Washington pot activists push for driving curbs to help pass bill

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) – Marijuana activists in Washington state hope voters will be reassured by strict new “stoned driving” standards, despite opposition from medical cannabis users who say the limits would make it hard for them to ever drive legally.

Washington is among three states voting on Tuesday on whether to allow marijuana for recreational use, even though the federal government considers it illegal, harmful and liable to be abused. Legalization measures in two other states, Colorado and Oregon, contain no new restrictions on impaired driving.

The group behind the Washington state measure has set a clear, measurable red line for blood limits on pot’s psychoactive element, which is built into the initiative to be decided by voters. In doing so, they have sought to overcome the failings of a 2010 California legalization referendum, which foundered in part over fears of more deadly car crashes.

But they have also ventured into the heavily contested territory of how to scientifically gauge hazardous levels of pot in drivers, and how limits should be enforced.

Critics say the science around pot-impaired driving is not settled and the National Institute on Drug Abuse says more research is needed to understand pot’s impact on driving.

Under the Washington proposal, an average pot smoker would cross the limit after two or three hits from a joint, and remain too high to drive for a couple of hours, said Brian Vicente, co-author of the Colorado cannabis legalization initiative.

Regular medical pot users, because they have more of the drug in their system, could be pushed over the limit after inhaling less of the drug, he said.

No state has ever legalized cannabis for recreational use, but polls have consistently shown the Washington measure leading, if by a narrowing margin.

An Elway Poll of 451 likely voters released last week showed 48 percent support the bill versus 44 percent opposed, with a margin of error of 4.5 percent.

New Approach Washington, the group behind the measure, has far out raised backers of the other two state legalization efforts, taking in over $ 4.5 million since the measure earned a place on the ballot.

The impaired driving limits are meant to make the measure palatable to a broad swath of voters, said Alison Holcomb, an ACLU lawyer who wrote the initiative and directs the campaign.

SWAYING VOTERS

“Trying to move such an historic measure, you can’t take anything for granted,” she said. “There was definitely a political consideration involved.”

A dozen states have standards for the amount of THC, the ingredient in pot that makes users high, that drivers can have in their blood. Nine of those states have zero tolerance, and the rest have limits on THC in the blood that are more restrictive than the proposal before Washington voters.

Washington prohibits driving while impaired by marijuana, but does not yet have a specific blood level standard.

Holcomb said legalization proponents had commissioned a statewide poll in May in which 62 percent of 602 likely voters said a pot-impaired driving standard would make them more likely to vote for legalization. Washington is one of 17 states that already allow medical marijuana.

She said Californians rejected a pot legalization measure in 2010 that lacked an impaired driving element after Mothers Against Drunk Driving complained the law would lead to more accidents.

But the proposed impaired driving standards have not won many fans among foes of legal pot.

“I don’t think it really would be much of a deterrent,” said Steve Freng, prevention treatment manager for the Northwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which seeks to curb the use of illicit drugs. Freng fears legalization would lead to more teenagers obtaining marijuana.

In a twist, some medical pot backers oppose the initiative. They say regular medical cannabis users could become outlaws under the proposed driving standard of 5 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood because THC can linger in the system. Those under 21 would face a zero-tolerance policy.

“You don’t criminalize us and call it legalization just to get (the measure) passed,” said Steve Sarich, a medical marijuana entrepreneur who leads the anti-initiative campaign.

A 2006 study cited by legalization proponents shows that pot users with between 5 and 10 nanograms of active THC per milliliter of blood were 75 to 90 percent more likely than sober people to show signs of impairment in driving-related tasks.

Research shows a once-a-week pot user’s active THC level drops below the state’s proposed legal limit within three hours of smoking, said toxicology expert Stefan Toennes of Goethe University in Germany. Heavy users sustain a higher level of THC longer, but only in extreme cases for over eight hours, he said.

The Washington state measure would create a system to license and tax pot growers, processors and stores. Only those 21 and older could legally buy the drug for recreation.

