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Hour by hour: What to watch on Election Night; will the suspense linger well into Wednesday?
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Stock up on munchies and make sure the batteries in your TV remote are fresh. With this year's presidential election razor-close to the finish, Tuesday could be a long night.
• Even if the presidency isn't decided until after midnight EST, there will be plenty of clues early in the evening on how things are going for President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. Obama has more options for piecing together the 270 electoral votes needed for victory, so any early setbacks for Romney could be important portents of how the night will end.
• Here's a timetable for armchair election watchers on how the night will unfold, based on what time the last polls close in each state. All times are EST.
• --7 p.m.: Polls close in six states but all eyes will be on Virginia, the first of the battleground states to begin reporting results. If either candidate is comfortably ahead in Virginia, with 13 electoral votes, that could be a leading indicator of which way the night is going.
• Virginia typically has been fairly fast at counting ballots. But there's a new voter ID law in the state that could complicate things this year. Voters who don't bring identification to the polls still can have their ballots counted if they produce ID by Friday. If the race in Virginia is super tight, it could come down to those provisional ballots. On Election Night, no one will even know how many of them are out there.
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Inside the geriatric unit: US Air Force struggles to keep aging aircraft flying
• TOKYO (AP) -- For decades, the U.S. Air Force has grown accustomed to such superlatives as unrivaled and unbeatable. These days, some of its key combat aircraft are being described with terms like geriatric, or decrepit.
• The aging of the U.S. Air Force, a long-simmering topic in defense circles, made a brief appearance in the presidential debates when Republican nominee Mitt Romney cited it as evidence of the decline of U.S. military readiness. His contention that the Navy is the smallest it's been since 1917 got more attention, thanks to President Barack Obama's quip that the Navy also has fewer "horses and bayonets."
• But analysts say the Air Force has a real problem, and it will almost certainly get (Continued on page 27)
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