After a late night last night,  we're taking a short break and will return to our regular programming here
later in the morning. Our sister blog, USA TODAY On Politics, is offering a complete look at the morning-after-election news coverage and additional news about president-elect Obama, so head on over.  We'll be back with you here by late morning.

The day after The Day:

• The presidential election may be over but the transition is just beginning. Follow the reaction, and get the national roundup, at On Politics.

• Economic reports: The Institute for Supply Management releases its non-manufacturing index for October, and ADP releases its National Employment Report for last month. Look for earnings reports from some big-name companies.

• Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice begins a visit to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Egypt.

• In Somalia, government troops and Islamist rebel groups are expected to observe a ceasefire agreed to last week.

• The United Kingdom (and some of its former colonies) celebrates Guy Fawkes Night with bonfires and fireworks. The festivities mark the foiling of the Gunpowder Plot on Nov. 5, 1605 to blow up the Houses of Parliament in London. The plot was hatched by Guy Fawkes and other Catholic conspirators.

In a move that could lead to "Wi-Fi on steroids," the Federal Communications Commission has opened portions of unused TV spectrum to wireless Internet and devices.

The FCC's 5-0 vote allows public use of the unlicensed frequencies, called “white spaces.” The government hopes that by opening the broadcast spectrum, a new generation of cheap, higher-speed Internet access will be developed, along with new wired devices. Rural Americans could be the big beneficiaries of new high-speed broadband known as WiMax.

TV broadcasters objected to the change, saying wireless Internet transmissions would disrupt their signals. Manufacturers and users of wireless microphones — including sports leagues, church leaders and performers of all stripes — have also raised concerns about interference.

Here's the FCC's news release (pdf).

"White spaces are the blank pages on which we which we will write our broadband future," said Jonathan Adelstein, one of two Democrats on the five-member commission. Adelstein added that white spaces could represent a "third channel" to reach consumers beyond the telephone and cable networks that represent the primary competition in today's broadband market, the Associated Press says.

Republican Commissioner Robert McDowell called it a "giant leap for American consumers."

PC Magazine and Bloomberg have more details.

The man who was in charge of risk at Bear Stearns when it almost collapsed in March has been hired by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to supervise the financial safety and soundness of U.S. banks.

Michael Alix is a senior vice president in the bank supervision group of the New York Fed, according to an announcement. Previously he worked at Bear Stearns for 12 years, 10 as the worldwide head of credit risk management. He was named chief risk officer in 2006 and held the job when the government helped rescue the investment bank. Before Bear he spent eight years at Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in September amid the financial meltdown.

"That's incredible," James Cox, a Duke University law professor and securities law expert, told the AP. "This is not reassuring. ... What is there in this person's experience and skill package" that qualifies him for the Fed position?"

New York Fed spokesman Andrew Williams didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

The The Wall Street Journal has more.

Investors voted with their wallets today, pushing stocks higher as they vacuumed up bargains. The big indices shot up in the final hour for the best Election Day performance since 1984.

At the close, the Dow Jones was up 3.2% (+305 points), the S&P 500 rose 4% (+39), the Nasdaq gained 3.1% (+53) and the Russell 2000 edged up 1.3% (+7).

"It's pretty typical of how bear markets end,"Matt King, chief investment officer of Bell Investment Advisors told AP. "The stock market recovers well ahead of the economy."

Doesn't mean the bears have left the forest, another money manager said.

"In the next couple of days, people are going to focus on the fact that we still have these issues," said Bernie McGinn, chief executive of McGinn Investment Management. "They aren't resolved."

(Trader Anthony Alvarino sported buttons from campaigns of the past on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Photo by Richard Drew, AP.)

Research published today suggests that regular rainfall may help trigger autism in children, USA TODAY's Rita Rubin reports.

"If you look at the autism literature now, they're much more open to an environmental trigger," says lead author Michael Waldman, a Cornell University economist who says his son was diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder at age 3 but has recovered and is now a normal third-grader.