(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Todd Eastham)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Storm-crippled subway creaks back to life

NEW YORK (AP) — Subways started rolling in much of New York City on Thursday for the first time since Superstorm Sandy crippled the nation's largest transit system. Traffic crawled over bridges, where police enforced mandatory carpooling.

Ridership was light in the morning, and the trains couldn't take some New Yorkers where they needed to go. There were no trains in downtown Manhattan and other hard-hit parts of the city, and people had to switch to buses.

People were grateful anyway. Ronnie Abraham was waiting at Penn Station for a train to Harlem, a trip that takes 20 minutes by subway and 2½ hours on city buses that have been overwhelmed since resuming service Tuesday.

"It's the lifeline of the city," Abraham said. "It can't get much better than this."

Other New Yorkers, without power for a third full day and growing dispirited, decided to flee the city. They worried about food and water and, in some cases, their own safety.

"It's dirty, and it's getting a little crazy down there," said Michael Tomeo, who boarded a bus to Philadelphia with his 4-year-old son. "It just feels like you wouldn't want to be out at night. Everything's pitch dark. I'm tired of it, big time."

Rima Finzi-Strauss was taking a bus to Washington. When the power went out Monday night in her apartment building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it also disabled the electric locks on the front door, she said.

"We had three guys sitting out in the lobby last night with candlelight, and very threatening folks were passing by in the pitch black," she said. "And everyone's leaving. That makes it worse."

She said people were on the street buying "old, tiny little vegetables" and climbing 20 floors into apartments where they wouldn't flush the toilet, and without heat. New York dipped to about 40 degrees Wednesday night.

After reopening airports, theaters and the stock exchange, city officials hoped the subway would ease the gridlock that had paralyzed the city, forcing cars and pedestrians to inch through crowded streets without working stoplights.

Television footage Thursday showed heavy traffic coming into Manhattan as police turned away cars that carried fewer than three people, a rule meant to ease congestion.

Flights took off and landed Thursday at LaGuardia Airport, the last of the three major New York-area airports to reopen since the storm, which killed more than 70 people across the Northeast and left millions without power.

Across the region, people stricken by the storm pulled together, providing comfort to those left homeless and offering hot showers and electrical outlets for charging cellphones to those without power.

The spirit of can-do partnership extended to politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their differences aside to focus together on Sandy.

"We are here for you," President Barack Obama said Wednesday in Brigantine, N.J., touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."

Obama joined Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast. But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.

On Wednesday, masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work, reversing the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terror attack and the blackout of 2003.

Downtown Manhattan, which includes the financial district, Sept. 11 memorial and other tourist sites, was still mostly an urban landscape of shuttered bodegas and boarded-up restaurants. People roamed in search of food, power and a hot shower.

Suburban commuter trains started running for the first time on Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from city to city on Friday for the first time since the storm.

From West Virginia to the Jersey Shore, the storm's damage was still being felt, and seen.

In New Jersey, signs of the good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and Mantoloking lay scattered and broken: $3,000 barbecue grills buried beneath the sand and hot tubs cracked and filled with seawater.

Nearly all the homes were seriously damaged, and many had disappeared.

"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."

Most of the state's mass transit systems remained shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters braving clogged highways and quarter-mile lines at gas stations.

Atlantic City's casinos remained closed. Christie postponed Halloween until Monday, saying trick-or-treating wasn't safe in towns with flooded and darkened streets, fallen trees and downed power lines.

Farther north in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000 people remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that officials have been slow to deliver food and water.

One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents were flooded, and 90 percent were without power.

The outages forced many gas stations across the state to close, resulting in long lines of people looking to fuel cars and backup generators. Darryl Jameson of Toms River waited more than hour to get fuel.

"The messed-up part is these people who are blocking the roadway as they try to cut in line," he said. "No one likes waiting, man, but it's something you have to do."

On New York's Long Island, bulldozers scooped sand off streets and tow trucks hauled away destroyed cars while people tried to find a way to their homes to restart their lives.

Richard and Joanne Kalb used a rowboat to reach their home in Mastic Beach, filled with 3 feet of water. Richard Kalb posted a sign on a telephone pole, asking drivers to slow down: "Slow please no wake."

