NPR News

With only a few days left until the election, President Obama pointed to the better-than-expected jobs numbers as evidence that — slowly but surely — his economic policies are working.

Mitt Romney made his "closing arguments" on the campaign trail in Wisconsin on Friday.

Both candidates seized on Friday's jobs report to make the case for why they should be elected next Tuesday. Employers added a better than expected 171,000 jobs in October. But the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.9 percent as more Americans entered the labor force to look for work.

Mario Veas spent Monday night hunkered down with his family. But he has been running ever since.

Veas runs a tree service in Willow Grove, Pa. He says his phone has been ringing nonstop because people want trees felled by the storm chopped up and cleared.

"Everybody [is] calling and they want [the job] to be done this morning," Veas says.

Earlier this week, Veas was clearing an enormous tree branch from Preethy Edamala's patio in nearby Elkins Park.

NPR's Zoe Chace made her way to Coney Island in Brooklyn this afternoon. There she found residents making line at a FEMA processing center.

Zoe spoke to DeQuan Franklin and Roberta Johnson, who wanted to apply for emergency relief. They said in all their time living in New York they've never seen anything like this. Franklin says he's had to walk 20 minutes to find an open store. He said she had to walk almost 70 blocks to find a laundromat.

"The neighborhood doesn't look nothing like it did a few days ago," DeQuan said.

Elizabeth Doyle was brought up around all kinds of music from an early age, thanks to a truly musical family in South Dakota. Three of her four grandparents were professional musicians, including one radio performer and singing cowboy. Her father had played saxophone and clarinet in the Navy during WWII, and her mother was an avid singer and pianist. Both parents were fans of big-band music, jazz, and the show tunes of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

The presidential race is expected to be extremely close, and that has a lot of people nervous about what it will mean for election night.

Does it mean that the vote count could drag on for days, or even weeks, as it did in 2000?

Lawyers for the campaigns, the political parties and state election offices are preparing for the possibility.

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted could very well be the man in the middle of any election night storm. By all accounts, the vote in his crucial battleground state will be extremely close.

The Playboy bunny is coming to India — even though the magazine is still banned.

India, like many other conservative countries, has not permitted Playboy to appear on newsstands. But the brand still plans to come to India in a big way.

Over the next 10 years, around 120 Playboy venues are expected to open across India, including bars, clubs, fashion cafes and stores. The first Playboy club will open next month in the holiday destination of Goa.

The World Anti-Doping Agency announced Friday that it won't fight the sanctions imposed against American cyclist Lance Armstrong.