He and his team studied children in California, Oregon and Washington state. They speculate that rain might act as a trigger in genetically susceptible children by carrying pollutants or by forcing indoor activity that leads to increased TV-watching, decreased vitamin D levels or increased exposure to household chemicals.

"Autism prevalence rates for school-aged children in California, Oregon and Washington in 2005 were positively related to the amount of precipitation these counties received from 1987 through 2001," they wrote in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Naturally, the findings are being disputed.

"It just does not seem plausible," said Lee Grossman, president of the Autism Society of America, who received a summary of Waldman's findings from a reporter but hadn't yet read the journal article. "It does not match up with any of the demographics that we follow."

Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick, a London physician who wrote "Defeating Autism: A Damaging Delusion", expressed doubt, telling Reuters that autism diagnoses are on the rise in all climates.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about one in every 150 children has autism or a related disorder such as Asperger's Syndrome. Rates in many countries have been rising, although that may be partly due to increased reporting and diagnosis of the condition.

Doctors generally agree on a genetic link, and many support that environmental factors play a roll. Still, autism remains largely a mystery.

In the second big Federal Communications Commission story of the day, an FCC spokesman says the agency has begun an investigation into cable TV pricing, the Associated Press just reported.

Update at 4:13 p.m. ET: Verizon, a cable competitor, also is being investigagted. Here are the cable operators that the FCC has targeted: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks, Suddenlink Communications, Bend Cable Communications, GCI Company, Harron Entertainment and RCN Corp.

The FCC is looking into the practice of moving analog channels into digital tiers to free up bandwidth for high-definition channels. Analog customers will have to rent a digital set-top box from the operator or buy the digital TV plan.

A British airline is charging a double amputee an excess-baggage fee to bring a spare pair of prosthetic legs, the Daily Telegraph.

Mick Skee, who is headed to Majorca in May on vacation, told the paper that Jet2 would not waive the charge, even though he could bring a wheelchair for free.

"In my opinion, the prosthetic legs are a disability aid. A wheelchair is classed as that and can be transported free of charge," said Skee, 47. "It is ridiculous. The legs weigh less than a wheelchair, but I have been told that Jet2 is not prepared to budge.

"If I want to take a spare pair of prosthetics, I will have to pay an extra £10 ($20) for each way."

Jet2 said it would not comment on individual cases.

The "F word" was the elephant in the courtroom today, but the nation's top justices talked around it, as USA TODAY's Joan Biskupic reports.

The Supreme Court heard competing arguments about restrictions on "fleeting expletives" broadcast on conventional TV and radio. But not a "dirty word" was heard; justices and lawyers relied on euphemisms and the alphabet.

At issue was the Federal Communication Commission's 2004 policy change on what it considered indecent language. Previously the commission only sanctioned repeat offenders uttering George Carlin's notorious "seven dirty words," but it decided to crackdown after a series of one-off bleepers by celebrities (Bono, Cher, Nicole Richie) in 2002 and 2003.

Here's what the AP has to say: "The words in question begin with the letters "F'' and "S." The Associated Press typically does not use them."

USA TODAY's Biskupic describes what went on in the sober chamber:

Hearing the government's appeal Tuesday, none of the justices, nor the lawyers who argued before them, invoked any of the four-letter words at issue. They instead employed euphemisms and the single first letters of particular bad words.

In many ways, their questions were similarly ambiguous in revealing how they might rule in the case that could have great consequence for TV viewers.

Some justices such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared open to the networks' argument that the FCC policy was arbitrary in violation of federal law.

"There seems to be no rhyme or reason," she said, for some of the decisions the FCC has made regarding challenged programs.

She noted that it had found material in a Blues music documentary indecent but not expletives in the TV airing of the World War II movie Saving Private Ryan.

Other justices, including Antonin Scalia, appeared strongly supportive of FCC efforts to curtail coarse words on TV, even when it was a single utterance.

Yet other justices did not signal their positions, and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas asked nothing.

The court's ruling could also affect "fleeting nudity," Broadcasting & Cable magazine writes.

