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• Both Biden and Ryan head into the debate with vulnerabilities: Biden must rein in a freewheeling manner that can be endearing but also produces plenty of gaffes. Ryan hasn't been in a campaign debate for more than a decade and is light on foreign policy experience, a sharp contrast to the vice president, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
• Ryan also will need to find a way to reinforce Romney's policy positions without selling out his own, more conservative credentials.
• Romney adviser Kevin Madden signaled in advance that Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, would distance himself from his past proposals for sharp budget cuts.
• "You have to remember that there is a Romney-Ryan ticket and there's one presidential candidate -- there's one person at the top of the ticket -- so the focus again will be on what Gov. Romney's plan is for reforming Washington," Madden said.
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Armstrong report includes 200 pages, 26 witnesses
EDDIE PELLS,AP National Writer
• Page after page of damning details.
• They came from computer records, books, media reports and, maybe most significantly, the people Lance Armstrong used to train alongside and celebrate with. The people he used to call his friends.
• Hit with a lifetime ban and the loss of all seven of his Tour de France titles, Armstrong challenged the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency to give him the names of all his accusers. The agency obliged, listing 26, including 11 former teammates.
• Armstrong said he wanted to see the hard evidence that he was a doper, and USADA gave him that, too, in the form of a 200-page tome filled with vivid recollections -- the hotel rooms riders transformed into makeshift blood-transfusion centers, the way Armstrong's former wife rolled cortisone pills into foil and handed them out to the cyclists.
• The report, released Wednesday, depicts what USADA chief Travis Tygart called "the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen."
• Armstrong's attorney called it a "one-sided hatchet job."
• Either way, it serves up the most detailed, unflinching portrayal yet of Armstrong as a man who would pay virtually any price -- financially, emotionally and physically -- to win the seven Tour de France titles that the anti-doping agency has or (Continued on page 31)
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