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The anger of Illinois Republican state Rep. Mike Bost is spontaneous and raw.

In 2013, for example, he raged against a floor amendment to a concealed carry gun bill.

"Once again, your side of the aisle is trying to make ploys instead of dealing with the real issue!" a YouTube video shows him bellowing. "Keep playing games," he says. "Keep playing games."

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Now, Bost is running for a seat in Congress against first-term Rep. Bill Enyart, a retired general and Democrat, and Bost's anger has become a campaign issue.

Voters in the 12th Congressional District in southern Illinois are hearing a lot of another Bost rant, a furious harangue from 2012 about language inserted into a pension reform bill on the final day of the House session.

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"Enough! I feel like somebody trying to be released from Egypt! Let my people go!" he hollers. "These damn bills that come out of here all the damn time come out here at the last second and I've got to try figure out how to vote for my people!"

The video of those remarks went viral that year. In it, Bost is seen throwing the bill into the air. He whiffs at the pages as they fall, then picks up the papers and throws them again.

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Enyart is running ads that point to Bost's rant as proof that he doesn't belong in Congress. Using footage of the lawmaker's outbursts, the announcer says, "Mike Bost. Twenty years yelling. Twenty years being the problem."

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Bost has represented small towns in rural, conservative southern Illinois for nearly two decades. Many voters here see his fury as well-placed.

"I think this was appropriate," says Bost supporter Jill Bunyan of Bost's pension rant. "You can get angry, and that's OK. And I think at that time, for that few moments, that was an appropriate response."

Bunyan lives in the tiny town of Cobden, in southernmost Illinois, population 1,100. People in Bunyan's part of the district, which hugs the Mississippi River, are frustrated with the state's fiscal troubles and weak local economy.

But head north to some of the district's larger cities, like Belleville, population 44,000, and Bost's anger is embraced less and criticized more. Interviewed on Main Street, Richard Rockwell thinks "the rant" is all political theater.

"I'm hoping that's the reason, and not that he's acting the fool in a deliberative chamber," Rockwell says. "That would be rather disconcerting to me."

Bost, in his own ad, refers to a video of the rant and embraces it. He half smiles and explains in folksy fashion that he's angry about the direction his opponents are taking the country.

"What the Chicago politicians and Gov. Quinn have done really made me mad," Bost says. "And what Bill Enyart and President Obama are doing to our country upsets me as well."

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Republicans are trying to make inroads with African-Americans in the Deep South, who have voted overwhelmingly Democrat since the civil rights era. In Alabama, the GOP is fielding more black candidates this cycle than ever before. One of them is Darius Foster, who gained national attention with this viral video challenging racial and political expectations:

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In the video, a diverse group of men and women mouth the candidate's introduction: "Did you know while growing up we went half the winter without heat, or that I think best while listening to Frank Sinatra? The last concert I attended was Lil Wayne. Yes, Lil Wayne." It ends, "Do I really fit in a box? See you on the campaign trail."

Foster says he needs no reminder that he stands out. "With me, unfortunately, everything is black Republican. Not Darius did this, but the black Republican did that. So, you know."

With the bulky frame of a former linebacker and a warm, hearty laugh, Foster fashions himself as a Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt Republican.

"The fight-for-the-people Republican. That's what they were. I'm not sure where the Democratic Party was able to hijack that narrative from us. But they did. And they have it. I'm trying to bring it back," he says.

Foster is a 33-year-old business consultant. He's been active in the GOP since he founded a lonely chapter of College Republicans at the historically black Miles College in Birmingham. He's been tapped by the Republican National Committee as a future leader.

Foster was raised by his grandmother, who forced him to vote a straight Democratic ticket the first time she took him to the polls. He says he went home and looked up political parties in the family's Encyclopaedia Britannica.

"I read through and went through all of them, I got to the Republican Party and I was just reading through the principles. My grandmother hates taxes. She doesn't do gay marriage," he says. "She's always taking about defending yourself and strong defense. And I said, 'Mom — you may be a Republican.' And she looked at me and walked off."

She's still a Democrat but has endorsed her grandson in his race for a state House seat representing part of suburban Birmingham. It includes the predominantly black city of Bessemer, where Foster spends a lot of time going door to door introducing himself.

Democrats have long represented this Alabama House district, which is about two-thirds African-American, giving his opponent, Louise Alexander, the advantage.

Foster knows he's up against some strong notions about the Republican Party. "I think they hear Republican they think of white men. And people who don't care about them and ... who don't understand them," he says.

What he calls "TV Republicans" — conservative pundits — are a thorn in his side, Foster says. And some of his fellow Alabamians haven't helped. Like the Republican state senator who referred to blacks as aborigines, or the congressman who declared that there was a war on whites.

Foster says he doesn't have to defend Republican principles — only Republicans. Especially those who are hostile to President Obama, who got 95 percent of the black vote in Alabama two years ago.

"And it's not saying that I agree with President Obama. I'm just saying that I can show somebody and talk to them about what it means to be a Republican and not mention President Obama's name at all. This is what being a Republican is. This is what being a conservative is," he says.

Over breakfast at their neighborhood IHOP, his wife, 28-year-old Setara Foster, a lawyer, talks about growing up black in Houston where her parents were union members and loyal Democrats.

