Mark Memmott

Three closely watched employment indicators are out this morning:

-- Unemployment Benefits. There were 363,000 first-time claims for jobless benefits last week, down from 372,000 the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says. So, as they have all year, claims remain in a range between 350,000 and 400,000.

The campaign calm after the storm is about to end.

Both President Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, will be out stumping for votes today. The race for the White House, which was just about put on hold as Superstorm Sandy bore down on the East Coast and then roared ashore, is back on with just five days to go before Election Day.

Romney will be in Virginia. The president will be in Wisconsin, Colorado and Nevada.

Life is no where near back to normal in New Jersey, New York City and surrounding areas that were punched hard by Superstorm Sandy, and it won't be for days if not weeks.

But on Morning Edition, NPR correspondents in Manhattan, Queens, Newark, N.J., and Stamford, Conn., were reporting that:

-- Limited subway service has been restored in Manhattan.

We want to note the death of Letitia Baldrige, who as The Washington Post writes "was social secretary to first lady Jacqueline Kennedy and also became known as a 'doyenne of decorum' and chief arbiter of good manners in modern America."

Baldrige died Monday at a nursing facility in Bethesda, Md. She was 86.

Across New York City, much of New Jersey and other places hit hard by Superstorm Sandy, power remains out today and the long, hard process of digging through debris and starting to rebuild continues.

Sandy, the hurricane-turned-superstorm, has left dozens dead, millions without power and thousands in need of rescue from rising waters as it slowly moves north and west from the Mid-Atlantic to pass over the Great Lakes and into Canada.

According to The Associated Press, storm damage was projected at $20 billion, "meaning it could prove to be one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history."

Sandy has also taken a huge human toll: More than 30 deaths since the weekend and millions more coping with damaged homes, crippled transportation systems and no power.

Though Hurricane Sandy is the dominant news of the day, there are other stories, including:

"Personal income increased $48.1 billion, or 0.4 percent," in September from August, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says, while "personal consumption expenditures" — consumer spending — rose 0.8 percent.

While we continue to monitor Hurricane Sandy, we wanted to pass on some of the morning's other top headlines:

"World's Most Powerful Laser Beams To Zap Nuclear Waste."

That Bloomberg Businessweek headline got our attention. We were imagining the explosion that might result.

But as it turns out, the zapping "could destroy nuclear waste and provide new cancer treatments," according to the story.

Declaring that they have "listened to the world's reaction to the Lance Armstrong affair," leaders of the international governing body for cycling today said that no one will be awarded the seven Tour de France titles that have been stri

A court in Milan has convicted former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi on a charge of tax evasion and he's been given a 4-year prison sentence, The Associated Press and Reuters report.

But whether he will ever actually go to jail on the charge isn't yet known.

An explosion outside a mosque in northwest Afghanistan today killed more than 30 people and wounded dozens more.

From Kabul, NPR's Sean Carberry reports that witnesses have said a man approached on foot and then detonated a suicide bomb. It happened in Maymana, the capital of Faryab Province. Worshipers were gathering to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.

"Fighting raged near a military base in Syria's north as a ceasefire in the bloody civil war was supposed to go into effect Friday at dawn," activists tell The Associated Press, which says the news illustrates "the difficulty of enforcing even a limited truce coinciding with a Muslim holiday."

The U.S. economy grew at a 2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, the Bureau of Economic Analysis says.

That follows growth (at annual rates) of 1.3 percent in the second quarter and 2 percent in the first.

"We're not trying to hype it," National Weather Service meterologist Paul Kocin tells Bloomberg News. "What we're seeing in some of our models is a storm at an intensity that we have not seen in this part of the country in the past century."

From one friend to another:

TV icon Barbara Walters turned to the camera on ABC's The View this morning to tell developer/reality TV star/birther conspirator Donald Trump that "you're making a fool of yourself."

Taxpayer-funded jobless benefits that shouldn't have been paid because of errors or fraudulent claims totaled about $11 billion in 2009, according to a new study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

But the total amount of unclaimed benefits was nearly 10 times larger, economists estimate: $108 billion. They estimate that during the 2007-2009 recession, only about half of those eligible for them were collecting the benefits.

A message has appeared on the website of Syria's SANA news agency saying that the country's armed forces will halt military operations for four days, starting tomorrow.

On its face, that would appear to be acceptance of U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi's plan for a truce during the Eid al-Adh holiday that Muslims begin observing on Friday.

The "mystery monkey" who had been on the loose in the Tampa Bay area for more than three years was captured Wednesday, our friends at WUSF report.

The number of first-time claims for unemployment insurance fell by 23,000 last week from the week before, to 369,000, the Employment and Training Administration says.

Claims have bounced around in recent weeks, in part because of some changes in the way at least one state reports its figures.

Saying that "I think we ought to keep on the track that we are on" and that fellow Republican Mitt Romney has not "thought through these issues as thoroughly as he should have," former secretary of state and retired Gen. Colin Powell this morning endorsed President Obama's re-election bid.

Frank Tanabe, the 93-year-old World War II veteran who wanted to cast one more vote and inspired thousands when a photo of him doing that from his deathbed went viral, has died.

If you shopped recently at 63 Barnes & Noble stores in nine states and used a credit or debit card there's a chance that thieves got hold of data about your accounts and your PIN.

As the company has announced:

Sales of new single-family homes rose 5.7 percent in September from August and at an annual rate of 389,000 hit the fastest pace since April 2010, the Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development say.

Sales were up 27.1 percent from September 2011.

Reuters calls the news "further evidence the housing market recovery is gaining steam."

Surf Beach near Vandenberg Air Force Base along California's central coast is closed after the death of a 39-year-old man who was attacked by a shark Tuesday while surfing.

The man's death came two years and a day after a shark killed a 19-year-old man along the same stretch of the coast.

Reuters and Fox News have obtained copies of an email sent about two hours after the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which the White House, Pentagon and other agencies are told that the Islamist militant group Ansar al-Sharia had "claimed responsibility."