Power Returns to Lower Manhattan

With the parks set to reopen, the power back on in nearly all of Manhattan and the weekend providing much needed relief from traffic nightmares, parts of New York City seemed to be returning to a semblance of normalcy on Saturday.

Outside of Manhattan, though, in the hardest hit neighborhoods of Queens and Staten Island as well as along the Jersey Shore, it was just the latest day to struggle through, working to both recover and rebuild after Hurricane Sandy.

And there were still reports of long lines at gas stations, with a government survey conducted on Friday showing that nearly two-thirds of the stations in the metropolitan region were out of fuel.

The most visible sign of progress came throughout the night, as New York City, once divided between light and dark, was united again.

As of Saturday morning, only about 5,800 people in Manhattan remained without power.

Just as significant as the return of power itself was what it meant for every other aspect of the recovery, specifically transit. As the power returns, subways can start running their full routes, and one of the greatest logistical problems caused by the storm will begin to be improved.

Throughout the night Friday, as lampposts, streetlights and storefronts flickered to life, cheers could be heard across whole neighborhoods.

In Lower Manhattan, the power restoration started around 5 p.m. in the East Village. The network there, known as Cooper Square, serves about 67,000 customers between 14th and Canal Streets. The Chelsea neighborhood sparked to life about 45 minutes later, bringing back power to an additional 25,000 customers between 14th and 31st Streets on the West Side.

The next big network came back to life around 7:30 p.m., when 30,000 customers east of Fifth Avenue between 14th and 31st Streets were once again able to turn their lights on.

Throughout the night, Consolidated Edison’s crews raced to make good on a promise that company executives made to restore power to all of Manhattan before Saturday. As each network came online, they got a bit closer to getting power back to all 220,000 people below 39th Street who lost it.

By morning, they had largely succeeded. There was work to be done on the Fulton Network, which is important to the subway system as well, and 65 buildings damaged in the storm would remain without power until crews could get to them individually, a Con Edison spokesman said.

Outside Manhattan, the challenges were in some ways more difficult, with crews having to contend with thousands of lines that were mangled, damaged or ripped down in the storm. Con Ed said it could take until the end of next week to bring electricity back to all of its customers.

As of 7 a.m. Saturday, Con Edison reported approximately 280,000 customers out of service. That included 5,800 in Manhattan, 81,000 in Queens, 31,000 in Brooklyn, 31,000 on Staten Island and 25,000 in the Bronx.

In Westchester County, where 107,000 people have no power, the utility said navigating downed trees and dealing with connections cut off by limbs and branches was simply going to take more time. On Long Island, more than 430,000 customers of the Long Island Power Authority still had no power on Friday evening, or any estimate of when it would return.

In New Jersey, Public Service Electric and Gas had restored power to over a million customers by Friday morning, but nearly 600,000 still had no electricity by night. In Newark, about 100,000 customers had service restored at around 9:45 p.m., according the Mayor Cory A. Booker.

Jersey Central Power and Light had over 685,000 customers without electricity on Friday night.

In Connecticut, repairs were moving quickly. Only about 140,000 customers of Connecticut Light and Power still had no power.

With progress faster in some places than others, more crews from around the country are still arriving to help local utility companies recover.

In Manhattan, though, there was a palpable sense of relief as the lights came back on.

Ali Salah, 40, who works at his family’s deli in Chelsea, said the first thing they turned on was the coffee maker.

“Then,” he said, “we plugged in our phones.”

This past week, he added, it did not feel like he was living in New York City, but rather it was more like a small town in his native Yemen.

But when the lights came back on, he could barely contain his joy.

“Today is like New Year’s,” he said. “Like a new holiday.”

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Google's Android software in 3 out of 4 smartphones

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Songs offer messages of hope at Sandy benefit show

NEW YORK (AP) — From "Livin' on a Prayer" to "The Living Proof," every song Friday at NBC's benefit concert for superstorm Sandy victims became a message song.

New Jersey's Jon Bon Jovi gave extra meaning to "Who Says You Can't Go Home." Billy Joel worked in a reference to Staten Island, the decimated New York City borough. The hourlong event, hosted by Matt Lauer, was heavy on stars and lyrics identified with New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area, which took the brunt of this week's deadly storm. The telethon was a mix of music, storm footage and calls for donations from Jon Stewart, Tina Fey, Whoopi Goldberg and others.

