The key changes include raising the retirement age from 57 to 65.
He also wants to up the minimum term of employment from 5 to 10 years.
Additionally he would proscribe practices like adding accumulated overtime to final year pay to boost pension benefits.
The first two changes are constitutionally protected and require support from the state. Normally this would be unlikely, but in 2011 there’s a pension crisis everywhere from Albany to Greece.
Here are the full details from the Mayor’s press office, via the NYT:
CIVILIANS AND TEACHERS
Retirement Age/Vesting
· New Tier: Newly hired civilians and teachers will vest after 10 years of city employment and will be eligible to receive pension checks at age 65.
· Current: Most employees can vest after five years. Retirement ages vary, but are generally age 57 for civilians and as low as 55 for teachers with 27 years’ experience.
Employee Contributions
· New Tier: Civilian employees and teachers will contribute 5 percent of their salary in all years of employment.
Egyptian president has cash in British and Swiss banks plus UK and US property
Gamal and Hosni Mubarak are reported to have built up huge fortunes, including properties in London. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images
President Hosni Mubarak’s family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.
After 30 years as president and many more as a senior military official, Mubarak has had access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits. Most of those gains have been taken offshore and deposited in secret bank accounts or invested in upmarket homes and hotels.
According to a report last year in the Arabic newspaper Al Khabar, Mubarak has properties in Manhattan and exclusive Beverly Hills addresses on Rodeo Drive.
His sons, Gamal and Alaa, are also billionaires. A protest outside Gamal’s ostentatious home at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, central London, highlighted the family’s appetite for western trophy assets.
Amaney Jamal, a political science professor at Princeton University, said the estimate of $40bn-70bn was comparable with the vast wealth of leaders in other Gulf countries.
“The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth,” she told ABC news. “There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain.
“This is the pattern of other Middle Eastern dictators so their wealth will not be taken during a transition. These leaders plan on this.”
Every time we revise the attached chart, its looks worse and worse.
The first time we did an analysis of how many jobs per month the US has to generate each month to get back to the same payroll number as of November 2007, right before the start of the Greater Depression, and when accounting for the 90K/month natural growth to the labor force, something the administration continues to blissfully ignore (with the labor participation rate plunging to a 26 year low) it was in the mid 220s.
As of today, the number is almost quarter of a million, or 246,600. That is how many jobs the US has to generate every single month until November 2016, or the end of Obama’s improbable second turn, for the unemployment rate to get back to where it was when accounting for population growth.
And while this is obviously impossible, one other thing that is concerning is that post the revised NFP numbers, not only do we now get a lower cumulative low of all jobs lost, at just over 8.6 million attained in February 2010, but as the highlighted area demonstrates, the recent trend in jobs is one of accelerating deterioration.
The real US unemployment rate is not 9.8% but between 25% and 30%.That is a depression level of job losses – so why doesn’t it look like a depression for many people? How can so large of a statistical discrepancy exist, and how is it that holiday shopping malls are so crowded in a depression?
‘Recovery’ is ‘The Greatest Depression’!
The Fed cannot raise interest even IF unemployment rates improve, …
… because otherwise the US and all politicians in Washington and the Fed are history.
‘Stimulus Program’ is Printing Money!
And the Fed will or better has to continue quantitative easing (printing money) to keep the interest rates low, because nobody is buying US junk treasuries, destroying the dollar in the process.
The only way out now is hyperinflation (or WW III). Doomed!
The Fed is unlikely to raise interest rates for at least 12 months because the U.S. economy isn’t generating enough growth to lower unemployment.
Feb o5 (Bloomberg) — Treasuries tumbled, pushing 10-year yields to the highest since May, as an unexpected drop in the jobless rate and data showing growth by factories and service industries fueled bets the economic recovery is gaining steam.
Thirty-year yields had the biggest weekly increase since October as manufacturing also accelerated in Europe and China, making higher-yielding assets more attractive. The gap between U.S. 2- and 10-year yields reached the widest in almost a year as U.S. employers added jobs for a fourth month. The Treasury will auction $72 billion in notes and bonds next week.
