Families Whose Lives Were Destroyed By Sandy Blast Christie’s Presidential Hope

Stoking anticipation that he will launch a 2016 presidential campaign, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (R) urged a conservative audience in New Hampshire this week to watch his YouTube videos to understand the full picture of who he is as a person and a state leader. On his YouTube page, Christie frequently appears wearing his signature fleece and speaking on boardwalks across the state on various occasions — including the first and second anniversary of Superstorm Sandy — about New Jersey’s ability to recover from the devastating hurricane.

I-Team: Sandy Funds Went to NJ Town With Little Storm Damage

Gov. Chris Christie's administration is again facing questions about how Sandy aid was distributed in New Jersey after it was revealed $4.8 million in relief funds went to help build an apartment tower in New Brunswick, a town that saw relatively little storm damage.

New Jersey's Housing and Mortgage Finance Agency approved the disbursement as part of the state's Fund for Rebuilding Multifamily Housing. The program is intended to speed the construction of new affordable housing in communities ravaged by the storm.

A Year After Sandy, New York’s Inequality Is Still Growing

When Hurricane Sandy engulfed New York a year ago, David Del Valle helped me instead of his mother. Del Valle’s choice was not voluntary.

For the last 10 years, the 48-year-old New Yorker has worked as a doorman at the hotel where my wife, daughter and I stayed after being ordered to evacuate our apartment in lower Manhattan. Eager to hold on to his job, Del Valle stayed at work but worried about his mother—who lives on the city’s Lower East Side, which lost electricity and flooded.

Flood Insurance Costs May Soar For Hardest-Hit Sandy Victims

TOMS RIVER, N.J. -- George Kasimos has almost finished repairing flood damage to his waterfront home, but his Superstorm Sandy nightmare is far from over.

Like thousands of others in the hardest-hit coastal stretches of New Jersey and New York, his life is in limbo as he waits to see if tough new coastal rebuilding rules make it just too expensive for him to stay.

Neil Heslin Smeared By Connecticut Carry Gun Lobbying Group

WASHINGTON -- A Connecticut gun lobbying group on Wednesday personally attacked the father of a Sandy Hook school massacre victim, accusing him of "profitting off of the tragedy" and saying a decade-old drug arrest makes him a "poster boy" for background check ineffectiveness.

Connecticut Carry, a nonprofit gun lobbying organization, singled out Neil Heslin, whose son Jesse Lewis was killed in the December school shooting, in a press release. Heslin has testified before Congress and attended events at the White House with President Barack Obama in support of increased background checks for gun purchasers.

After Hurricane Sandy, Homeless Still Number In The Thousands In New York, New Jersey

MANTOLOKING, N.J. -- The 9-year-old girl who got New Jersey's tough-guy governor to shed a tear as he comforted her after her home was destroyed is bummed because she now lives far from her best friend and has nowhere to hang her One Direction posters.

A New Jersey woman whose home was overtaken by mold still cries when she drives through the area. A New York City man whose home burned can't wait to build a new one.

Ted Cruz, Bill Flores Asked For Federal Aid After Texas Explosion, But Voted Against Sandy Relief

A pair of Republican lawmakers who voted against federal aid in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy are now looking for federal aid in the wake of the deadly explosion in West, Texas.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz lambasted the Sandy Aid package, voting against the measure in January. Cruz issued a statement explaining that he voted against the aid because it included a number of spending measures that were not related to disaster relief, including "Smithsonian repairs, upgrades to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration airplanes, and more funding for Head Start."

Sandy Relief Passes House Despite Conservative Opposition

A measure providing $51 billion for relief and recovery from Hurricane Sandy was approved by a bipartisan majority in the House on Tuesday evening, three weeks after Northeast Republicans excoriated the chamber's GOP leaders for failing to vote on storm aid before the end of the last Congress.

An amendment to the relief package introduced by Tea Party-allied conservatives requiring across-the-board cuts to defense and domestic programs to pay for $17 billion of storm aid was supported by a majority of Republicans, but was defeated 258-162 with a combination of GOP and Democratic votes.

Superstorm Sandy—a People's Shock?

Less than three days after Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States, Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute blamed New Yorkers’ resistance to big-box stores for the misery they were about to endure. Writing on Forbes.com, he explained that the city’s refusal to embrace Walmart will likely make the recovery much harder: “Mom-and-pop stores simply can’t do what big stores can in these circumstances,” he wrote.

Called to Work During Superstorm Sandy, Tribeca Parking Attendant Drowned

Sometime during the mid-afternoon hours of October 29, as Superstorm Sandy was heaving up the East Coast, Anthony Narh, a Ghanaian immigrant, limped toward his job at Empire Parking, an underground garage serving one of the toniest strips of one of Manhattan’s toniest neighborhoods. Nestled near the watery edge of TriBeCa, Empire Parking was smack in the center of an evacuation zone—and Sandy was heading straight for it.

