FAST TRACK: The number of people killed in the high speed train wreck south of Madrid in Spain has reached 80 with 145 injured. One train hit the rear of another on the same track.

  Initial reports suggest that around 9 am a train belonging to the private company Iryo was stopped on the tracks when a train operated by Spain’s national rail company, Renfe, crashed into it from behind. So far the accident has been attributed vaguely to computer and human error.

  There were a  reported 397 passengers aboard the Renfe train and about 150 on the Iryo. 

  Aerial photos show that the nose of the Renfe train, which was traveling to Seville from Madrid, appeared to be destroyed on impact. Two rear carriages of the Iryo train overturned, and a third derailed.

  This is the second accident this year involving the same train companies. In January, 46 people were killed when two high-speed trains collided near Adamuz. 

ELECTION WATCH: Nearly 40 million Americans have already voted in Tuesday’s midterm elections. CNN says Democrats have a 14-point advantage in turnout so far.

DECOY DAN: The NY Times dug into a story that was right in front of everyone … the election staff for Alaska’s Democratic Senate candidate Mary Peltola recruited a man with the same name as her Republican opponent Dan Sullivan to get his name on the ranked choice ballot.

  Now there’s an unknown Daniel J. Sullivan on the ballot right next to incumbent Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan. Peltola denies having anything to do with it but Alaska’s governor has ordered an investigation.

  President Trump has been outraged about the situation. “Mary Peltola should resign from the race. I think she should be prosecuted criminally for what she did,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews ahead of his trip to Ohio.

  What’s known as “ballot stacking” is not illegal. It’s dirty politics, which is a redundant term.

DEADLOCK: It looks increasingly like no party has won a majority of seats in the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, meaning there could be weeks of negotiations to put together a ruling coalition. You think US politics are difficult? You haven’t seen anything.

  Israel’s conservative and hard-nosed Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu controls the most seats following the vote, but neither he nor opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot has the 61 seats necessary to take the office.

  This is somewhat of a rebuke to Netanyahu who stays on, for now, as a caretaker prime minister until a government is formed. There’s a chance he’s not going anywhere.

IMMIGRATION: Brazil’s defeated right wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro landed in Miami yesterday, despite having been ordered at home to surrender his passport as part of a money-laundering investigation. Bolsonaro, who’s had the firm support of Donald Trump, had gone off the radar for 24 hours before turning up in sunny Florida.

  Bolsonaro and family are reported to have crossed into Argentina before traversing South America on a private plane to reach the United States.  

THE BOYS OF LATE OCTOBER: The Milwaukee Brewers closed out the World Series last night, beating Tampa Bay 4-1, also taking the Series 4-1. It is the first World Series win for Milwaukee.

INFINITE SCROLL:

— A federal judge issued a blistering rejection of the Trump administration’s attempt  to stop California from counting 20,000 ballots the feds believe were issued to non-citizens, calling the claim not credible. 

— The Trump administration is proposing to dramatically cut back a Biden-era rule aimed to cut methane emissions from oil and gas industry drilling sites. 

  Methane is a major contributor to climate  change but the President and his lieutenants believe that environmental protections hamper business and making money. Trump also claims climate change is a “hoax.”

— Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, who’s been pushing Congress to shut down her department, plans to spend $43,000 on new furniture for her government office because, as her people have informed Congress, her current furniture is worn out and “cannot be configurationally or aesthetically integrated into the agency’s new office space.” 

THE OBIT PAGE: Dolores Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez improving the lives of thousands of migrant laborers but decades later said she and other women were raped by the hero of the movement, died in Bakersfield, California at age 96.

  Chavez was the figurehead and Huerta was the hard-working organizer who was the union’s vice president for 40 years until Chavez died in 1993. She coordinated the strikes and walkouts that brought the agriculture business to the table and recognize the union.

  It was only earlier this year that Huerta said Chavez had raped her and groomed underage girls for sex, knocking the revered labor leader off his pedestal. “I saw him, again, as my boss, as my hero, as, you know, somebody that would do the impossible,” Huerta told The NY  Times. “I never talked about it to anybody, and the reason I didn’t is because I just didn’t want to hurt the movement.”

THE SPIN RACK: The Federal reserve yesterday left interest rates unchanged, leaving critics who say they should have been raised calling it a pre-election political decision. — Right wing independent “sting” journalist James O’Keefe has been charged in Minnesota with felony counts of unlawful voting and identity theft. O’Keefe and partner Cameron Higby are charged with attempting to use the identity of other voters to test the security of the state’s “vouching” system in which one voter can vouch for the identity of another and guess what … security worked. —Paleontologists outside Arches National Park in Utah say they have found remains of a new species of armored dinosaur in what they call the Ironstone Bonebed, named for its rusty-red rocks. The Ironstone Bonebed could produce a trove of dinosaur fossils over many years of digging. 

BELOW THE FOLD: We’re taking a few days off even though life will be uninformed without us. Back on Monday. 

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