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Sen.-elect Angus King of Maine, who cruised to victory last week running as an independent, said Wednesday that he will caucus with Senate Democrats.

King's announcement means the Democrats will have in essence a 55-45 seat advantage in the Senate next year.

The Senate's other independent, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, also caucuses with the Democrats.

King was elected last week to replace the retiring moderate Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe.

New details are emerging about how David Petraeus' extramarital affair developed, and when officials — from law enforcement to the White House — first found out about it. Track the story with this interactive timeline, compiled through some digging by The Associated Press and NPR.

Retail sales fell in October, for the first time in several months. Analysts largely blamed the hurricane. If they're right, sales will bounce back this month and the economic recovery will continue (slowly, slowly).

That's the big picture. To get a sense of the small picture — messier, more ambiguous — I visited three small businesses on Cross Bay Boulevard, in Howard Beach, Queens. The storm swept in here and flooded the neighborhood.

In 2009, Susannah Cahalan was a healthy 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post, when she began to experience numbness, paranoia, sensitivity to light and erratic behavior. Grasping for an answer, Cahalan asked herself as it was happening, "Am I just bad at my job — is that why? Is the pressure of it getting to me? Is it a new relationship?"

But Cahalan only got worse — she began to experience seizures, hallucinations, increasingly psychotic behavior and even catatonia. Her symptoms frightened family members and baffled a series of doctors.

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NEAL CONAN, HOST:

There's been plenty of discussion about head injuries in professional football, new equipment, new lawsuits and new rules as well. Inevitably, the conversation came to include high schools, most prominently when a school board member in - near Philadelphia proposed to end the football program. There's also been, sometimes, angry pushback. Last month, the discussion opened again in Dover, New Hampshire.

President Barack Obama takes questions from reporters at the White House today, in his first press conference since March. NPR's Ken Rudin and political strategists Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman, and Anna Greenberg, a democratic pollster, analyze the President's remarks.

Maine, Maryland, and Washington passed same-sex marriage on the ballot in the 2012 election. Minnesotans struck down a proposed constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Now, people on both sides of the issue are reevaluating their strategies.