The mood was somber but hopeful, from Christina Aguilera's "Beautiful" to Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" and a tearful Mary J. Blige's "The Living Proof," her ballad of resilience with the timely declaration that "the worst is over/I can start living now." Joel rocked out with "Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)," a song born from crisis, New York City's near bankruptcy in the 1970s, while Jimmy Fallon endured a faulty microphone and gamely led an all-star performance of the Drifters' "Under the Boardwalk" that featured Joel, Bruce Springsteen and Steven Tyler. The Aerosmith frontman then sat behind a piano and gave his all on a strained but deeply emotional "Dream On." Sting was equally passionate during an acoustic, muscular version of The Police hit "Message In a Bottle" and its promise to "send an SOS to the world."

The show ended, as it only could, with Springsteen and the E Street Band, tearing into "Land Of Hope and Dreams."

"God bless New York," Springsteen, New Jersey's ageless native son, said in conclusion. "God bless the Jersey shore."

The stable of NBC Universal networks, including USA, CNBC, MSNBC, E! Entertainment, The Weather Channel and Bravo, aired the concert live from the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, several blocks north of where the city went days without power. Millions of people for whom the benefit was organized couldn't watch the event because they had no electricity.

NBC Universal invited other networks to televise the event, but not everyone signed on.

That might have something to do with network rivalries.

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the networks organized a benefit together behind the scenes and it was televised on more than 30 networks simultaneously, including all the big broadcasters.

After Hurricane Katrina, NBC televised its own benefit before the other broadcasters, one that became best known for Kanye West's off-script declaration that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." The other broadcasters cooperated on their own telethon a week later, and NBC televised that one, too.

Also this year, NBC organized and scheduled a telethon and gave others the chance to air it.

Others declined to televise Friday's telethon, even though ABC parent Walt Disney Co. said it would donate $2 million to the American Red Cross and various ABC shows will promote a "Day of Giving" on Monday. The CBS Corp., Viacom Inc., parent of "Jersey Shore" network MTV, Fox network owner News Corp. also announced big donations to the Red Cross.

Read More..

Second Illness Infects Meningitis Sufferers

Just when they might have thought they were in the clear, people recovering from meningitis in an outbreak caused by a contaminated steroid drug have been struck by a second illness.

The new problem, called an epidural abscess, is an infection near the spine at the site where the drug — contaminated by a fungus — was injected to treat back or neck pain. The abscesses are a localized infection, different from meningitis, which affects the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. But in some cases, an untreated abscess can cause meningitis. The abscesses have formed even while patients were taking powerful antifungal medicines, putting them back in the hospital for more treatment, often with surgery.

The problem has just begun to emerge, so far mostly in Michigan, which has had more people sickened by the drug — 112 out of 404 nationwide — than any other state.

“We’re hearing about it in Michigan and other locations as well,” said Dr. Tom M. Chiller, the deputy chief of the mycotic diseases branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We don’t have a good handle on how many people are coming back.”

He added, “We are just learning about this and trying to assess how best to manage these patients. They’re very complicated.”

In the last few days, about a third of the 53 patients treated for meningitis at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital in Ann Arbor, Mich., have returned with abscesses, said Dr. Lakshmi K. Halasyamani, the chief medical officer.

“This is a significant shift in the presentation of this fungal infection, and quite concerning,” she said. “An epidural abscess is very serious. It’s not something we expected.”

She and other experts said they were especially puzzled that the infections could occur even though patients were taking drugs that, at least in tests, appeared to work against the fungus causing the infection, a type of black mold called Exserohilum.

The main symptom is severe pain near the injection site. But the abscesses are internal, with no visible signs on the skin, so it takes an M.R.I. scan to make the diagnosis. Some patients have more than one abscess. In some cases, the infection can be drained or cleaned out by a neurosurgeon.

But sometimes fungal strands and abnormal tissue are wrapped around nerves and cannot be surgically removed, said Dr. Carol A. Kauffman, an expert on fungal diseases at the University of Michigan. In such cases, all doctors can do is give a combination of antifungal drugs and hope for the best. They have very little experience with this type of infection.

Some patients have had epidural abscesses without meningitis; St. Joseph Mercy Hospital has had 34 such cases.

A spokesman for the health department in Tennessee, which has had 78 meningitis cases, said that a few cases of epidural abscess had also occurred there, and that the state was trying to assess the extent of the problem.