There's more at The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog and at ScotusBlog.

In a historic meeting of the world's two largest faiths, Vatican and Islamic scholars opened the first Catholic-Muslim forum in a bid to improve relations.

The three-day meeting in Rome stems from Pope Benedict's 2006 speech implying that Islam was violent and irrational.

In response, 138 invited Christian churches to a new dialogue to foster mutual respect through a better understanding of each other's beliefs.

Muslim scholars responded with "A Common Word", a manifesto that argues that both faiths share the core principles of love of God and neighbor. The meeting will include an audience with Pope Benedict.

Two previous gatherings with Christians have been held with U.S. Protestants in July and Anglicans last month.

"It was a very cordial atmosphere" today, one delegate told Reuters, asking not to be named because the meeting was closed. The forum consists of 29 scholars and clerics from each faith.

The BBC also is covering the conclave.

Here's background, along with a Vatican Radio interview with the head of inter-religious dialogue.

Scholar Tariq Ramadan, president of the European Muslim NetworkUK Guardian "Why I'm going to meet the Pope."

"It is clear that the time has come to open debate on the common theological underpinnings and the shared foundations of the two religions," he writes. “Our task is not to create a new religious alliance against the ‘secularized’ and ‘immoral’ world order, but to make a constructive contribution to the debate, to prevent the logic of economics and war from destroying what remains of our common humanity.”

(Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, right, talks with Mustafa Ceric, head of the Bosnia Islamic Community. Photo by Osservatore Romano via AP.)

Hoping to corral "bandwidth hogs," AT&T is experimenting with limiting how much data its Internet customers can use each month.

Reno, Nev., is the test market, starting this month. A spokesman said another location may be added by the end the year.

AT&T, the country's ISP, says 5% of its subscribers use 50% of the capacity.

AT&T will limit downloads to 20 gigabytes per month for users of their slowest DSL service, at 768 kilobits per second. The limit increases with the speed of the plan, up to 150 gigabytes per month at the 10 megabits-per-second level.

"This is a preliminary step to find the right model to address this trend," spokesman Michael Coe said today.

Last month Comcast, the No. 2 Internet service provider, began a nationwide limit of 250 gigabytes per subscriber.

Walter Astrada of AFP/Getty Images took this photo of a child clutching high-nutrition biscuits today at a Mercy Corps clinic for "internally displaced persons" in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The United Nations says recent fighting between rebels and government troops has displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians in this African nation. That's on top of some 800,000 who were forced out their homes during previous conflicts.

British Foreign Minister David Miliband says the most recent violence threatens regional stability and could result in a humanitarian catastrophe, according to BBC News.

"When we carried out our distribution, it was a desperate situation,” Jaya Murthy of UNICEF says. “People came and crowded around our sites and were virtually trying to barge in to get the assistance. These were just biscuits [that we were distributing]. So this shows the desperation.

“We know that most of them have had very little to nothing to eat, so they’re absolutely starving,” he adds. 

Doctors Without Borders, an international aid group, tells AFP that it is seeing five to 10 new cases of cholera each day.

Newsday says the brother of a murder suspect was charged yesterday with trying to break INTO a jail in Nassau County, N.Y.

"When Thomas Walsh was told that prisoners could not receive visitors on Mondays, he sneaked around to a side ramp and tried to get into the jail that way," the paper says, paraphrasing a police spokesman.

Walsh was arrested after an altercation with jailers, Newsday reports. Local news organizations say he was still in custody last night.

See more charts in USA TODAY's Money section.

Today's tip: Don't wave a toy gun and yell "get down" on a college campus.

That's what police say Ryan Labenz, a 24-year-old senior at the University of Nebraska, did yesterday in Lincoln. "We handle everything as real and serious, and he scared students enough so several of them exited through a window," campus police Capt. Carl Oestmann tells the Omaha World-Herald.

He was charged with making terroristic threats, according to the school.

In case you missed it, yesterday's tip was a reminder that you shouldn't break into an occupied police station.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says a 7-year-old boy found a bag of cash and meth mixed in with his Halloween candy.