Five-foot snow drifts piled up in West Virginia, where the former Hurricane Sandy merged with two winter weather systems as it went inland. Snow collapsed parts of an apartment complex, a grocery store, a hardwood plant and three homes.

The sixth person killed in the state was a candidate for the state House, John Rose Sr., who was struck by a falling tree limb. His name will remain on the ballot on Election Day.

A few more inches might fall in West Virginia, but meteorologists said the remnants of the storm are in the Appalachian Mountains and will be gone by the end of the week.

___

Contributing to this report were Verena Dobnik, Eileen AJ Connelly, Karen Matthews, David B. Caruso, Leanne Italie and Lou Ferrara in New York; Samantha Henry in Hoboken, N.J.; Wayne Parry in Mantoloking, N.J., Katie Zezima in Seaside Heights, N.J.; Frank Eltman in Mastic Beach, N.Y., Larry Neumeister in Long Beach, N.Y., and Vicki Smith in Elkins, W.Va.

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Syrian air force on offensive after failed truce

AMMAN (Reuters) – Syrian warplanes bombed rebel targets with renewed intensity on Tuesday after the end of a widely ignored four-day truce between President Bashar al-Assad‘s forces and insurgents.

State television said “terrorists” had assassinated an air force general, Abdullah Mahmoud al-Khalidi, in a Damascus suburb, the latest of several rebel attacks on senior officials.

In July, a bomb killed four of Assad‘s aides, including his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat and the defense minister.

Air strikes hit eastern suburbs of Damascus, outlying areas in the central city of Homs, and the northern rebel-held town of Maarat al-Numan on the Damascus-Aleppo highway, activists said.

Rebels have been attacking army bases in al-Hamdaniya and Wadi al-Deif, on the outskirts of Maarat al-Numan.

Some activists said 28 civilians had been killed in Maarat al-Numan and released video footage of men retrieving a toddler’s body from a flattened building. The men cursed Assad as they dragged the dead girl, wearing a colorful overall, from the debris. The footage could not be independently verified.

The military has shelled and bombed Maarat al-Numan, 300 km (190 miles) north of Damascus, since rebels took it last month.

“The rebels have evacuated their positions inside Maarat al-Numaan since the air raids began. They are mostly on the frontline south of the town,” activist Mohammed Kanaan said.

Maarat al-Numan and other Sunni towns in northwestern Idlib province are mostly hostile to Assad’s ruling system, dominated by his minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.

Two rebels were killed and 10 wounded in an air strike on al-Mubarkiyeh, 6 km (4 miles) south of Homs, where rebels have besieged a compound guarding a tank maintenance facility.

Opposition sources said the facility had been used to shell Sunni villages near the Lebanese border.

“WE’LL FIX IT”

The army also fired mortar bombs into the Damascus district of Hammouria, killing at least eight people, activists said.

One video showed a young girl in Hammouria with a large shrapnel wound in her forehead sitting dazed while a doctor said: “Don’t worry dear, we’ll fix it for you.”

Syria’s military, stretched thin by the struggle to keep control, has increasingly used air power against opposition areas, including those in the main cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Insurgents lack effective anti-aircraft weapons.

U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has said he will pursue his peace efforts despite the failure of his appeal for a pause in fighting for the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday.

But it is unclear how he can find any compromise acceptable to Assad, who seems determined to keep power whatever the cost, and mostly Sunni Muslim rebels equally intent on toppling him.

Big powers and Middle Eastern countries are divided over how to end the 19-month-old conflict which has cost an estimated 32,000 dead, making it one of the bloodiest of Arab revolts that have ousted entrenched leaders in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

The United Nations said it had sent a convoy of 18 trucks with food and other aid to Homs during the “ceasefire”, but had been unable to unload supplies in the Old City due to fighting.

“We were trying to take advantage of positive signs we saw at the end of last week. The truce lasted more or less four hours so there was not much opportunity for us after all,” said Jens Laerke, a U.N. spokesman in Geneva.