“In context with the other data we’ve seen, the employment number is consistent with the idea of recovery — net net, it’s taken as a bearish signal,” said Carl Lantz, head of interest- rate strategy in New York at Credit Suisse Group AG, one of 20 primary dealers that trade with the Federal Reserve. “The market probably won’t be able to catch its breath until we get through the auction process. Demand will be fairly strong.”
Paramedics Found a Bottle of Prescription Drugs by His Bed
John Taylor Skilling, a 20-year-old communications major at Chapman College in Orange, Calif., and the son of imprisoned ex-Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling, was found dead from what police say was a drug overdose.
Paramedics broke into his apartment after friends were concerned and found Skilling in the bedroom with a bottle of prescription drugs by his bed.
“They were supposed to meet him for dinner and he didn’t show up and they knew he was despondent over a recent break-up with a girlfriend,” Santa Ana Police Corporal Anthony Bertagna told Reuters. “They looked in the window and they could see him lying on the bed.”
“We don’t know yet if it’s a possible accidental overdose or suicide,” he said.
John Taylor Skilling, or JT as he was called, was 15 when his father was sentenced to a 24 years in a federal prison in Englewood, Colo.
Feb. 05 (Wall Street Journal) — Hackers have repeatedly penetrated the computer network of the company that runs the Nasdaq Stock Market during the past year, and federal investigators are trying to identify the perpetrators and their purpose, according to people familiar with the matter.
The exchange’s trading platform—the part of the system that executes trades—wasn’t compromised, these people said. However, it couldn’t be determined which other parts of Nasdaq’s computer network were accessed.
Investigators are considering a range of possible motives, including unlawful financial gain, theft of trade secrets and a national-security threat designed to damage the exchange.
The Nasdaq situation has set off alarms within the government because of the exchange’s critical role, which officials put right up with power companies and air-traffic-control operations, all part of the nation’s basic infrastructure. Other infrastructure components have been compromised in the past, including a case in which hackers planted potentially disruptive software programs in the U.S. electrical grid, according to current and former national-security officials.
“So far, [the perpetrators] appear to have just been looking around,” said one person involved in the Nasdaq matter. Another person familiar with the case said the incidents were, for a computer network, the equivalent of someone sneaking into a house and walking around but—apparently, so far—not taking or tampering with anything.
A top Wall Street bank is said to have suspected Bernie Madoff was a crook more than 18 months before he was exposed as the world’s biggest swindler.
But JPMorgan Chase executives continued to do business with the financier in spite of their concerns, according to a report today in the New York Times.
One of JP Morgan Chase’s London operations ignored a series of red flags over fraudster Bernard Madoff, according to a series of allegations made against the bank in a lawsuit that was unsealed in New York on Thursday.
Bernard Madoff was sentenced to a 150-year jail term in 2009 for fraud Photo: Bloomberg News
The bank’s Equity Exotics & Hybrids Desk is alleged to have wilfully overlooked concerns over how Mr Madoff was generating his returns because it was making good money from selling products linked to the performance of the Ponzi scheme’s feeder funds.
The suit was initially filed under seal in December by Irving H Picard, the court-appointed trustee who is seeking to recover billions of dollars from those who lost out in Mr Madoff’s record fraud. Mr Picard has also taken action against UBS and HSBC, claiming that the banks failed to act on so-called red flags that would have ended Mr Madoff’s fraud years earlier.
JP Morgan said on Thursday that Mr Picard’s suit is “meritless and is based on distortions of both the relevant facts and the governing law”.
The suit is claiming $6.4bn (£4bn) from JPMorgan Chase for allegedly “aiding and abetting” the fraud as the primary banker for Mr Madoff’s firm.
Ok, someone needs to step in here before people get hurt… Er, more. The chart above is not of some biotech strategically bought by various CT hedge funds having just announced a successful obesity Phase 3 trial. It is corn: one of the most widely consumed commodities in the world.
And while corn appears to be today’s limit up commodity, elsewhere cotton has just limited down as a continuation of the recent ICE plundering, courtesy of the exchange’s margin hike; rice, after touching on highs, has decided to drop aggresively, as have cocoa (never mind the Ivory Coast government vacuum) and coffee.
Pilot Steve Irwin was astonished after spotting a mass of more than 100,000 sharks swimming just 100 yards off Florida’s sandy beaches.