Dr. Chiller said doctors were also reporting that some patients exposed to the tainted drug had arachnoiditis, a nerve inflammation near the spine that can cause intense pain, bladder problems and numbness.

“Unfortunately, we know from the rare cases of fungal meningitis that occur, that you can have complicated courses for this disease, and it requires prolonged therapy and can have some devastating consequences,” he said.

The meningitis outbreak, first recognized in late September, is one of the worst public health disasters ever caused by a contaminated drug. So far, 29 people have died, often from strokes caused by the infection. The case count is continuing to rise. The drug was a steroid, methylprednisolone acetate, made by the New England Compounding Center in Framingham, Mass. Three contaminated lots of the drug, more than 17,000 vials, were shipped around the country, and about 14,000 people were injected with the drug, mostly for neck and back pain. But some received injections for arthritic joints and have developed joint infections.

Inspections of the compounding center have revealed extensive contamination. It has been shut down, as has another Massachusetts company, Ameridose, with some of the same owners. Both companies have had their products recalled.

Compounding pharmacies, which mix their own drugs, have had little regulation from either states or the federal government, and several others have been shut down recently after inspections found sanitation problems.

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Apple rolls out iPad mini to shorter queues

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At Bellevue, a Desperate Fight to Ensure the Patients’ Safety

Uli Seit for The New York Times

Ralston Davis had a triple heart bypass operation at Bellevue, but when the hospital lost power, he walked down 10 flights of stairs and was moved to another medical center.

From the moment the water lapped above street level in Lower Manhattan, the doctors and nurses of Bellevue Hospital Center began a desperate struggle to keep patients safe. By 9 p.m. Monday, the hospital was on backup power, and an hour later, the basement was flooded.

Officials rushed to move the most critically ill patients closer to an emergency generator. After midnight, doctors heard shouts in the hallway. The basement fuel pumps had stopped working, and medical residents, nurses and administrators formed a bucket brigade to ferry fuel up 13 flights to the main backup generators.

By Tuesday, the elevator shafts at Bellevue, the country’s oldest public hospital, had flooded, so all 32 elevators stopped working. There was limited compressed air to run ventilators, so oxygen tanks were placed next to the beds of patients who needed them. Water faucets went dry, food ran low, and buckets of water had to be carried up to flush toilets.

Some doctors began urging evacuations, and on Tuesday, at least two dozen ambulances lined up around the block to pick up many of the 725 patients housed there. People carried babies down flights of stairs. The National Guard was called in to help. On Thursday afternoon, the last two patients were waiting to be taken out.

The evacuation went quickly only because Bellevue had planned for such a possibility before Hurricane Irene hit last year, several doctors said. But the city, which had evacuated two nearby hospitals before that storm, decided not to clear out Bellevue. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the consequences of bad calls, bad luck and equipment failures cascaded through the region’s health care system, as sleep-deprived health care workers and patients were confronted by a new kind of disarray.

A patient recovering from a triple bypass operation at Bellevue walked down 10 flights of stairs to a waiting ambulance, one of the dozens provided through the Federal Emergency Management Agency to speed patients across the metropolitan region.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, already dealing with the 2 a.m. arrival of a dozen psychiatric patients who spoke only Chinese, was struggling to identify the relatives of brain-injured traffic victims from Bellevue who arrived three hours later with only rudimentary medical records.

Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn was straining to meet a rising need for emergency dialysis for hundreds of people shut out of storm-crippled private dialysis centers. Patients who would normally get three hours of dialysis were getting only two, to ensure the maximum number of people received at least a minimal amount of care.

“The catastrophe is growing by the minute,” said Eileen Tynion, a Maimonides spokeswoman. “Here we thought we’d reached a quiet point after the storm.”

Every hospital maintains an elaborate disaster plan, but after Hurricane Sandy, the fact that many health care facilities are in low-lying areas proved to be something of an Achilles’ heel. Bellevue became the third hospital in the city to evacuate after the storm’s landfall, after NYU Langone Medical Center, just north of Bellevue, and Coney Island Hospital, another public hospital.

New York Downtown Hospital, the only hospital south of 14th Street in Manhattan, and the Veterans Affairs Hospital, just below Bellevue, had evacuated before the storm.

Hospital executives were reluctant to criticize their colleagues or city officials. But the sequence of events left them with many questions.

“All hospitals are required to do disaster planning and disaster drills,” Pamela Brier, the chief executive of Maimonides, noted. “All hospitals are required as a condition of being accredited, to have generators, backup generators.”