The prime minister of the Gulf state of Qatar told al-Jazeera television late on Monday that Syria’s conflict was not a civil war but “a war of annihilation licensed firstly by the Syrian government and secondly by the international community”.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said some of those responsible were on the U.N. Security Council, alluding to Russia and China which have vetoed three Western-backed U.N. draft resolutions condemning Assad.

He said that the West was also not doing enough to stop the violence and that the United States would be in “paralysis” for two or three weeks during its presidential election.

(Additional reporting by Raissa Kasolowsky in Abu Dhabi and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Oliver Holmes; Editing by Alistair Lyon)

World News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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In hurricane, Twitter proves a lifeline despite pranksters

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - As Hurricane Sandy pounded the U.S. Atlantic coast on Monday night, knocking out electricity and Internet connections, millions of residents turned to Twitter as a part-newswire, part-911 hotline that hummed through the night even as some websites failed and swathes of Manhattan fell dark.

But the social network also became a fertile ground for pranksters who seized the moment to disseminate rumors and Photoshopped images, including a false tweet Monday night that the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange was submerged under several feet of water.

The exchange issued a denial, but not before the tweet was circulated by countless users and reported on-air by CNN, illustrating how Twitter had become the essential - but deeply fallible - spine of information coursing through real-time, major media events.

But a year after Twitter gained attention for its role in the rescue efforts in tsunami-stricken Japan, the network seemed to solidify its mainstream foothold as government agencies, news outlets and residents in need turned to it at the most critical hour.

Beginning late Sunday, government agencies and officials, from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo(@NYGovCuomo) to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (@FEMA) to @NotifyNYC, an account handled by New York City's emergency management officials, issued evacuation orders and updates.

As the storm battered New York Monday night, residents encountering clogged 9-1-1 dispatch lines flooded the Fire Department's @fdny Twitter account with appeals for information and help for trapped relatives and friends.

One elderly resident needed rescue in a building in Manhattan Beach. Another user sent @fdny an Instagram photo of four insulin shots that she needed refrigerated immediately. Yet another sought a portable generator for a friend on a ventilator living downtown.

Emily Rahimi, who manages the @fdny account by herself, according to a department spokesman, coolly fielded dozens of requests, while answering questions about whether to call 311, New York's non-emergency help line, or Consolidated Edison.

At the Red Cross of America's Washington D.C. headquarters, in a small room called the Digital Operations Center, six wall-mounted monitors display a stream of updates from Twitter and Facebook and a visual "heat map" of where posts seeking help are coming from.

The heat map informed how the Red Cross's aid workers deployed their resources, said Wendy Harman, the Red Cross director of social strategy.

The Red Cross was also using Radian6, a social media monitoring tool sold by Salesforce.com, to spot people seeking help and answer their questions.

"We found out we can carry out the mission of the Red Cross from the social Web," said Harman, who hosted a brief visit from President Barack Obama on Tuesday.

SPREADING INFORMATION

Twitter, which in the past year has heavily ramped up its advertising offerings and features to suit large brand marketers like Pepsico Inc and Procter & Gamble, suddenly found itself offering its tools to new kind of client on Monday: public agencies that wanted help spreading information.

For the first time, the company created a "#Sandy" event page - a format once reserved for large ad-friendly media events like the Olympics or Nascar races - that served as a hub where visitors could see aggregated information. The page displayed manually- and algorithmically-selected tweets plucked from official accounts like those of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who was particularly active on the network.

Agencies like the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and the New York Mayor's Office also used Twitter's promoted tweets - an ad product used by advertisers to reach a broader consumer base - to get out the word.

The company said offering such services for free to government agencies was one of several initiatives, including a service that broadcasts location-specific alerts and public announcements based on a Twitter user's postal code.

"We learned from the storm and tsunami in Japan that Twitter can often be a lifeline," said Rachael Horwitz, a Twitter spokeswoman.

Jeannette Sutton, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security to study social media uses in disaster management, said government agencies have been skeptical until recently about using social media during natural disasters.

