What we’re watching Thursday

Senate nears historic vote on gay rights bill

• The Senate is headed for a historic vote on legislation outlawing workplace discrimination against gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. All 55 members of the Democratic majority, including senators from the Deep South, and several Republicans were expected to unite on Thursday in backing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

CIA paying AT&T for metadata on international phone calls

• The New York Times reported Thursday that the CIA is paying AT&T more than $10 million a year to provide a database of phone records to assist the agency with its counterterrorism investigations. According to the report, most of the call logs provided involve foreign-to-foreign calls, but when one end is in the U.S., it does not disclose the identity of the Americans and ‘masks’ several digits of their phone numbers.

Super typhoon heads for the Philippines

• Thousands have been evacuated in central Philippines ahead of a major storm that is expected to be a super typhoon, with winds in excess of 149 mph when it makes landfall Friday.

Twitter officially becomes a public company

• Twitter opened its IPO Thursday at $26 a share. The microblogging service began trading on the New York Stock Exchange at 9:30 a.m. EST under the symbol TWTR. USA Today has 5 things you should know about Twitter’s IPO.

Third quarter GDP rose 2.8 percent

• Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent in the July-through-September period, the Commerce Department said Thursday.