City health department and emergency officials have been particularly fervent about citywide disaster drills, she added, but “as prepared as we think we are we’ve never had a mock disaster drill where we carried patients downstairs. I’m shocked that we didn’t do that. Now we’re going to.”

The city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley, defended the decision not to require evacuations of Bellevue, Coney Island and NYU Langone hospitals before the storm, which he said had been made in consultation with the state health commissioner, Dr. Nirav Shah.

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U.S. Adds 171,000 Jobs; Jobless Rate Rises to 7.9%

In the last assessment of the  job market before the presidential election, the Labor Department announced Friday that the nation’s employers had added 171,000 positions in October, as well as more jobs than initially estimated in both August and September.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 7.9 percent in October, from 7.8 percent in September.

 The report showed persistent but modest improvement in the American economy. It was based on surveys conducted too early in the month to capture the work stoppages across the East Coast from Hurricane Sandy.

“Generally, the report shows that things are better than we’d expected and certainly better than we’d thought a few months ago,” said Paul Dales, senior United States economist for Capital Economics. “But we’re still not making enough progress to bring that unemployment rate down significantly and rapidly.”

The latest figures are probably good news for President Obama, as there was widespread suspicion that the previous month’s large drop in the unemployment rate — below 8 percent for the first time since he took office — might have been a statistical fluke.

Even so, the numbers arrived somewhat late in the game to have a huge impact on the election, particularly given the ongoing focus on Hurricane Sandy.

Economists were hopeful that once the election was over and Congress addressed the major fiscal tightening scheduled for the end of this year, job growth could speed up further.

“If we can do this kind of job growth with all the uncertainty out there, imagine if we were to clear up those tax issues and hold back the majority of tax increases that are pending at the end of the year,” said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics. “We could do much better in 2013, maybe as well as we appeared to be doing earlier this year.”

 Job gains in previous months were revised to show bigger gains. September’s increase of 114,000 new jobs was revised to 148,000, and August’s 142,000 was revised to 192,000, the government said.

In October, the biggest job gains were in professional and business services, health care and retail trade, the Labor Department said. Government payrolls dipped slightly. State and local governments have been shedding jobs most months over the last three years.

One of the lowlights of the report was in hourly wages, which remained flat in October after showing barely any growth in the previous several months.

“Perhaps the decline in real wages is a factor here in being able to employ more people,” Mr. Ryding said. “It’s something to keep in mind when we think about creating jobs and whether we’re maybe creating the wrong sort of jobs.”

A report from the National Employment Law Project released in August found that while the majority of jobs lost in the downturn were mid-wage jobs, the majority of the jobs created since then have been lower-wage ones.

 There have now been 25 straight months of jobs gains in the United States, but the increases have been barely large enough to absorb people entering the work force. A queue of about 12 million unemployed people remain waiting for work, about two out of five of whom have been out of a job for more than six months.

 That is in addition to more than eight million people who are working part-time but really want full-time jobs.

 “I’m not just competing against all the other people who are out of work,” said Griff Coxey, 57, of Cascade, Wis., who was laid off in May from his controller job at a small business. “I’m also competing against all those people who are actually working but are underemployed.”

 Like two million other idle workers, Mr. Coxey is scheduled to lose his unemployment benefits the last week of the year, when the federal extensions abruptly expire. He said he still has some savings to fall back on, but many workers do not.

 Labor advocates and economists are hopeful that Congress will renew the benefits as part of their discussions of the “fiscal cliff” during their postelection session. So far, though, the issue has received little attention, and analysts worry that ending extended benefits could disrupt what modest forward momentum the economy currently has.

 “Federal unemployment benefits are one of the most effective stimuli we have,” said Christine L. Owens, the executive director of the National Employment Law Project, a liberal research and advocacy organization that focuses on labor issues.

“The recovery is still fragile,” she said, “and to pull that amount of income and expenditure out of the economy — particularly at a time when people thinking about the holiday season  — will have a significant impact on not just those individuals and their families but the economy as a whole.”

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Live Coverage: Burdens of Storm’s Damage Ease Slightly

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Apple's Cook fields his A-team before a wary Wall Street

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc Chief Executive Tim Cook's new go-to management team of mostly familiar faces failed to drum up much excitement on Wall Street, driving its shares to a three-month low on Wednesday.