"There's a big problem with whether it's valid, accurate information out there," Sutton said. "But if you're not part of the conversation, you're going to be missing out."

As the hurricane hit one of the most wired regions in the country, news outlets also took advantage of the smartphone users who chronicled rising tides on every flooded block. On Instagram, the photo-sharing website, witnesses shared color-filtered snapshots of floating cars, submerged gas stations and a building shorn of its facade at a rate of more than 10 pictures per second, Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told Poynter.org on Tuesday.

Many of the images were republished in the live coverage by news websites and aired on television broadcasts.

LIES SLAPPED DOWN

But by late Monday, fake images began to circulate widely, including a picture of a storm cloud gathering dramatically over the Statue of Liberty and a photoshopped job of a shark lurking in a submerged residential neighborhood. The latter image even surfaced on social networks in China.

Then there was the slew of fabricated message from @comfortablysmug, the Twitter account that claimed the NYSE was underwater. The account is owned by Shashank Tripathi, the hedge fund investor and campaign manager for Christopher Wight, the Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tripathi, who did not return emails by Reuters seeking comment, apologized Tuesday night for making a "series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets" and resigned from Wight's campaign.

His identity was first reported by Jack Stuef of BuzzFeed.

Around 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Tripathi began deleting many of his Hurricane Sandy tweets. Tripathi's friend, @theAshok, defended Tripathi, telling Reuters on Twitter: "People shouldn't be taking "news" from an anonymous twitter account seriously."

Tripathi's @comfortablysmug's Twitter stream, which is followed by business journalists, bloggers and various New York personalities, had been a well-known voice in digital circles, but mostly for his 140-character-or-less criticisms of the Obama administration, often accompanied by the hashtag, #ObamaIsn'tWorking.

On Tuesday, New York City Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. appeared to threaten Tripathi with prosecution when he tweeted that he hoped Tripathi was "less smug and comfortable cuz I'm talking to Cy," presumably referring to Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.

For its part, Twitter said that it would not have considered suspending the account unless it received a request from a law enforcement agency.

"We don't moderate content, and we certainly don't want to be in a position of deciding what speech is OK and what speech is not," said Horwitz, Twitter's spokeswoman.

But Ben Smith, the editor at Buzzfeed, which outed Tripathi, said Twitter's credibility would not be affected by rumormongers because netizens often self-correct and identify falsehoods.

"They used to say a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth puts its shoes on, but in the Twitter world, that's not true anymore," Smith said. "The lies get slapped down really fast."

For Smith, the ability to disseminate information via Twitter and Facebook on Monday night became perhaps even more important than his Web publication, which enjoyed one of its better nights in readership but went dark when the blackout crippled the site's servers in downtown Manhattan.

Buzzfeed's staff quickly began publishing on Tumblr instead, and Smith personally took over Buzzfeed's Twitter account to stay in the thick of the conversation.

"Our view of the world is that social distribution is the key thing," Smith said. "We're in the business of creating content that people want to share, more than the business of maintaining a website."

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Jennifer Ablan and Felix Salmon in New York; Editing by Robert Birsel)

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“Community” returning to old time slot in February

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – “Community” will return Thursday, February 7 to its previous timeslot after a long absence from NBC‘s lineup.

NBC confirmed the show’s return date soon after star Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley on the ensemble comedy, announced the news on Twitter.

“Guys, #Community officially has an airdate: Thursday, February 7th at 8pm!,” tweeted the actress. NBC also announced several others return and premiere dates Tuesday.

The move means the network has abandoned its plans to move the show to Friday nights. “Community” will take the place of “30 Rock,” which will have completed its 13-episode final season by February.

“Community” was scheduled to move to Fridays beginning on October 19. But NBC opted to delay the Friday debut of “Community” and “Whitney” so it could devote itself to promoting its new fall comedies.

When one of them, “Animal Practice,” was cancelled, its timeslot went to “Whitney,” and the fate of “Community” was left up in the air.

Despite the long delay – “Community” hasn’t aired since the spring – the Thursday timeslot is good news for the show since Fridays usually draw much lower ratings.

