(Continued from page 18)

• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Yes, if Mitt Romney wins the White House and his Republican allies retake the Senate, he could shred most of President Barack Obama's health care law without having to overpower a Democratic filibuster.
• But it won't be as easy as some Republicans portend, and it certainly won't be quick.
• Why?

• Because any realistic effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act -- as opposed to last week's quixotic vote in the GOP-controlled House -- is sure to get jumbled together with lots of other issues, including Medicare, taxes, food stamps and defense spending.
• And that's because Republicans have to first pass a budget. It's the only way than can invoke special Senate rules that allow legislation to pass with just a simple majority vote -- instead of the 60 votes needed in the 100-member Senate to beat a filibuster.
• ___

• TOKYO (AP) -- Most of the quarter-million people forced to flee massive flooding in southwest Japan were able to return home by Monday, but weather officials warned the danger had not fully passed from the record rainfall that left at least 28 people dead over the weekend.
• Thousands of homes and hundreds of roads were damaged, and hundreds of landslides were reported. The military airlifted food by helicopter to stranded districts.
• The rain "was like a waterfall," Yoko Yoshika said in Yamaguchi prefecture (state). "It was horrible."
• Yoshika, wife of an award-winning Hagi-yaki style potter, said workers scrambled to carry out a bucket relay with plastic pails to get rid of the water flowing into their shop.
• In Yame, a city of 69,000 in Fukuoka prefecture, 74 people in three separate ar

(Continued on page 20)