As the winds picked up and debris was flying up and down TriBeCa’s narrow streets, Anastasia Ratia, an architect and designer who lives with her aunt at 92 Laight Street, a high-end building adjoining the garage, ran into Narh and a co-worker. Ratia and her aunt had already evacuated but were making a last-minute run to the building; Narh, who was in his late fifties and walked with a severe limp, was just arriving for work. (At the garage, he was known as Jackson.)

Hurricane Sandy is another blow to Haiti

Hurricane Sandy struck another heavy blow to Haiti on October 23, 24, 2012. At least 54 people died and dozens more are missing. Several tens of thousands of people were flooded out of their homes or earthquake survivor camps.

There are some 370,000 people stuck in appalling conditions in the camps while hundreds of thousands more have gone back to damaged homes or whatever other inadequate shelter they can find.

Hurricane Sandy Price Gouging: New York Attorney General Launches Price-Gouging Probe

NEW YORK, Nov 5 (Reuters) - New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman on Monday launched an investigation into post-storm price gouging after consumers flooded his office with complaints about jacked-up prices for everything from gasoline to hotel rooms.

Schneiderman's announcement came as AAA, the national auto club which tracks gas price trends, said prices in some storm-stricken zones have risen as much as 15 cents a gallon in the week since Sandy struck, even as the national gas price keeps falling.

Wireless Industry Resisted Calls To Back Up Cell Towers Before Sandy

One key factor helps explain why communities ravaged by Hurricane Sandy could not use cell phones to call for help and communicate with the outside world: mobile telephone companies have for years lobbied to kill rules that would have forced them to maintain backup power at their cell phone towers.

After Hurricane Katrina knocked out communications along the Gulf Coast, federal regulators proposed that wireless companies have backup power at all cell towers.

After Sandy, Occupy Movement Re-Emerges as Relief Hub for Residents in Need

In addition to the National Guard and FEMA, one of the more active relief efforts in New York City has been a volunteer effort organized by alumnae of Occupy Wall Street called Occupy Sandy Relief. Along with groups like 350.org and Recovers.org, Occupy activists quickly mobilized hundreds, and then thousands, of people to help affected areas of New York City. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke speaks with Occupy organizer Catherine Yeager in the Rockaways about Occupy Wall Street’s transformation into Occupy Sandy Relief.

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"We Need Help": Battered by Sandy, Desperate Residents of New York’s Far Rockaways Plead for Aid

Power has returned to most of Manhattan, but well over one million residents of New York City’s outer boroughs and New Jersey remain in the dark. We begin our coverage of Superstorm Sandy’s hardest hit areas with the Rockaways, a peninsula located in the southeast section of New York City. Democracy Now! senior producer Mike Burke and videographer Elizabeth Press traveled to the Rockaways on Friday and filed this report.

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Crossing the Line

In the summer of 2007, Eve Mosher, an artist who grew up in Texas and lives in New York, bought a machine known as a Heavy Hitter. Heavy Hitters are typically used to produce the white chalk lines found on Little League fields, but Mosher had an entirely different purpose in mind. She filled the Heavy Hitter with a combination of white chalk and blue pigment and began pushing it through the streets of Brooklyn.

In Sandy's Wake, Insurance Industry Must Better Account For Climate Change, Critics Say

In 2009, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, a standard-setting and regulatory support body comprised of chief insurance regulators from all 50 states, reached a historic agreement.

Beginning in 2010, the organization announced, insurance companies would be required to disclose, to regulators and investors, "the financial risks they face from climate change, as well as actions the companies are taking to respond to those risks."

In a matter of months, that agreement fell apart.

Superstorm Sandy: Power slowly returns to New York as frustration over gas shortages grow

NEW YORK, N.Y.—The lights went back on Saturday in lower Manhattan, prompting screams of sweet relief from residents who had been plunged into darkness for nearly five days by Superstorm Sandy. But that joy contrasted with deepening resentment in the city’s outer boroughs and suburbs over a continued lack of power and maddening gas shortages.

Adding to the misery of those lacking power, heat or gasoline: dipping temperatures. Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged older residents without heat to move to shelters, and said 25,000 blankets were being distributed across the city.

Hurricane Sandy: Richard Garneau, Resolute CEO, Says Canada's Forestry Industry To Profit From Storm

MONTREAL — The destructive wrath of Hurricane Sandy will help boost recovery in Canada's forest products industry next year as communities in New York City area and along the New Jersey coast rebuild, the head of Resolute Forest Products said Friday.

"When you look at the devastation it's mind boggling and it's going to have an impact,'' CEO Richard Garneau said in an interview.

New York’s Next Extremist Shock

New York can be as compelling in a hurricane as it is on a starry Saturday night. Some of the thrill of living in the city arises from its combination of majesty and vulnerability. Coming to terms with apocalyptic scenes is easier here than in other cities because the scenes have already been imagined, scripted and filmed by Hollywood’s dystopian directors. We step outside this week as if onto a familiar movie set.

New Yorkers like to tell themselves stories about their extraordinary resilience. There is truth in these stories, as we’ve seen in the past few days—the rescues and coöperation in devastated communities, the absence of looting, the well-rehearsed emergency-response protocols by many institutions of government. Yet there is a collective sense of denial, too, about how poorly prepared the city is for events of this scale.