NBC fired “Community” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon at the end of last season. Though it is critically acclaimed and has many diehard fans online, that hasn’t translated into many viewers.

NBC’s entertainment chairman has said that the network wants to focus more this season on broad comedies than on its quick-witted but odd Thursday shows, which tend to struggle for ratings.

TV News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Biogen’s hemophilia-A drug meets late-stage trial goal

BOSTON (Reuters) – Biogen Idec Inc said on Wednesday its experimental treatment for patients with hemophilia A, a disorder that inhibits coagulation of the blood, controlled bleeding in a late-stage clinical trial.

Biogen, which makes the multiple sclerosis drugs Avonex and Tysabri, said it plans to submit an application to market the drug with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the first half of 2013. It will file with European regulators after it completes a study of the drug in children.

Last month, Biogen and its partner Swedish Orphan Biovitrum AB (Sobi), reported promising results of a trial of their drug to treat hemophilia B, a less common form of the disease.

Hemophilia is a new disease area for Biogen.

Hemophilia A is caused by a lack, or insufficient amount of, the blood coagulation factor VIII. Patients with hemophilia B lack or have reduced levels of coagulation factor IX.

Biogen’s drugs are designed to cut the number of infusions needed to control bleeding. Existing Factor VIII products must be taken as many as three to four times a week. Factor IX products must be taken intravenously two or three times a week.

In Biogen’s latest study, known as A-LONG, 98 percent of bleeding episodes were controlled with one or two injections of its long-lasting Factor VIII drug.

Individual and weekly preventative regimens resulted in median annualized bleeding rates in the low single digits, the company said.

The market for hemophilia A treatments is worth about $ 5 billion, according to Biogen, while the market for hemophilia B treatments is about $ 1 billion

(Reporting By Toni Clarke; Editing by Alden Bentley and Gerald E. McCormick)

Medications/Drugs News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Back to business after Sandy's hard hit

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. Northeast began crawling back to normal on Wednesday after monster storm Sandy crippled transportation, knocked out power for millions and killed at least 45 people in nine states with a massive storm surge and rain that caused epic flooding.

Financial markets reopened with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and packed buses took residents back to work with the subway system halted after seawater flooded its tunnels.

John F. Kennedy and Newark airports reopened with limited service after thousands of flights were canceled, leaving travelers stuck for days. New York's LaGuardia Airport, the third of the airports that serve the nation's busiest airspace, was flooded and remained closed.

It will take days or weeks to recover from the massive power and mass transit outages.

With six days to go before the November 6 elections, President Barack Obama will visit storm-ravaged areas of the New Jersey shore, where Sandy made landfall on Monday.

He will be accompanied by Republican Governor Chris Christie, a vocal backer of presidential challenger Mitt Romney. Nevertheless, Christie has praised Obama and the federal response to the storm.

The storm killed 27 people in New York state, including 22 in New York City, and six in New Jersey. Seven other states reported fatalities. One disaster-modeling company said Sandy may have caused up to $15 billion in insured losses.

Sandy killed 69 people in the Caribbean last week before it slammed into the U.S. East Coast and pushed inland, dumping snow in the Appalachian Mountains and other inland areas.

Remnants of the storm churned slowly over Pennsylvania on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. Winter storm warnings were in effect from southwestern Pennsylvania to eastern Tennessee.

Battered by a record storm surge of nearly 14 feet of water, large sections of New York City remained submerged under several feet of water. In the city's borough of Staten Island, police used helicopters to pluck stranded residents from rooftops.

Across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, members of the National Guard arrived to help residents pump floodwater from their homes, the city said on Twitter.

More than 8.2 million homes and businesses remained without electricity across several states after trees toppled by fierce winds tore down power lines.

In New Jersey, Christie said it could take seven to 10 days before power was restored statewide.

Subway and commuter tunnels under New York City, which carry several million riders a day, were under several feet of water.

In the lower half of Manhattan, a quarter of a million residents remained without power after a transformer explosion at a Con Edison substation Monday night.