The long-time fisherman and marine technology expert was cruising 300ft above the clear waters in his helicopter on Sunday when he came across the astonishing scene.
The 50-year-old – who shares his name with the late Australian ‘Crocodile Hunter’ – whipped out his smartphone to capture the masses of deadly predators, which spanned a 20-mile stretch of water.
After 200 years as one of London’s pre-eminent banking houses, NM Rothschild is dropping the initials of its founder and the phrase “investment banking” from its list of services. Here are some of its biggest recent deals:
Ireland
Rothschild is advising the Irish government on the restructuring of its banks, the weakness of which pushed the country take an €85bn (£72bn) bailout from the EU and the IMF. The London bank took over from Bank of America-Merrill Lynch which had been advising Ireland until last summer.
Two hundred years after “the third son” founded his eponymous bank in London, “NM” is being dropped in a rebranding exercise designed to ditch the group’s “investment banking image.”
The group will now be called just “Rothschild,” while the division previously named “investment banking” has been renamed “global financial advisory.”
Staff at the London office were told about the rebranding in an internal meeting yesterday.
Sian Westerman, in charge of marketing at the bank, told The Daily Telegraph: “Whenever we talked about ourselves we found we were often describing what didn’t do as much as what we did.
“So we’d say investment banking but immediately follow that with the fact we don’t sell shares, we’re not conflicted or self-serving, which felt very negative. We decided to badge the division as it is: financial, advisory and global.”
New Mexican Governor Susana Martinez makes announcements regarding gas shortages from the Emergency Operating Center on the National Guard Base just south of Santa Fe, N.M., on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2011. Secretary of Homeland Security and Emergency Management Michael Duvall, left, and Major General Kenny C. Montoya, right, look on. Martinez has declared a state of emergency as thousands of New Mexico residents lost natural gas service due to the bitter cold. Martinez sent all nonessential state workers home for the day Thursday, and urged all residents to turn down their thermostats, bundle up and shut off appliances they don’t need for the next 24 hours. (AP Photo/The New Mexican, Natalie Guillén)
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—With tens of thousands of people across New Mexico without natural gas service, Gov. Susana Martinez on Thursday declared a state of emergency, ordered all government offices be shut down Friday and urged schools to “strongly consider” remaining closed for the day.
Demand has soared because of extremely cold weather across the state since Tuesday. New Mexico Gas Company said rolling blackouts in West Texas also impeded the delivery of natural gas into New Mexico.
Martinez declared a state of emergency for all of New Mexico, urging residents to turn down their thermostats, bundle up and shut off appliances they don’t need for the next 24 hours.
She later announced all state operations not providing critical services would be closed Friday to decrease the strain on energy resources throughout the state.
“Due to statewide natural gas shortages, I have ordered all government agencies that do not provide essential services to shut down and all nonessential employees to stay home” on Friday, Martinez said after meeting with public safety personnel in Albuquerque.
“I have also encouraged all schools that have not already announced closures to strongly consider doing so,” she said.
NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – If the saying “as goes California, so goes the nation” still rings true, then Americans are facing a depressing future, according to a list of the country’s most miserable cities.
Ravaged by falling house prices, high unemployment, a massive budget deficit, rampant crime and high state taxes, California filled four of the top five spots in the Forbes list of unhappy urban areas.
Stockton, in the state’s Central Valley, topped the list, followed by Miami, in Florida, Merced, Modesto and Sacramento — all in California.
“California was hit by the bursting of the housing bubble about as hard as can be imagined,” said Kurt Badenhausen, Forbes senior editor.
2010-12-01 CONFIDENTIAL Embassy Madrid SPAIN: ATTORNEY GENERAL RECOMMENDS COURT NOT PURSUE GTMO CRIMINAL CASE VS. FORMER USG OFFICIALS http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/04/09M…
One of the just released cables obtained by WikiLeaks sent from the US Embassy in Madrid to the State Department details how in its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. The document says the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
The U.S. Embassy in Madrid has made in recent years significant resources to stop or boycott the court cases in Spain against U.S. political and military officials allegedly involved in cases of torture in Guantanamo war crimes in Iraq and kidnappings on flights the CIA. La legación diplomática estadounidense ha dejado constancia escrita de esa actividad en algunos de sus miles de documentos secretos, clasificados o reservados a los que ha tenido acceso EL PAÍS. The U.S. embassy has left a written record of that activity in some of its thousands of secret documents, classified or restricted to those who had access COUNTRY.