She now identifies more closely with the GOP. But she says she tends to split her ticket.

"I think that when we as a group identify with one party, for one thing, all the time, that party never has to earn our vote. Ever. And so I think that by having a diversity of political ideology within ethnic, racial, gender, age groups, we force politicians to work," she says.

On the campaign trail, you won't hear Foster talk about Republicans or Democrats. Instead, he talks about how he's invested some of his campaign funds in community initiatives — technology for schools, shoes for a basketball team, hosting a local job fair.

The strategy has won some converts like Juanita Graham. "When this gentleman came along, I was a die-hard Democrat," she says. Graham owns a firm that offers inner-city students enhanced engineering and math courses. She first met Foster while she was working for his Democratic opponent.

"There were some preconceived notions; I will not lie. Because when you say Republican African-American, the first thing pops in most African-American minds is Uncle Tom, butt-kisser. I'm honest. That is the mindset," she says.

But when Foster helped her with startup funds, and talked about tackling Bessemer's low high school graduation rate, he earned her vote.

Graham says she's still a Democrat, though. And that's the real challenge for Foster and Republican leaders who hope to position the party for the future.

In what could be a major setback for commercial space tourism, a manned spaceship has crashed in California.

The Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two was on a test flight this morning, with two pilots aboard. Minutes after its rocket fired, the company announced on Twitter that spacecraft experienced an "anomaly."

#SpaceShipTwo has experienced an in-flight anomaly. Additional info and statement forthcoming.

— Virgin Galactic (@virgingalactic) October 31, 2014

Local authorities confirm that an aircraft has gone down. The AP reports that one pilot has been killed.

BREAKING: California Highway Patrol reports 1 fatality, 1 major injury after SpaceShipTwo accident.

— The Associated Press (@AP) October 31, 2014

SpaceShip Two doesn't go all the way into orbit. But the goal is to fly into space for brief tourist trips. The trips will cost $250,000 a piece, and more than 700 people have already put down deposits.

Virgin Galactic

North Korea has a number of serious public health woes: malnutrition, tuberculosis and cardiovascular disease, just to name a few. Ebola isn't one of them. The disease hasn't hit anywhere in Asia, much less this isolated and rarely visited Northeast Asian nation.

And yet state television has been broadcasting daily segments this month to raise awareness of the disease. A Beijing-based Spanish cameraman was banned from a visit because Spain was considered a risk. An official Japanese delegation visiting Pyongyang earlier this week was greeted by men wearing hazmat suits.

Meanwhile, the government requested help from South Korea's Red Cross in preventing Ebola. It also banned tourism and notified diplomats Thursday that all foreigners will be quarantined and observed for 21 days, the incubation period for Ebola.

Why is North Korea so freaked out by a disease nowhere near its borders?

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North Korea is infamously isolated and paranoid, so close observers aren't particularly surprised by any of this. And there's a precedent: during the 2003 SARS epidemic, Pyongyang closed the country's borders — though that disease was actually present in Asia, notably in China, North Korea's neighbor, ally and biggest trade partner.

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"They act in ways they see as necessary to protect their national security," says Keith Luse, executive director of the Washington-based National Committee on North Korea, who emphasizes that he's expressing his personal views. He notes that the North Korean leadership likely has "viewed with great interest" the U.S. reaction to Ebola. The official announcements of the past couple of weeks "are sending a message to the population that it is taking steps to protect them."

Although there's not exactly brisk traffic between North Korea and Africa — certainly no direct flights — they are not complete strangers, either. Far from it. Pyongyang enjoys official and business ties with many African nations, including decades-long diplomatic relations with all three countries worst affected by Ebola — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. (In fact, Kim Yong Nam, president of North Korea's national assembly, is in the midst of a four-country African tour now.)

It's too soon to tell what the overall economic impact of the Ebola-related tourism ban will be, but the timing is unfortunate. It comes in the midst of efforts to boost tourism and bring in more visitors and hard currency. When Kim Jong-un became leader three years ago, "he launched a number of initiatives to open the country to tourism and make it a more attractive place to visit," says Luse, ski resorts and water parks among them. A few thousand American tourists visited in 2013, Luse says. Tour operators have canceled November trips for now.

At Singapore's Choson Exchange, which trains North Koreans in entrepreneurship, a blog post warned: "We could be seeing potentially tens of thousands of dollars of losses as we delay training programs, and possibly even more as this drags on. For businesspeople, a shutdown will likely hurt their investment plans or transactions."

And when it comes to health priorities, the bottom line is that North Korea has many more pressing concerns than the threat of Ebola. The overall picture is grim. Even after emerging from famine in the 1990s, North Koreans continue to suffer high rates of malnutrition. Tuberculosis occurs at an estimated 344 cases per 100,000 people, "one of the highest incidence rates outside sub-Saharan Africa," according to a study published in the Lancet in April, while rates of stunting and underweight among North Korean children come "close to the worst-performing African countries."

And ironically, North Korea — so worried now about the slim chance of a dread disease entering from the outside world — may be the one posing a serious health threat to its own neighbors. "The spread of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in North Korea is much more advanced than was previously assumed," the authors of the Lancet paper warned, "which is a threat to North Korea's population and neighboring countries."

ebola

North Korea

Global Health