The world's most valuable technology company, which had faced questions about a visionary-leadership vacuum following the death of Steve Jobs, on Monday stunned investors by announcing the ouster of chief mobile software architect Scott Forstall and retail chief John Browett -- the latter after six months on the job.

Cook gave most of Forstall's responsibilities to Macintosh software chief Craig Federighi, while some parts of the job went to Internet chief Eddy Cue and celebrated designer Jony Ive.

But the loss of the 15-year veteran and Jobs's confidant Forstall, and resurgent talk about internal conflicts, exacerbated uncertainty over whether Cook and his lieutenants have what it takes to devise and market the next ground-breaking, industry-disrupting product.

Apple shares ended the day down 1.4 percent at 595.32. They have shed a tenth of their value this month -- the biggest monthly loss since late 2008, and have headed south since touching an all-time high of $705 in September.

For investors, the management upheaval from a company that usually excels at delivering positive surprises represents the latest reason for unease about the future of a company now more valuable than almost any other company in the world.

Apple undershot analysts targets in its fiscal third quarter, the second straight disappointment. Its latest Maps software was met with widespread frustration and ridicule over glaring mistakes. Sources told Reuters that Forstall and Cook disagreed over the need to publicly apologize for its maps service embarrassment.

And this month, Apple entered the small-tablet market with its iPad mini, lagging Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc despite pioneering the tablet market in 2010.

Investor concerns now center around the demand, availability and profitability of new products, including the iPad mini set to hit stores on Friday.

"The sudden departure of Scott Forstall doesn't help," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with Sterne Agee. "Now there's some uncertainty in the management."

"There appears to be some infighting, post-Steve Jobs, and looks like Cook is putting his foot down and unifying the troops."

Apple declined to comment beyond Monday's announcement.

Against that backdrop, Cook's inner circle has some convincing to do. In the wake of Forstall's exit, iTunes maestro Eddy Cue -- dubbed "Mr Fixit", the sources say -- gets his second promotion in a year, taking on an expanded portfolio of all online services, including Siri and Maps.

The affable executive with a tough negotiating streak who, according to documents revealed in court, lobbied Jobs aggressively and finally convinced the late visionary about the need for a smaller-sized tablet, has become a central figure: a versatile problem-solver for the company.

Ive, the British-born award-winning designer credited with pushing the boundaries of engineering with the iPod and iPhone, now extends his skills into the software realm with the lead on user interface.

Marketing guru Schiller continues in his role, while career engineer Mansfield canceled his retirement to stay on and lead wireless and semiconductor teams. Then there's Federighi, the self-effacing software engineer who a source told Reuters joined Apple over Forstall's initial objections, and has the nickname "Hair Force One" on Game Center.

"With a large base of approximately 60,400 full-time employees, it would be easy to conclude that the departures are not important," said Keith Bachman, analyst with BMO Capital Markets. "However, we do believe the departures are a negative, since we think Mr. Forstall in particular added value to Apple."

TEAM COOK

Few would argue with Forstall's success in leading mobile software iOS and that he deserves a lot of credit for the sale of millions of iPhones and iPads.

But despite the success, his style and direction on the software were not without critics, inside and outside.

Forstall often clashed with other executives, said a person familiar with him, adding he sometimes tended to over-promise and under-deliver on features. Now, Federighi, Ive and Cue have the opportunity to develop the look, feel and engineering of the all-important software that runs iPhones and iPads.

Cue, who rose to prominence by building and fostering iTunes and the app store, has the tough job of fixing and improving Maps, unveiled with much fanfare by Forstall in June, but it was found full of missing information and wrongly marked sites.

The Duke University alum and Blue Devils basketball fan -- he has been seen courtside with players -- is deemed the right person to accomplish this, given his track record on fixing services and products that initially don't do well.

The 23-year veteran turned around the short-lived MobileMe storage service after revamping and wrapping it into the reasonably well-received iCloud offering.

"Eddy is certainly a person who gets thrown a lot of stuff to ‘go make it work' as he's very used to dealing with partners," said a person familiar with Cue. The person said Cue was suited to fixing Maps given the need to work with partners such as TomTom and business listings provider Yelp.

Cue's affable charm and years of dealing with entertainment companies may come in handy as he also tries to improve voice-enabled digital assistant Siri. He has climbed the ladder rapidly in the past five years and was promoted to senior vice president last September, shortly after Cook took over as CEO.