The ambassador between 2005 and 2009, Eduardo Aguirre, appointed by the Bush administration, has personally directed many of the pressures on the Spanish Government or the Spanish judicial authorities, but the secret reports it appears that the U.S. had the support of important contacts in Spain. Entre estos destacan los del fiscal general del Estado, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, y varios fiscales de la Audiencia Nacional, especialmente su jefe, Javier Zaragoza. These include the state attorney general, Candido Conde-Pumpido, and several prosecutors from the Audiencia Nacional, especially your boss, Javier Zaragoza.
Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO, said: “The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating.
“These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come. High food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food.”
Already Record Food Prices Rise By 3.4% In January
When last month we highlighted the FAO’s periodic report which noted that food prices had surged to a fresh all time high, Zero Hedge first predicted that food riots were imminent.
Fast forward 6 rioting countries and 2 revolutions later, to today when we get an update from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, where we read that, not surprisingly “the FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) rose for the seventh consecutive month, averaging 231 points in January 2011, up 3.4 percent from December 2010 and the highest (in both real and nominal terms) since the index has been backtracked in 1990.”
And while it is painfully obvious to anyone who shops for groceries, but not to Genocide Ben, nothing is ever obvious to him, here is Reuters’ take on the numbers: “Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely watched FAO Food Price Index touched its highest since records began in 1990, in nominal terms, and topped the high of 224.1 in June 2008, during the food crisis of 2007/08.” Yes, oil may not be at its all time highs from the summer of 2008, but food has already surpassed it.
A graphic presentation of what guarantees many more revolutions, courtesy of Gen Ben:
Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fueled protests that toppled Tunisia’s president in January. Food inflation has also been among the root causes of protests in Egypt and Jordan, raising speculation other nations in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.
Severe drought in the Black Sea last year, heavy rains in Australia and dry weather in Argentina and anticipation of a spike in demand after unrest in north Africa and the Middle East has helped power grain prices to multi-year highs.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Regulators on Friday shut down three small banks in Georgia and Illinois, bringing to 14 the number of bank failures in 2011 following last year’s tally of 157 amid the sagging economy and mounting bad loans.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized American Trust Bank, based in Roswell, Ga., with $238.2 million in assets and $222.2 million in deposits; North Georgia Bank of Watkinsville, Ga., with $153.2 million in assets and $139.7 million in deposits; and Chicago-based Community First Bank, with $51.1 million in assets and $49.5 million in deposits.
Renasant Bank, based in Tupelo, Miss., agreed to assume $147.4 million of the assets and all the deposits of American Trust Bank. BankSouth, based in Greensboro, Ga., is assuming $123.9 million of the assets and all the deposits of North Georgia Bank. Northbrook Bank and Trust Co., based in Northbrook, Ill., is acquiring the assets and deposits of Community First Bank.
In addition, the FDIC and Renasant Bank agreed to share losses on $94.3 million of American Trust Bank’s loans and other assets. The FDIC and BankSouth are sharing losses on $120.1 million of North Georgia Bank’s assets. The agency and Northbrook Bank and Trust are sharing losses on $42.8 million of Community First Bank’s assets.
The failure of American Trust Bank is expected to cost the deposit insurance fund $71.5 million. The failure of North Georgia Bank is expected to cost $35.2 million; that of Northbrook Bank and Trust, $11.7 million.
A 21st-century gold rush has brought lawlessness and destruction to the once pristine Madre de Dios region of Peruvian rainforest
Illegal goldmining is laying waste to Madre de Dios, the most biodiverse region in the world Photo: Miguel Bellido
We sped across the jungle along a narrow manmade path. ‘Quick! Hide the camera! If they see this, they’ll beat us up,’ shouted the motorcyclist who was driving me.
Visitors are not welcome in Guacamayo, one of the biggest illegal goldmining sites in the world, so large it is visible from space. Above the noise of the bike we could just make out a distant rumble of machines.
