Hurricane Sandy reeks havoc in New York & New Jersey as storm hits land
Left picture a man made his way along a flooded street in Lower Manhattan and the Inlet section of Atlantic City, N.J., was flooded
Deaths reported in New York as the historic storm hits land in southern New Jersey.
Death toll climbs as storm hits New Jersey
• More than 2.5 million people without power
• Sandy unravels into post-tropical storm
• Obama and Romney cancel campaign events
• One HMS Bounty sailor found dead, other missing
• More than 2.5 million people without power
• Sandy unravels into post-tropical storm
• Obama and Romney cancel campaign events
• One HMS Bounty sailor found dead, other missing
More than two million Americans in 11 states and the District of Columbia were without electricity last night, when Hurricane Sandy, believed to be the biggest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic, made landfall in southern New Jersey.
The mammoth and merciless storm made landfall near Atlantic City around 8 p.m., with maximum sustained winds of about 80 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. That was shortly after the center had reclassified the storm as a post-tropical cyclone, a scientific renaming that had no bearing on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm surge expected to accompany its push onto land.
The storm had unexpectedly picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to paralyse life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shore-fronts & neighbourhoods into ghost towns.
The police said a tree fell on a house in Queens New York shortly after 7 p.m., killing a 30-year-old man. In Manhattan a few hours earlier, a construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in the city came loose and dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall.
Soon power was going out and water was rushing in. Waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating downstream. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, known officially as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in memory of a former governor, flooded hours after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York ordered it closed to traffic.
The US Coastguard said Claudene Christian, a sailor from the HMS Bounty, a replica of the historic ship, was found dead after it sank off the coast of North Carolina. Fourteen crew members were rescued, but the captain, Robin Walbridge, was still missing. Dubbed “the Frankenstorm” because of her hybrid, monster nature, Sandy killed 67 people in the Caribbean last week.
High winds and rising flood waters battered the Atlantic coast from the Carolinas to Maine. The façade of a building collapsed in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, and much of West 57th street had to be evacuated because a construction crane dangled precariously over the street.
Cars were under water in Atlantic City, where part of the fabled boardwalk was torn up by the storm on the northern coast of Long Island, 94 mph winds were recorded.
In the same area, water surged 12.4 feet above its normal level. Nine eastern US states have declared a state of emergency.
Sixty million people, or almost 20 per cent of the US population, live in the path of the storm.
As the storm approached the Atlantic seaboard, some Americans tempted fate. Gamblers squeezed in a few more games of blackjack in Atlantic City casinos before Governor Chris Christie shut them down on Sunday night.
Thrill-seekers walked on a jetty in the Rockaways section of Queens.
At least one surfer flew from California to New Jersey to ride the waves as the storm hit. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said police had to arrest surfers.
In the hours before the storm, shoppers hoarded tinned food, bottled water, candles, torches and batteries, and filled their bathtubs. Electrical generators sold out. Petrol stations in Connecticut ran out of fuel during the exodus from New York.
Shopkeepers and restaurateurs took out plywood sheets they’d used to protect their businesses from Hurricane Irene last year. They used black spray paint to cross out “Irene,” so the graffiti now reads “Go Away Sandy” and “Be kind to us Sandy”.
Just one week before the presidential election, neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama wants to appear to exploit the hurricane for political advantage. Both men called off campaign events yesterday and today. “The election will take care of itself next week,” Mr Obama said.
Mr. Obama dispatched the former president Bill Clinton to campaign for him in Minnesota and Colorado.
In Virginia, where two former governors are embroiled in a race for the US Senate, both candidates asked supporters to take down yard signs. “The last thing we want is for yard signs to become projectiles,” the Democratic candidate Tim Kaine said in an email.
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg once more urged residents to stay indoors. “This is a storm that could easily kill you,” he said.
The mayor’s office has advised almost 400,000 people to evacuate the city, and shelters have already accepted 3,000 residents affected by the hurricane.
A spokeswoman for the NYC Department of Education said that 76 public school buildings are being used as evacuation centres across the city.
High Intake of Omega-3 Enhances Working memory and body functions
Omega-3 fatty acids have now and then been linked by studies with boosting memories. A recent study has suggested that higher the intake of these fatty acids, the more one can enhance their working memory and also can improve their body functioning.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have asserted that young adults aged between 18 and 25 can attain the benefits of Omega-3 essential fatty acids by increasing the intake of foods rich in it, including fish and grass-fed livestock.