Investigators say the drugs had a street value of $200. They think a man dropped the contraband in the boy's bag while he was fleeing police.

"The [kids] could have OD'd on it. That's what made me so shaky and upset,'' mother Shelly Brosdahl tells the paper.

You're going to want to wash your hands after reading this: There's a new study out that finds thousands of species of bacteria live on the human hand, with the average hand hosting 150 species of bacteria.

In addition, according to the study, women have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men do -- and both men and women have more types of bacteria than researchers were expecting to find.

In the research, published in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers took samples from the palms of 51 college students and identified 4,742 species of bacteria -- including five species which were present on every hand.

Researchers aren't sure why women's hands harbored more variety of bacteria than men's. One theory: Men generally have more acidic skin than women.

• The front page of this morning's USA TODAY

What to watch for as election returns come in
As vote tallies and analysis flood television networks and the Web, here's what to watch for tonight in four critical states.

Where is everybody? Maybe standing in line at the polls
Wondering why so many of your co-workers are nowhere to be found Tuesday? Blame it on the election.

Decision is in voters' hands
Americans go to the polls today to make a historic selection, either the first African-American president or the oldest first-term occupant of the White House and his female vice president.

A programming note: For today's latest election news, please turn to our sister blog, USA TODAY On Politics. We're going to focus here on non-election news, with a few 'big headline' exceptions. And take the time to vote today!

Good morning. It's Election Day 2008. Of course, news of the election dominates major newspapers and news websites. Polls are open all over the East now, and open elsewhere soon.

The New York Times takes the what-does-it-all-mean angle this morning, saying the 2008 presidential race "fundamentally upended the way presidential campaigns are fought in this country" -- a fact overlooked as the focus turns to the McCain-Obama horse race. The Washington Post has plenty of election coverage as well, but also looks at China's crisis of confidence in the midst of world financial woes.

 CNN, MSNBC and Fox News are all fronting election coverage, with Fox among numerous news outlets pushing out a feature on today's traditional early vote in two New Hampshire towns.

Yahoo! News has its own election package, but among its most-emailed stories: The possibility that a new Three Stooges feature project may be filmed. Google News fronts with a Los Angeles Times article on America's mood on Election Day.

For Election Day:

• Barring a repeat of 2000, American voters will choose the 44th president of the United States. Record turnout is expected. USA TODAY will have full coverage throughout the day and night.

• Economic news: factory orders for September.

• The Supreme Court hears about dirty words you can't say on TV or radio. The justices will decide whether the court of appeals erred in striking down the Federal Communications Commission's determination that the broadcast of vulgar expletives may violate federal restrictions on the broadcast of "any obscene, indecent, or profane language," when the expletives are not repeated. The case is FCC v. Fox Television Stations.

Contradicting a report last month by the state Legislature, Alaska's Personnel Board has concluded that Gov. Sarah Palin did not violate ethics laws by firing her public safety commissioner.

Both investigations found that Palin was within her rights to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, who alleged that he was dismissed because he did not terminate a trooper who was Palin's ex-brother-in-law. But the Legislature's report concluded that Palin had abused her power by firing Monegan.

The Personnel Board, however, ruled that the Legislature's investigator wrongly concluded that Palin abused her power by allowing aides and her husband to pressure Monegan and others to dismiss her ex-brother-in-law, Trooper Mike Wooten, the Anchorage Daily News says.

The report presents the findings and recommendations of Anchorage lawyer Timothy Petumenos, whom the Personnel Board hired as independent counsel. He wrote that the Legislature's special counsel, former state prosecutor Steve Branchflower, used the wrong state law as the basis for his conclusions and also misconstrued the evidence.

Here are the summary and recommendations.

Declaring war on "elitist" and "discriminatory" bureaucratic language, the councillors in Bournemouth, England, has ordered borough workers to replace Latin phrases in documents and correspondence with plain, everyday phrases, London's Sunday Telegraph reports.