A sharp turn of the wheel later and the trees vanished, replaced by a vast desert dotted with shacks covered in blue plastic sheets where thousands of miners live. We were at the heart of a 21st-century gold rush that, environmentalists warn, is rapidly destroying the Amazon’s Madre de Dios (Mother of God) region in south-east Peru, 33,000 square miles of low-lying, dense rainforest containing the richest biodiversity on earth.
Added: 2. February 2011
HELSINKI — A group calling itself the Food Liberation Army has claimed responsibility for “kidnapping” a statue of the McDonald’s food chain mascot Ronald McDonald and has threatened to “execute” the figure if their demands are not met.
The group posted a video on YouTube where balaclava-clad “terrorists”, holding the clown statue with a bag over its head, demanded that the world’s largest food chain answer questions about its corporate responsibility and food production.
“We love burgers, fries and McDonald’s, but we can no longer watch in silence as the food we love is being destroyed and brought to shame because of greed and indifference,” one of the “terrorists” said, speaking in Finnish.
If martial law will be declared in the future you may have to bury your guns.
According to in-house memos now circulating, the DHS has issued orders to banks across America which announce to them that “under the Patriot Act” the DHS has the absolute right to seize, without any warrant whatsoever, any and all customer bank accounts, to make “periodic and unannounced” visits to any bank to open and inspect the contents of “selected safe deposit boxes.”
Further, the DHS “shall, at the discretion of the agent supervising the search, remove, photograph or seize as evidence” any of the following items “bar gold, gold coins, firearms of any kind unless manufactured prior to 1878, documents such as passports or foreign bank account records, pornography or any material that, in the opinion of the agent, shall be deemed of to be of a contraband nature.”
DHS memos also state that banks are informed that any bank employee, on any level, that releases “improper” “classified DHS Security information” to any member of the public, to include the customers whose boxes have been clandestinely opened and inspected and “any other party, to include members of the media” and further “that the posting of any such information on the internet will be grounds for the immediate termination of the said employee or employees and their prosecution under the Patriot Act.” Safety deposit box holders and depositors are not given advanced notice when failed banks shut their doors.
If people have their emergency money in a safe deposit box or an account in a bank that closes, they will not be allowed into the bank to get it out. They can knock on the door and beg to get in but the sheriff’s department or whoever is handling the closure will simply say “no” because they are just following orders.
Deposit box and account holders are not warned of the hazards of banking when they sign up. It is not until they need to get their cash or valuables out in a hurry that they find themselves in trouble.
There is no global warming and there certainly never was a man-made global warming and CO2 has nothing do to with a warming climate, because rising CO2 levels always lag 800 years behind rising temperatures.
“The 58th Bilderberg Meeting will be held in Sitges, Spain 3 – 6 June 2010. The Conference will deal mainly with Financial Reform, Security, Cyber Technology, Energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, World Food Problem, Global Cooling, Social Networking, Medical Science, EU-US relations.”
Yep, that’s right. Global Cooling.
The elitists may have just intentionally caused a mini Ice Age:
The bottom line is always money, power and control and not the truth.
(Click on images to enlarge.)
A new satellite map by the government agency NOAA shows the extent of the snow blanketing a vast area from the west coast of Canada to eastern China
At first glance it looks like a graphic from a Discovery Channel programme about a distant ice age. But this astonishing picture shows the world as it is today – with half the Northern Hemisphere covered with snow and ice.
The image was released by the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Association (NOAA) on the day half of North America was in the grip of a severe winter storm.
The map was created using multiple satellites from government agencies and the US Air Force.
That Antarctica, the Arctic, Greenland and the frozen wastes of Siberia are covered in white comes as no surprise. But it is the extent to which the line dips down over the Northern Hemisphere that is so remarkable about the image.
The shroud of white stretches down from Alaska and sweeps through the Midwest and along to the Eastern seaboard. The bitter cold has reached as far as Texas and northern Mexico where in Ciudad Juarez temperatures today were expected to dip to minus 15C.
In the U.S. tens of millions of people chose to stay at home rather than venture out. In Chicago, 20in of snow fell leading to authorities closing schools for the first time in 12 years. The newspaper for Tulsa, Okalahoma, was unable to publish its print edition for the first time in more than a century.
This particular storm is the result from two clashing air masses which, if not unprecedented, is extraordinarily rare for its size and ferocious strength.