The study led by Rajesh Narendarn, project principal investigator and associate professor of radiology, included healthy young women and men and provided them with supplements, Lovaza, for six months to increase their omega-3 fatty acid consumption.
Prior to providing the supplements, positron emission tomography (PET) imaging and blood test of each of the participant was carried out.
Further, the participants were asked to undergo a working memory test, during which they were shown letters and numbers. The participants were to memorize the sequence of the series.
After six months of intake of supplement, the young adults were requested to complete the series again. Narendarn said, “Diets enriched with Omega-3 fatty acid can enhance cognition. It was a bit disappointing that our imaging studies were unable to clarify the mechanisms by which it enhances working memory”.
‘Smoking will kill up to a billion people this century’
Smoking, which is described as the biggest public health disaster in the history of the world with its perpetrators likened to terrorists, will kill up to a billion people worldwide this century unless governments across the world stamp down on the half-trillion-dollar tobacco industry, cancer experts have warned.
John Seffrin, chief executive of the American Cancer Society, issued this warning while speaking at a high-level forum of the world’s 100 leading cancer experts gathered in the Swiss resort of Lugano.
They said governments must do far more than they have done to control the global tobacco industry, either by raising cigarette prices dramatically, outlawing tobacco marketing or by taxing the multinational profits of the big cigarette firms.
European countries need to raise cigarette prices significantly because this is the one proven method of reducing consumption, Sir Richard said. They should adopt a “triple-half-double” strategy, which was tried in France in the 1990s, when cigarette prices were tripled, consumption halved and the tobacco tax revenues to the French government doubled.
They said that if the current trends continue – with cigarette companies targeting the non-smoking populations of the developing world – then hundreds of millions of people will be dying of cancer in the second half of this century.
Some of the experts attending the World Oncology Forum went further by calling for an outright ban on cigarettes and for the tobacco industry to be treated as a terrorist movement for the way it targets new markets with a product that it knows to be deadly when used as intended.
“We have a major global industry producing a product that is lethal to at least half the people who use it. It will kill, if current trends continue, a billion people this century,” the Independentquoted Dr Seffrin as saying.
“It killed 100 million in the last century and we thought that was outrageous, but this will be the biggest public health disaster in the history of the world, bar none. It all could be avoided if we could prevent the terroristic tactics of the tobacco industry in marketing its products to children.
“There is a purposeful intent to market a product that they know full well will harm their customers and over time will kill more than half of them. The industry needs to be reined in and regulated,” he said.
Worldwide, tobacco causes about 22 percent of cancer deaths each year, killing some 1.7 million people, with almost 1 million of them dying from lung cancer. Yet the numbers of new smokers among the young is rising faster than the numbers giving up.
Sir Richard Peto of Oxford University, a co-author of the Million Women study who worked closely with Sir Richard Doll, is also the scientist who first calculated how many people this century will die from tobacco-induced cancers.
“We have about 30 million new smokers a year in the world. On present patterns, most of them are not going to stop, and if they don’t stop, and if half of them die from it, then that means more than 10 million a year will die – that’s 100 million a decade in the second half of the century,” Professor Peto said.
“So this century we’re going to see something like a billion deaths from smoking if we carry on as we are. In Europe we have about 1.3 million premature deaths per year now, of which about 0.3 million are deaths by tobacco. There’s nothing else as big as that.
“If you put all causes together, you wouldn’t get a total that’s half of that caused by tobacco, and tobacco kills more people by cancer than other diseases. Smoking is still the most important cause of cancer… If you smoke a few cigarettes a day, it will be the most dangerous thing you do,” he added.
Irish retail sales post first annual rise this year
Irish retail sales volumes posted their first growth this year on an annualised basis, climbing 1.4 percent in September from a year earlier after eight months of contraction, government figures showed on Friday. Volumes were 0.9 percent higher in September than in August, their largest monthly rise since July, data from the Central Statistics office showed.
The statistics office confirmed provisional data that retail volumes climbed 0.4 percent in August. Sales volumes fell 0.7 percent in the year to August, compared to a fall of 0.6 percent indicated in provisional figures last month. Economists expect retail sales to fall 2.3 percent this year, according to the latest Reuters poll.
Just how are our Dail ministers & TD’s’ pensions worked out?
A TD who has also served at least two years as a minister receives a pension based on service as a TD plus a separate pension based on service as a minister, which are calculated on different criteria. The two sums are then added
1 Working out a TD’s pension entitlement.
To work out a TD’s basic pension you divide his or her salary by 40 and then multiply it by the number of years they’ve served in the Dáil. A cap of 20 years service applies.