CRIPPLED COMMUTE

New York City likely will struggle without subway service for days, authorities said. Buses were operating on a limited basis and many residents were walking long distances or scrambling to grab scarce taxi cabs on the streets.

Sunday's New York Marathon will go on as scheduled, but Wednesday night's Halloween parade through Greenwich Village was postponed. On Broadway, the Theater League announced that most shows would resume performances on Wednesday. Shows had been canceled since Sunday due to the storm.

In New Jersey, Christie took a helicopter tour of the devastation on Tuesday along the shore, where boats were adrift, boardwalks washed away and roads blocked by massive sand drifts. He stopped in the badly damaged resort towns of Belmar and Avalon.

"I was just here walking this place this summer, and the fact that most of it is gone is just incredible," he said at one stop.

Sandy hit the East Coast with a week to go to the November 6 presidential election, dampening an unprecedented drive to encourage early voting and raising questions whether some polling stations will be ready to open on Election Day.

Obama faces political danger if the government fails to respond well, as was the case with his predecessor George W. Bush's botched handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Obama and Romney put campaigning on hold for a second day on Tuesday but Romney planned to hold rallies in the battleground state of Florida on Wednesday and Obama seemed likely to resume campaigning on Thursday.

Sandy became the biggest storm to hit the United States in generations when it crashed ashore with hurricane-force winds on Monday near the New Jersey gambling resort of Atlantic City.

(Additional reporting by Michael Erman, Anna Louie Sussman, Atossa Abrahamian, Michelle Nichols, Ed Krudy, Chris Michaud and Scott DiSavino in New York and Ian Simpson in West Virginia; Writing by Daniel Trotta and Ellen Wulfhorst; Editing by Eric Beech)

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Cuba’s 2nd city without power, water after Sandy

HAVANA (AP) — Residents of Cuba‘s second-largest city of Santiago remained without power or running water Monday, four days after Hurricane Sandy made landfall as the island’s deadliest storm in seven years, ripping rooftops from homes and toppling power lines.

Across the Caribbean, the storm’s death toll rose to 69, including 52 people in Haiti, 11 in Cuba, two in the Bahamas, two in the Dominican Republic, one in Jamaica and one in Puerto Rico.

Cuban authorities have not yet estimated the economic toll, but the Communist Party newspaper Granma reported there was “severe damage to housing, economic activity, fundamental public services and institutions of education, health and culture.”

Yolanda Tabio, a native of Santiago, said she had never seen anything like it in all her 64 years: Broken hotel and shop windows, trees blown over onto houses, people picking through piles of debris for a scrap of anything to cover their homes. On Sunday, she sought solace in faith.

“The Mass was packed. Everyone crying,” said Tabio, whose house had no electricity, intermittent phone service and only murky water coming out of the tap on Monday. “I think it will take five to ten years to recover. … But we’re alive.”

Sandy came onshore early Thursday just west of Santiago, a city of about 500,000 people in agricultural southeastern Cuba. It is the island’s deadliest storm since 2005′s Hurricane Dennis, a category 5 monster that killed 16 people and did $ 2.4 billion in damage. More than 130,000 homes were damaged by Sandy, including 15,400 that were destroyed, Granma said.

“It really shocked me to see all that has been destroyed and to know that for many people, it’s the effort of a whole lifetime,” said Maria Caridad Lopez, a media relations officer at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese in Santiago. “And it disappears in just three hours.”

Lopez said several churches in the area collapsed and nearly all suffered at least minor damage. That included the Santiago cathedral as well as one of the holiest sites in Cuba, the Sanctuary of the Virgin del Cobre. Sandy’s winds blew out its stained glass windows and damaged its massive doors.

“It’s indescribable,” said Berta Serguera, an 82-year-old retiree whose home withstood the tempest but whose patio and garden did not. “The trees have been shredded as if with a saw. My mango only has a few branches left, and they look like they were shaved.”

On Monday, sound trucks cruised the streets urging people to boil drinking water to prevent infectious disease. Soldiers worked to remove rubble and downed trees from the streets. Authorities set up radios and TVs in public spaces to keep people up to date on relief efforts, distributed chlorine to sterilize water and prioritized electrical service to strategic uses such as hospitals and bakeries.