The Bournemouth Borough Council (Latin motto: Pulchritudo et Salubritas — beauty and health) singles out 19 terms Latin words or phrases, e.g., bona fide, status quo, ad hoc, vice versa, e.g., etc. It suggests alternative wording.

"Not everyone knows Latin," the council told its staff. "Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult."

The councils of Salisbury and Fife also have directed their staffs not to use certain Latinate phrases.

Dismayed scholars say the Bournemouth ban dilutes the world's richest language. One denounced it in very plain, colorful English.

"This is absolute bonkers and the linguistic equivalent of ethnic cleansing," said Mary Beard, a professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge. "English is and always has been a language full of foreign words. It has never been an ethnically pure language."

The Daily Mail offers a plea for common sense: "Si fractum non sit, noli id reficere (If it ain't broke, don't fix it!)"

Which phrases are to be avoided and substituted? Read on.

Two large bones found a half mile from the crash site of Steve Fossett's plane in California's Sierra Nevada have been identified positively as the adventurer's remains.

Madera County Sheriff John Anderson announced the results of DNA tests conducted by the state Department of Justice, three days after the bones, a tennis shoe and Fossett's license and credit cards were found. Officials said that Fossett would have died on impact and that animals apparently dragged his remains away after his plane slammed into a mountain in September 2007. Bite marks were found on his shoe and license.

The wreckage was discovered last month.

Update at 5:58 p.m. ET: Fossett's widow, Peggy, released a statement thanking authorities for their work, AP says.

"I am hopeful that the DNA identification puts a definitive end to all of the speculation surrounding Steve's death. This has been an incredibly difficult time for me, and I am thankful to everyone who helped bring closure to this tragedy," she said.

Sen. Barack Obama has announced that his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, 86, died of cancer today late last night in Hawaii. The Democratic candidate had visited her two weeks ago in Hawaii, where he lived with her for much of his youth.

Our colleagues over at On Politics have more.

A plain vanilla day on Wall Street. No vertigo-inducing swings, no last-minute surges, no screaming gains or losses.

Traders played it safe in the face of bad reports on auto sales and manufacturing, and a certain election tomorrow.

The Dow Jones and S&P 500 both finished just a hair under the break-even line, and the Nasdaq finished just a hair above. Basically flat.

"What we've seen was a rally last week taking a dire depression off the table and I think now what we have a severe recession," he told the AP. "By and large the economy is bad but it's not as bad as many people think it is. There are still people going to work every day."

"With the election tomorrow obviously people probably want to wait and see what happens there. I think that's probably holding people back."

Any prognostications about what the markets will do based on the election outcome?

The U.S. Army discharged one recruit and disciplined two drill instructors after a Jewish soldier reported that he was being discriminated against because of his religion, the Associated Press reports.

Pvt. Michael Handman was beaten by a fellow recruit last month in the laundry room of their barracks at Fort Benning. Handman's attacker has been removed from the service, but commanders said he wasn't motivated by anti-Semitism, according to AP.

"Just days before the Sept. 24 assault, the two drill sergeants were issued letters of reprimand, in which they were accused by the military of addressing Handman with anti-Jewish slurs, including 'Juden,'" the Jewish Telegraph Agency says. "In the base’s mess hall, one of the drill sergeants also demanded that he remove his yarmulke, which he had begun to wear in the few weeks following his induction."

Highway workers found voter information scattered on the side of Interstate 4 this morning in Tampa, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

The documents, which filled nine garbage bags, "carried an alphabetical listing of Tampa residents, their party affiliations, age, sex, home address, and sometimes phone numbers," the paper says. "Each entry includes a check boxes to mark whether each person supports John McCain or Barack Obama, whether they voted and whether they need a ride to the polls on Election Day."

Local election officials say the documents are based on public information. "They're not our papers," Mia McCormick, a spokeswoman for the county elections office, tells The Tampa Tribune. "Sometimes candidates request this information for campaign surveys. But we don't know whose they are."

Officials say the documents will probably be destroyed.