If we take a TD with 20 years’ service, whose salary is €92,672, then to calculate that TD’s pension entitlement, we divide the salary by 40 and multiply it by 20, which means the TD is entitled to a €46,336 a year pension once they reach retirement age. TDs are also entitled to a one-off pension lump sum of three times their pension. So, in this example, the TD would receive three times €46,336 – a lump sum of €139,008
On top of this, TDs who have served more than six months in the Oireachtas are also entitled to a termination lump sum equal to two months’ salary (€15,445).
If TDs have served for longer than three years they are also entitled to up to 12 monthly payments based on their length of service (for a TD the maximum payment total over 12 months is €57,920). Only after these payments end do they receive their pension proper.
2 Working out the pension of a minister.
A number of positions attract a pension entitlement over and above that earned by a TD or senator. These positions are taoiseach, tánaiste, minister, attorney general and ceann comhairle (called “ministerial” offices for pension purposes) and minister of state, leas cheann comhairle, cathaoirleach, leas-chathaoirleach and leader of the Seanad (called “secretarial” posts for pension purposes).
To receive this pension entitlement you have to have served for at least two years in one of these offices. The pension is then worked out as a percentage of the office holder’s salary. After two years a retiring minister is entitled to a pension equal to 20 per cent of his or her salary. After three years this becomes 25 per cent, four years 30 per cent, and five years 35 per cent.
The maximum entitlement is 60 per cent after 10 years’ service. Service as a minister of state is reckonable for ministerial pension calculations, with half the service accrued being counted for pension purposes.
If you are entitled to receive a “ministerial” pension but previously served in a “secretarial” post then half the time you spent in the latter post is reckonable at the “ministerial” rate.
So a minister with the standard salary of €76,603 (this excludes the €92,672 they earn as a TD) and a maximum 10 years’ “ministerial” service would be entitled to 60 per cent of €76,603, making for a “ministerial” pension of €45,962.
3 Working out an office-holder’s long-term pension projection (ie how much the annuities would cost in the private sector).
Add together the pension entitlements reached in steps 1 and 2 above. So a senior minister who has served 20 years or more would be entitled to €46,336 (their TD pension) plus €45,962 (their “ministerial” pension), making a total pension entitlement of €92,298.
This sum is then entered into a pension calculator using an inflation cap of 3 per cent.
4 Working out an office-holder’s long-term pension projection (ie how much the annuities would cost in the private sector) in cases where the TD is not yet the requisite age to receive a pension.
In the case of office holders who would not yet be entitled to a pension, you use a further calculation to work out the annuity cost.
You first calculate how much the pension would cost in the private sector (as per steps 1, 2 and 3 above).
The resulting figure is then divided by 1.02 (where 1.02 represents a 3 per cent inflation cap and a 5 per cent return on investment – a net 2 per cent).
This figure (which we will call x) is put to the power of the number of years until the minister reaches retirement age.
(So if a minister has seven years before he/she reaches retirement age, the calculation is x to the power of 7.)
THE SMALL PRINT
All calculations (both here and in the accompanying table) are estimations based on Oireachtas/government guidelines and are based on “new scheme” pension arrangements that have been in place since 1993. Lengths of service were based on information on the Oireachtas website.
Those entitled to “ministerial” or “secretarial” pensions can either take their pension straight away or avail of a ministerial lump sum and a ministerial severance payment (payable for up to two years) – but they cannot draw down both at once.
All TDs elected after April 1st, 2004, cannot receive a pension or pension lump sum until they reach 65 years of age unless they served in a public service body prior to April 1st, 2004.
Those who served in the Dáil prior to this date are not entitled to a full pension until they reach the age of 50 (although they may receive a reduced pension and pension lump sum at any time between the ages of 45 and 49).
In calculating an officeholder’s long-term pension projection, spouses were included in the calculation where the officeholder is married. On the death of a former officeholder, his/her spouse is eligible for 50 per cent of the pension.
For the purposes of calculating an officeholder’s long-term pension projection, where he or she was married, wives were assumed to be two years younger than their husbands while husbands were assumed to be two years older than their wives.
Since May 1st, 2009, public servants’ remuneration is subject to the following annual pension-related deductions: up to €15,000 – exempt; between €15,000 and €20,000 – 5 per cent; between €20,000 and €60,000 – 10 per cent; above €60,000 – 10.5 per cent.
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