Enrique Berdion, a 45-year-old doctor who lives in central Santiago, said his small apartment building did not suffer major damage but he had been without electricity, water or gas for days.

“This was something I’ve never seen, something extremely intense, that left Santiago destroyed. Most homes have no roofs. The winds razed the parks, toppled all the trees,” Berdion said by phone. “I think it will take years to recover.”

Raul Castro, who toured Cuba’s hardest-hit regions on Sunday, warned of a long road to recovery.

Granma said the president called on the country to urgently implement “temporary solutions,” and “undoubtedly the definitive solution will take years of work.”

Venezuela sent nearly 650 of tons of aid, including nonperishable food, potable water and heavy machinery both to Cuba and to nearby Haiti, which was not directly in the storm’s path but suffered flash floods across much of the country’s south.

Across the Caribbean, work crews were repairing downed power lines and cracked water pipes and making their way into rural communities marooned by impassable roads. The images were similar from eastern Jamaica to the northern Bahamas: Trees ripped from the ground, buildings swamped by floodwaters and houses missing roofs.

Fixing soggy homes may be a much quicker task than repairing the financial damage, and island governments were still assessing Sandy’s economic impact on farms, housing and infrastructure.

In tourism-dependent countries like Jamaica and the Bahamas, officials said popular resorts sustained only superficial damage, mostly to landscaping.

Haiti, where even minor storms can send water gushing down hills denuded of trees, listed a death toll of 52 as of Monday and officials said it could still rise. Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe has described the storm as a “disaster of major proportions.”

In Jamaica, where Sandy made landfall first on Wednesday as a Category 1 hurricane, people coped with lingering water and power outages with mostly good humor.

“Well, we mostly made it out all right. I thought it was going to be rougher, like it turned out for other places,” laborer Reginald Miller said as he waited for a minibus at a sunbaked Kingston intersection.

In parts of the Bahamas, the ocean surged into coastal buildings and deposited up to six feet of seawater. Sandy was blamed for two deaths on the archipelago off Florida’s east coast, including a British bank executive who fell off his roof while trying to fix a window shutter and an elderly man found dead beneath overturned furniture in his flooded, low-lying home.

___

Associated Press writers Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana, David McFadden in Kingston, Jamaica, and Jeff Todd in Nassau, Bahamas, contributed to this report.

___

Peter Orsi is on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Peter_Orsi

Latin America News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Nokia says shipping new Lumia smartphones this week

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Israeli-Palestinian drama ‘The Other Son’ wins Tokyo Film Fest

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Lorraine Levy‘s Palestinian/Israeli drama, “The Other Son,” won the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, the top award at the 25th Tokyo International Film Festival, on Sunday night. Levy also took home the best director honors at the festival, which marks the final go-round for festival chairman, Tom Yoda.

The special jury prize went to Kang Yi-kwan’s “Juvenile Offender.” Seo Young-joo, who stars in the film, was awarded the best actor prize. The best actress award went to Neslihan Atagul for “Araf – Somewhere in Between.” Tetsuaki Matsui‘s “Flashback Memories 3D,” about a Japanese didgeridoo player who loses his memory, took home the audience award. The Toyota Earth Grand Prix for the best nature-themed fiction or documentary was given to Valerie Berteau’s “Himself He Cooks.”

“All the films were excellent,” said Roger Corman, president of the international competition jury. “They each demonstrate the glory and power of cinema to entertain, inform, and teach us.”

For the first time this year, TIFFCOM, the market arm of the festival took place in Odaiba, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay. At TIFFCOM, there were 227 exhibiting companies from 25 countries and regions, up from last year’s 20 countries, with 111 of those entities were new exhibitors.

At the close of the festival, Yoda reflected back on his five years as chairman.

“It is the fifth year since the introduction of the Green Carpet and the Toyota Earth Grand Prix. It is also the 25th memorable year for us. On such as special year, I am very happy to have had the world respected Roger Corman leading the member of the jury,” he said.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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