Hurricane Sandy Bears Down on US East Coast
Millions of people on the US northeastern seaboard were bracing themselves on Monday as powerful Hurricane Sandy swept toward the coast, packing life-threatening high winds, heavy rains and the potential for massive flooding across the nation’s most densely populated region.
“This is serious, killer storm,” Maryland Governor Maryland Martin O’Malley said. “This storm has already killed a number of people in the Caribbean and will likely take more lives as the storm hits the mid-Atlantic and the eastern US.”
The gigantic hurricane stretches more than 1,000 miles (1,609 km) across, and as of Monday morning was located about 285 miles (459 km) off the North Carolina Coast.
Forecasters say it is expected to make landfall in New Jersey on Monday evening, a circumstance one official told The Associated Press was a “worst case scenario.”
Another said the sheer size of the storm – even with relatively low wind speeds for a hurricane of around 85 mph (137 kph) – raised the potential for destruction to record levels.
“You have a lot of wind acting over a long distance of water for hundreds of miles,” said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground, a commercial Internet weather service.
Forecasters said Sandy could turn into a “super storm” when it combines with a cold front and winter storm system likely to turn rain into snowfall in higher elevations, and make the storm the worst the eastern US has seen in decades.
The pending storm forced mass evacuations and shut down transport systems, government offices and schools up and down the East Coast, home to an estimated 50 million people.
In anticipation of heavy damage and huge power outages, states of emergency were declared in several states and Washington, DC.
Hundreds of thousands of residents in low-lying coastal areas from Maryland to Connecticut were ordered to evacuate.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has dealt with residents reluctant to leave their homes before, and this time, with his state forecast to take a direct hit from the hurricane, he was characteristically blunt.
“Staying on the barrier islands for 36 hours of hurricane force winds of 75 mph (120 kph) or more sustained, not gusting, is stupid,” he said at a news conference.
“Don’t be stupid. Get out. Go to higher and safer ground,” Christie said.
In New York City, forecasters have warned that a storm surge could bring a wall of water as high as 11 feet (3.3 meters), potentially flooding lower Manhattan.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered the evacuations of 375,000 residents.
“If you don’t evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,” Bloomberg told reporters.
“This is a serious and dangerous storm.”
Mass transit systems throughout the region were shut down, including the Washington, Philadelphia and New York City subway system, the largest rapid transit system in the US.
It transports more than five million people a day, and many New Yorkers do not have cars.
More than 5,500 flights have been cancelled for Monday, including more than a thousand in Philadelphia alone.
A week before the US presidential election, the storm is also wreaking havoc on the chaotic, final week of campaigning for President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
Obama spent part of Sunday being briefed on the latest state and local preparations at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Washington.
“Anything they need, we will be there,” he said.
He left Washington late Sunday and flew to Florida for a campaign appearance on Monday, but cancelled events in the critically important swing states of Ohio and Virginia later in the day with plans to return to the White House to monitor the storm.
Romney skipped three appearances in Virginia on Sunday and campaigned in Ohio. He was heading to Wisconsin on Monday, but cancelled an appearance in New Hampshire on Tuesday.
“The top priority is the safety and security of people who may be in harm’s way,” senior Romney campaign adviser Kevin Madden said on Sunday.
Madden said Romney campaign staffers would help collect supplies for storm victims in Virginia and a campaign bus would be used for relief efforts.
The hurricane is also having an impact on early voting taking place across the US. Officials in Maryland cancelled early voting for Monday, and said a decision would be made later in the day about voting on Tuesday.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell said early voting facilities that lost power from the storm would be “moved up to the same level as hospitals and police stations to have power restored.”
“Obviously, we want unfettered access to the polls, because we think the more people that come out, the better we’re going to do,” top Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod told CNN.
“To the extent that it makes it harder, that’s a source of concern.”
The approaching storm also forced the US stock market to close.
“The dangerous conditions developing as a result of Hurricane Sandy will make it extremely difficult to ensure the safety of our people and communities, and safety must be our first priority,” the New York Stock Exchange said in a statement late on Sunday.
Tymoshenko Declares Hunger Strike Over Poll Results
Ukraine’s jailed former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko has declared a hunger strike in protest at what she calls vote-rigging in the parliamentary election, her lawyer told Ukrainian media on Monday.
Tymoshenko, whose seven year sentence over a 2009 gas deal with Russia was viewed by critics as politically motivated, condemned Sunday’s elections as being the most dishonest in the country’s history.
“The elections were rigged from the first till the last day, and concealing this means killing Ukraine’s future,” lawyer Serhiy Vlasenko quoted Tymoshenko as saying.
According to Vlasenko, the former prime minister is on hunger strike, and will only drink water.
In April Tymoshenko announced another hunger strike in protest against what she called cruel treatment in prison and held out for some 20 days.
Tymoshenko, the opposition heroine of Ukraine’s 2004 pro-democracy “Orange Revolution,” said that had she been free, she would have called Ukrainians out onto the streets in new protests.
“But the only thing I can do under these circumstance is declare a hunger strike,” Tymoshenko said, adding that President Viktor Yanukovych’s regime had lost all legitimacy.
With 70 percent of the ballots counted, Ukraine’s ruling Party of Regions, led by President Yanukovych, had secured just over 33 percent of the vote. The United Opposition, anchored by Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party, is second with 23 percent of the vote.
They are followed by the Communist Party (14.5 percent), the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform (UDAR), led by the world-famous boxer Vitaly Klitschko (13 percent) and the Svoboda (Freedom) nationalist party (some 9 percent).
Over 5,000 candidates campaigned for 450 seats in the country’s parliament, with half the deputies to be elected on party-list vote and half in single-mandate constituencies.
Chilean Press Highlights High Abstention and Victory for Opposition in Elections
The media in Chile awoke today with headlines about the right losing and the high number of non voters
“Abstention plus ruling party defeats mark key municipal election,” headlined the daily La Tercera, to specify that the governing parties lost key electoral battlegrounds in Santiago, Providencia and Concepcion.
The newspaper also states that opposition increased from 147 to 168 the number of municipalities in their power, while the ruling party went down from 144 to 121.
“The 60 percent level abstention marks the first election in Chile with voluntary voting”, led on its front page newspaper El Mercurio, which states that out of an electoral roll of 13 million 388 thousand voters little more five million people bothered to.
The main television channels repeated over and over the low level of participation and lashed out at polls right before the election, which had predicted right wing victories in several municipalities that yesterday passed into the hands of the opposition
The opposition presented two lists, one of the Democratic coalition, comprising the Christian Democrats and the Socialist Party, and the Agreement for a Fair Chile, composed of the Communist Party, Radicals and others.
The Communist Party, which doubled their number of councillors, participated in both, the first by an electoral agreement not to run candidates against other oppositions parties, which resulted in mutual support for the election of some mayors, while the agreement for a Fair Chile included the election of councillors.
Via PL