Both Cue and Cook will work more closely with Federighi, who spent a decade in enterprise software before rejoining Apple in 2009, taking over Mac software after the legendary Bertrand Serlet left the company in March last year

Federighi was instrumental in bringing popular mobile features such as notifications and Facebook integration onto the latest Mac operating system Mountain Lion, which was downloaded on 3 million machines in four days.

The former CTO of business software company Ariba, now part of SAP, worked with Jobs at NeXT Computer. Federighi is a visionary in software engineering and can be as good as Jobs in strategic decisions for the product he oversees, a person who has worked with him said.

His presentation skills have been called on of late, most recently at Apple annual developers' gathering in the summer.

Then there's Ive, deemed Apple's inspirational force. Among the iconic products he has worked on are multi-hued iMac computers, the iPod music player, the iPhone and the iPad.

Forstall's departure may free Ive of certain constraints, the sources said. His exit brought to the fore a fundamental design issue -- to do or not to do digital skeuomorphic designs. Skeuomorphic designs stay true to and mimic real-life objects, such as the bookshelf in the iBooks icon, green felt in its Game Center app icon, and an analog clock depicting the time.

Forstall, who will stay on as adviser to Cook for another year, strongly believed in these designs, but his philosophy was not shared by all. His chief dissenter was Ive, who is said to prefer a more open approach, which could mean a slightly different design direction on the icons.

"There is no one else who has that kind of (design) focus on the team," the person said of Ive. "He is critical for them."

(Additional reporting by Alistair Barr; Editing by Edwin Chan and Ken Wills)

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NBC holding a benefit concert for Sandy victims

NEW YORK (AP) — NBC is doing a benefit concert for victims of Hurricane Sandy featuring some artists native to the areas hardest hit.

Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi of New Jersey and Billy Joel of Long Island are scheduled to appear at the concert Friday.

The telecast will benefit the American Red Cross and will be shown on NBC and its cable stations including Bravo, CNBC, USA, MSNBC and E! Other networks are invited to join in.

The concert will be hosted by Matt Lauer. It will air at 8 p.m. Eastern and will be taped-delayed in the West.

Other performers include Christina Aguilera, Sting and Jimmy Fallon.

The telethon will be broadcast from NBC facilities in Rockefeller Center in New York City.

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Live Updates

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State-by-State Guide

A look at the devastation caused in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy from North Carolina to New England.

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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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Hosts Underwood, Paisley ready for 5th CMA Awards

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Spend a lot of time with a guy over five years and you get to know him pretty well. In the time Carrie Underwood has spent co-hosting the Country Music Association Awards with Brad Paisley, she's learned there's nothing fake about the man with the white hat.

Paisley's not projecting the family first, fun-loving, good-guy persona that's made him one of country music's most popular stars. That's who he is, and he's found an uncommon balance Underwood really didn't believe existed in show business.

"He's not a different person in front of the camera and a whole different person away from the cameras," Underwood said in a recent interview. "He is the way you think he is. It's really great to see how somebody has balanced family life and doing this, you know, being in our crazy world. Because a few years ago I was wondering how on Earth anybody could make that work. And seeing him and (wife) Kimberly (Williams-Paisley) — she's superbusy, too — being able to juggle that is very encouraging."

That doesn't mean Underwood's ready to start a family just yet.

She and husband Mike Fisher, a star player for the NHL's Nashville Predators, are at the peak of their respective careers. The former "American Idol" winner's latest album, "Blown Away," was a multiweek No. 1 on the country albums chart. She's in the midst of an arena tour and also is up for female vocalist of the year at Thursday night's awards, airing live on ABC at 8 p.m. EDT from Nashville's Bridgestone Arena.

Children are in the plan "eventually," though.

"It's so funny, I still think of myself I guess being much younger than I actually am," Underwood said. "I'm like, I'm too young to have kids when I'm 29 years old, so I'm really not. My mom had a couple in her early 20s and a lot of people do. I don't know, I guess it's a sign of my immaturity in that area. I've only been married two years. I really want to enjoy that and really figure that out a little better before we start throwing so much responsibility into that."

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co.

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For the latest country music news from the Associated Press: http://twitter.com/AP_Country. Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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Recipes for Health: Roasted Beet and Winter Squash Salad With Walnuts

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

The colors of the vegetables were the inspiration behind this beautiful salad. You may be fooled into thinking the orange vegetables next to the dark beets are sliced golden beets, but they are slices of roasted kabocha squash.