‘A storm that produces a swath of 20in snow is really something we’d see once every 50 years – maybe,’ said a U.S. National Weather Service meteorologist.
Hundreds of drivers on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, which was blasted by 20 inches of snow, abandoned their cars in an almost apocalyptic scene as authorities closed the road
Louis Uccellini, director of the government’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, said the U.S. storm also drew strength from the La Nina condition currently affecting the tropical Pacific Ocean.
La Nina is a periodic cooling of the surface temperatures of the tropical Pacific Ocean, the opposite of the better-known El Nino warming. Both can have significant impacts on weather around the world by changing the movement of winds and high and low pressure systems.
A scene from sci-fi film The Day After Tomorrow? No, these are cars stuck in the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, after accidents and drifting snow stranded the drivers during last night’s blizzard. As of late morning more than 20in of snow had fallen, making this snowstorm the third largest recorded in the city
The NOAA image shows how the weather is affecting Scotland and begins in earnest from southern Germany, through Italy and down into Greece, Turkey and Iran. Northern areas of India and China are also affected.
The startling image was released on the same day Al Gore stepped up to defend his claim that global warming causes the bitterly cold weather. Thirty states in America are affected by a two-day blizzard.
Writing in his blog Al’s Journal, he said: ‘As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.’
Hilarious! This is what thosefraudsters call ‘completely consistent’:
His response came after Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly challenged the former Vice President to give his thoughts on ‘why southern New York has turned into the tundra’.
Snow and ice turn streets into parking lots and force the cancellation of thousands of flights. At least two deaths are reported.
Drifting snow and icy winds brought even the hardiest Midwesterners to their knees Wednesday as two-thirds of the nation reeled from what the National Weather Service described as a storm of “historic proportions.”
Dubbed the “Blizzard of Oz” in Kansas, the storm coursed its way through the Midwest and Plains states — collapsing roofs, forcing highway and school closures, leaving tens of thousands without power and breaking snowfall and low-temperature records.
Airlines canceled about 6,300 flights Wednesday, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware.com. About a third of the canceled flights were out of Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest hubs. Eighty-four flights were canceled at Los Angeles International Airport.
At least two deaths were blamed on the weather. On Long Island in New York, a homeless man set himself on fire trying to stay warm, and in Oklahoma a 20-year-old woman was killed while being pulled on a sled by a pickup that crashed into a pole.
By late Wednesday, the blizzard, which pummeled Chicago with lightning, thunder and whiteout conditions, had narrowed its path along northern New England and upstate New York.
At its height, the storm had a following that more than rivaled Oprah Winfrey‘s Twitter audience: the National Weather Service website, which normally gets 70 million hits a day, was drawing as many as 20 million an hour Wednesday.
At one point the weather service issued blizzard warnings for an area stretching from Oklahoma City to Detroit, and wind-chill warnings from the Dakotas to Texas, said Laura Furgione, the service’s deputy director. She compared the “massive storm” to the one that paralyzed Chicago in 1979 for more than a week.
Not only did 20.2 inches of snow and near-hurricane winds close Chicago schools and banks Wednesday, it kept people from so much as buying groceries or fixing an achy tooth. Denise Daly spent the morning canceling appointments at her dental office.
“Someone with a toothache can deal with it for a day as long as they have something for the pain,” she said.
Although the snowfall had all but stopped Wednesday evening, it went down in the books as the third-worst storm in Chicago, and set a record for cold at minus 40 degrees in parts of Montana. Oklahoma City’s 11.8 inches of snow set a new February one-day record.
President Obama received a telephone briefing on the federal response to the storm from Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate. FEMA had put power generators, blankets, cots, water, meals and other emergency supplies in places that were likely to suffer the most.
“It’s been a very snowy winter in general,” Furgione said. “It’s not over yet. We’re still expecting this cold air to remain over the central United States and even the Eastern Seaboard. We are expecting more below-normal temperatures at least through the next two weeks.”
For worried Super Bowl fans, predictions called for warmer temperatures by Sunday in Dallas, where an unusually severe ice storm had driven the mercury below zero and prompted utility companies to orchestrate rolling blackouts across the city, with the exception of Cowboys Stadium.
