Street Terror: The driver of a pickup truck that ran down and killed eight people on a West Side Manhattan bike path yesterday wrote a note mentioning the Islamic State, investigators say. He left behind a trail of mangled bodies and crushed bicycles. As many as 12 people also were injured.

The driver, identified as Sayfullo Saipov, 29, born in Uzbekistan, drove a pickup rented from a New Jersey Home Depot about a mile down the bike path before turning back onto the road, smashing into a school bus near Chambers Street in lower Manhattan. Witnesses say Saipov then got out of the truck waving a pellet gun and paintball gun and shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.” He was shot in the stomach by a police officer and is in critical condition after surgery.

Five of the dead were identified as Argentine citizens in New York for a 30-year high school reunion.

If it was an act of terrorism, it is believed to be the first vehicle attack in the US. There’ve been several incidents of it in Europe. Video shows Saipov wandering erratically on the street before he was shot, suggesting mental illness may also be at play.

World Series: The Dodgers beat Houston last night to force the World series into a seventh game. Trailing 1-0, Los Angeles exploded with two runs in the bottom of the 6^th. A 7^th inning home run put the Dodgers up to a winning 3-1.

The Series has been marked by a record number of home runs, two in last night’s game and 24 through game six. Some of the players say the balls used in the Series seem different.

And as the announcers say, be sure to get all your World Series gear at MLBshop.com

Denial Ain’t a River: President Trump came out tweeting in anger yesterday following the indictment of his former campaign chairman and the guilty plea of a former political associate. “The Fake News is working overtime,” Trump wrote, although the only thing the news did was report what was in the indictments and charging documents.

  As for the October surprise, the guilty plea by little-known former policy adviser George Papadopoulos, “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar,” the President said. This is the same man Trump described to The Washington Post last year as an “excellent guy.”

Trump and the administration are trying mightily to turn press attention to tax reforms and Republican claims of Democratic corruption.

ABC News Correspondent Jonathan Karl had this exchange yesterday with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

KARL: Chief of staff John Kelly said that this special counsel investigation has been very distracting to the president. Can you elaborate on that? Is this affecting his ability to get his job done here?

SANDERS: I don’t think it’s at all affecting his ability to get his job done, and that wasn’t the point he was making. You guys seem completely obsessed with this while there are a lot of other things happening around the country, and frankly a lot of other things that people care a lot more about, the media refuses to cover it, and I think that’s the distraction.

A Crack in the Wall: Speaking at the US Naval Academy Monday night, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain pressed his case against President Trump, once again without naming him.

McCain described the current national politics as “a time in which the seductions of authoritarian rule find favor with many; when self-interested leadership excuses naked aggression with weak rationalizations; when ethnic grievances haunt the old and religious fanaticism fires the minds of the misguided young.”

McCain said, “We have to fight against propaganda and crackpot conspiracy theories. We have to fight isolationism, protectionism and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions.”

To Your Health: The Obamacare exchanges open today through Dec. 15 for enrollment in 2018 health plans. The signup period was cut in half by the Trump administration as part of its effort to make Obamacare collapse. The administration has also drastically cut money for advertising and outreach to help people sign up, likely causing a drop of as many as a million customers by some estimates.

Worse, premiums for some people will increase by as much as 35 percent, caused in part by the political uncertainty of Obamacare’s future, and President Trump’s decision to cut off subsidy payments.

But — LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik writes that the Trump administration doesn’t know how Obamacare works, and that the result of  efforts to financially cripple it will have the reverse effect of increasing the number of people paying less for insurance.

The benchmark for subsidies is based on the “silver” level plans, and as they go up, so do subsidies for people who need them. “As a result,” Hiltzik writes,  “net premiums will be lower for millions of enrollees. The HHS report revealed that for a 27-year-old with household income of $25,000, the actual premium cost for a benchmark silver plan will fall to $138 next year from $142 in 2017. For a family of four with household income of $60,000, the actual premium will fall to $397 from $407.”