2 pounds kabocha or butternut squash

1 bunch beets, with greens

2 tablespoons red wine or sherry vinegar

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1 small garlic clove, minced or put through a press

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons walnut oil

3 tablespoons chopped walnuts (about 1 1/2 ounces)

2 tablespoons mixed chopped fresh herbs, like parsley, mint, tarragon, chives

1. Roast the beets. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Cut the greens off of the beets, leaving about 1/2 inch of the stems attached. Scrub the beets and place in a baking dish or ovenproof casserole. Add about 1/4 inch water to the dish. Cover tightly with a lid or foil, and bake 35 to 40 minutes, until the beets are tender. Remove from the heat and allow to cool. If not using right away, refrigerate in a covered bowl.

2. Line another roasting pan with foil or parchment and brush with olive oil. Peel the squash and cut in 1/2-inch thick slices. Toss with 2 teaspoons of the olive oil and salt to taste and place on the baking sheet. Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, turning halfway through, until lightly browned and tender. You can do this at the same time that you roast the beets, but watch carefully if you need to put the baking sheet on a lower shelf. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

3. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil while you stem and wash the greens. Add salt to the water, and blanch the greens for 1 minute or until tender. Transfer the greens to a bowl of cold water, then drain and squeeze out the water. Chop coarsely.

4. Mix together the vinegars, garlic, salt, pepper, the remaining olive oil and the walnut oil. When the beets are cool enough to handle, trim the ends off, slip off their skins, cut in half, then slice into half-moon shapes. Toss with half the salad dressing. In a separate bowl, toss the roasted squash with the remaining dressing.

5. Place the greens on a platter, leaving a space in the middle. Arrange the beets and squash in alternating rows in the middle of the platter. Sprinkle on the fresh herbs and the walnuts. If desired, sprinkle on crumbled feta. Serve.

Yield: 6 servings.

Advance preparation: Roasted beets and squash will keep for 4 to 5 days in the refrigerator. Cooked beet greens will keep for about 3 days, and can be reheated. The salad will hold in the refrigerator for a couple of hours, but it’s prettiest when served right away.

Nutritional information per serving (6 servings): 248 calories; 16 grams fat; 2 grams saturated fat; 6 grams polyunsaturated fat; 8 grams monounsaturated fat; 0 milligrams cholesterol; 26 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams dietary fiber; 88 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 4 grams protein

Martha Rose Shulman is the author of “The Very Best of Recipes for Health.”

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Wall Street Reopens With a Mild Gain

After a historic two-day closing spurred when Hurricane Sandy flooded lower Manhattan and knocked out its power and public transit, Wall Street reopened Wednesday with slight gains in stock prices.

Trading was expected to be volatile following the first multiple-day closing of the stock market since 1888 for weather-related reasons.

Travel into and around New York City remained limited, and wide-scale power outages meant many would be unable to work even from home.

Shortly after the 9:30 a.m. opening, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 0.5 percent, or about 60 points. The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index added 0.2 percent and the Nasdaq composite index fell 0.2 percent. The mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, rang the bell that marks the start of trading.

Some analysts said an overreaction and higher-than-normal volume was possible as a result of pent-up demand. The two-day shutdown came during the busy corporate earnings season and at the end of the fiscal year for some funds.

Chris Bertelsen, chief investment officer at Global Financial Private Capital in Sarasota, Fla., said the day would be marked by “the compression effect,” marked by above-average volume as “one day of trading basically represents three.”

“However, that’s volume to the upside since we’ve had some positive underpinnings with strong earnings from Ford and BP and good news out of Europe,” he said. “If we had been open over the past two days, that would have been reflected in the market, but since we were dark, all that is going to come out today.”

Stocks moving in premarket trading included Ford, Advanced Micro Devices and Home Depot, all of which climbed.

Home Depot, a Dow component, is viewed as a company that may benefit from the storm as people buy rebuilding supplies. Insurance companies, which may be on the hook for billions of dollars of damage relating to the storm, will also be in view, as will airlines, which canceled thousands of flights in the northeast because of Sandy.

All of the American stock market operators took part in coordinated testing Tuesday for trading on the New York Stock Exchange’s backup system, in case it needed to be used.

The exercise was also aimed at allowing member trading firms, many of which were operating on backup systems due to complications from the storm, a chance to ensure they were ready to resume trading.

