller, has been to build an opposition-research database that campaigns and super PACs can harness in ads and on the stump.

“You can hit gold on some of these opposition research hits, like we did with Braley, and have it be very impactful in the races,” Miller says, but “there’s a whole ‘nother level of work we’re spending a lot of time on, which is trying to make the paid media more dynamic.”

It’s no coincidence that the role of opposition research has increased as media outlets scale back their resources, and amid the constant churn of a 24-hour news cycle that covets juicy controversy over dry policy debates. With fewer reporters able to comb through transcripts or attend obscure events, outside mercenaries dig through through public records and feed scraps to eager journalists. American Bridge, for example, has filed more than 1,100 records requests this cycle.

This was the void that Patch, a freelance reporter turned party flack, was filling when he filed the chicken scoop. He got a tip, hopped in his car and drove to the Braleys’ vacation house on Holiday Lake in Brooklyn, Iowa. It took parts of three days on the ground for Patch to talk to canvass neighborhood residents, obtain relevant documents, and post his story on the website of The Iowa Republican. In many ways, it was basic journalism—and it offers a glimmer of hope that journalists can steer the political conversation back to more substantive matters.

But don’t count your chickens.