“It won’t be anywhere near as cold Sunday in Dallas as it is today down there,” said Bruce Sullivan, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
In New York City, the locals called it the “Groundhog Day Storm” as they gingerly negotiated icy sidewalks, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had an uplifting encounter with the city’s most famous groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, who, however improbably, predicted an early spring. (And you don’t mess with Chuck: In 2009 he bit the mayor’s hand, prompting Bloomberg to wear gloves for their next encounters.)
In Kansas City, Mo., Danny Rotert, an aide to Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), was hunkered down in his home, responding to questions via e-mail.
“The city is shut down and has declared an emergency,” he wrote. “… Even if I could shovel the driveway to get out, my street would be impassable.”
Some motorists were stuck for hours in their vehicles on snow-clogged highways.
On Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, nearly 1,000 cars were stranded overnight. Just before dawn Wednesday, firefighters walked down the line of snow-caked cars, shining flashlights inside to check on motorists.
Joanna Moore, 24, and her boyfriend were returning home from the Downstream Casino Resort in Quapaw, Okla., when they got caught in whiteout on the Will Rogers Turnpike. They had two cups of hot chocolate and two muffins to tide them over between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m., when the National Guard rescued them.
They were among 16 people waiting out the storm at a Red Cross shelter set up in a local church. It was unclear when the couple would be able to retrieve their car and get home. Moore said she was crossing her fingers that they would be there in time for her 3-year-old daughter’s birthday Friday.
Meanwhile, officials began to prepare for an onslaught of insurance claims resulting from damaged properties like the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino near Tulsa, where part of the roof caved in.
Wet snow and heavy ice caused roofs to cave in and buildings to collapse in several states. A gas station canopy plummeted in Long Island, an airplane hanger in Boston and an entire brick building in northwest Connecticut.
Even sunny Arizona didn’t escape freezing temperatures, prompting a warning from the National Weather Service for Phoenix residents to keep their plants and pets warm.
In Milan, N.H., Brad Ray, 72, who used to rescue people from avalanches on Mt. Washington, wondered what all the fuss was about.
Yes, the snow was coming down, he said, and they had already had 12 inches.
No, he wasn’t rushing to plow his 1,325-foot driveway. “My plow truck is a pretty good size,” he said. “I have a lot of weight and chains on it. I don’t worry about pushing the snow.”
But even with all his equipment and know-how, he advised: “Listen to the professionals and don’t go out unless you really have to.”
By Richard Simon, Geraldine Baum and Abby Sewell, Los Angeles Times
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden react to cheers as they arrive in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 23, 2010, for the signing ceremony for the health care bill. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
(CNSNews.com) – Long before his administration went into federal court to fight 27 states that are now challenging the constitutionality of the federal government forcing people to buy health insurance, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama told Ellen DeGeneres that—unlike his opponent Hillary Clinton—he opposed forcing the uninsured to buy health insurance, saying that it would be like forcing the homeless to buy homes.
“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it,”Obama said in a Feb. 28, 2008 appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ television show. “So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”
In a ruling issued yesterday holding that the insurance mandate in Obamacare is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson pointed to a similar statement that Obama had made in a Feb. 5th, 2008 interview with CNN. “Indeed,” wrote Vinson, “I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that ‘if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.’”
Scientists are a step closer to creating a Star Trek-style cloaking device after making an object visible to the naked eye disappear for the first time.
The research works by using a naturally forming crystal called calcite which has extraordinary light bending abilities Photo: CORBIS
In the past researchers have only been able to “cloak” microscopic objects using extremely complicated physics and so-called meta-materials made on a tiny scale.
But a new study at the University of Birmingham has taken a massive step forward by making a paper clip invisible – an object thousands of times bigger than previous experiments.
The research works by using a naturally forming crystal called calcite which has extraordinary light bending abilities.
By placing the crystals over an object it “bounces” light around it rendering it totally invisible to the naked eye.
Dr Shuang Zhang, a physicist and lead investigator from the University of Birmingham, said: ‘‘This is a huge step forward as, for the first time, the cloaking area is rendered at a size that is big enough for the observer to ‘see’ the invisible object with the naked eye.
“By using natural crystals for the first time, rather than artificial meta-materials, we have been able to scale up the size of the cloak and can hide larger objects, thousands of times bigger than the wavelength of the light.”
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