Ford posted a third-quarter profit that trounced analysts’ forecasts on Tuesday, driven by higher vehicle prices and record profit margins of 12 percent in North America. General Motors reported earnings Wednesday that beat expectations.

In Europe, stocks were generally ahead before Wall Street joined in. The Euro Stoxx 50 was up 0.5 percent, the DAX in Frankfurt was up 0.6 percent and the CAC 40 in Paris rose 0.2 percent. The FTSE 100 in London, however, fell 0.3 percent.

Other companies, including Pfizer, delayed the release of results because of the impact of the storm.

Walt Disney agreed to buy filmmaker George Lucas’s Lucasfilm and its “Star Wars” franchise for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, a blockbuster deal that includes the surprise promise of a new film in the series in 2015. Disney, a Dow component, rose in premarket trading.

Investors will be looking ahead to Friday’s report on United States unemployment, the last before Tuesday’s presidential election. Economists forecast a gain 125,000 jobs in October, up 11,000 from the previous month.

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Hurricane Sandy Barrels Region, Leaving Battered Path

As Hurricane Sandy churned inland as a downgraded storm, residents up and down the battered mid-Atlantic region woke on Tuesday to lingering waters, darkened homes and the daunting task of cleaning up from once-in-a-generation storm surges and their devastating effects.

Power remained out for roughly six million people, including a large swath of Manhattan. Early risers stepped out into debris-littered streets that remained mostly deserted as dawn shed light on the extent of the damage. Bridges remained closed, and seven subway tunnels under the East River were flooded. Other mass transit service, including commuter rails, was also still suspended.

A wind-tossed construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in New York City still dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall, after coming loose during the storm.

The storm was the most destructive in the 108-year history of New York’s subway system, said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in an early morning statement.

“We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the process of recovery,” he said, but did not provide a timetable for restoring transit service to a paralyzed city.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the damage to his state “incalculable” and said the Jersey Shore had been “devastated.” As he spoke on a series of morning talk shows on Tuesday, rescue teams were rushing to the aid of those stranded in Atlantic City and in areas of Bergen County where he said tidal waters had overwhelmed a protective natural berm.

At least 11 deaths — including 7 in the New York region — were tied to the storm, which toppled trees and sparked fires in several areas, state authorities said. Falling limbs became deadly bludgeons in three of the New York deaths and two in Morris County, N.J., where The Associated Press reported a man and a woman were killed when a tree fell on their car Monday evening.

The storm made landfall at 8 p.m. on Monday. Reclassified as a post-tropical cyclone, it weakened as it passed west across southern Pennsylvania, though it still packed maximum sustained winds of 65 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. It was expected to turn north and head for Canada late on Tuesday.

The storm had picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, grinding life to a halt for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center. Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Heavy snow was expected in some states.

Businesses and schools were closed, roads were closed, and more than 13,000 airline flights were canceled. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines. Flights were canceled at airports across the East Coast, including the three major airports in the New York City area.

In Breezy Point on the Rockaways in Queens, nearly 200 firefighters were still battling a blaze on Tuesday morning that destroyed at least 50 tightly-packed homes in the beach community. A Fire Department spokesman said the area was “probably the most flooded part of the city, so there are all sorts of complications.”

The surging water also caused extensive complications at NYU Langone Medical Center when a backup power system failed on Monday night, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities. Backup power also failed at Coney Island Hospital in southern Brooklyn, though critical patients had been evacuated in advance of the storm.

Fatalities in Several States

Reporting on the storm was contributed by Peter Applebome, Charles V. Bagli, Joseph Berger, Nina Bernstein, Cara Buckley, Russ Buettner, David W. Chen, Annie Correal, Sam Dolnick, Christopher Drew, David W. Dunlap, Ann Farmer, Lisa W. Foderaro, Joseph Goldstein, David M. Halbfinger, Elizabeth A. Harris, Winnie Hu, Jon Hurdle, Thomas Kaplan, Corey Kilgannon, John Leland, Randy Leonard, Patrick McGeehan, Jad Mouawad, Colin Moynihan, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Wendy Ruderman, Nate Schweber, Michael Schwirtz, Mosi Secret, Kirk Semple, Joe Sharkey, Brian Stelter, Kate Taylor, Julie Turkewitz, Matthew L. Wald, Michael Wilson, Michael Winerip, Vivian Yee and Kate Zernike.

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Nokia says shipping new Lumia smartphones this week

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