New Orleans gets 10 inches of snow in Artic blast

10 inches snow New Orleans

Important Takeaways:

  • A historic plunge in temperatures has gripped the central and eastern U.S., bringing dangerous wind chills and record-breaking cold to many areas. From extreme subzero conditions in the Midwest to snowstorms along the Gulf Coast, the Arctic air has shattered records and created hazardous conditions across the region.
  • What to know:
    • Extreme cold warnings and advisories stretch from the Midwest to the South and East, with wind chills reaching as low as minus 50 degrees in places like Duluth, Minnesota.
    • Tuesday morning saw Kansas City, Missouri, and Pueblo, Colorado, set record lows at minus 8 and minus 19 degrees, respectively.
    • Gulf Coast states witnessed unprecedented snowfall, with New Orleans recording 10 inches of snow, and parts of Florida seeing totals of nearly 9 inches—a likely state record.
    • The rare storm was fueled by a mix of unusually cold Arctic air and Gulf of Mexico warmth, resulting in record snowfalls and dangerous conditions.
    • Temperatures are expected to remain frigid through the weekend, with a gradual warm-up forecast next week.

Read the original article by clicking here.

ISIS to take advantage of the chaos in Syria and weak governments are ill-equipped to stop it

New Orleans Car into Crowd Bollards

Important Takeaways:

  • Branches make gains in Africa, Middle East, and reach out to U.S. sympathizers
  • Behind the ISIS-inspired assault in New Orleans on New Year’s Day is a disturbing reality: Military officials and national security insiders fear a perfect storm is forming around the world that could lead to more deadly terrorist attacks in the U.S.
  • Even before U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar killed 14 New Year’s revelers by driving a vehicle into a crowd on Bourbon Street, a growing consensus in foreign policy circles acknowledged that conditions were ripe for an Islamic State resurgence abroad and a new pool of recruits in the U.S., Europe and Asia willing to carry out acts of violence.
  • The more territory the group controls and the safer its leaders feel from attack, the easier it is to coordinate recruiting efforts online, teach would-be terrorists how to build bombs or map out jihadi missions around the globe.
  • U.S. and international officials warn that weak central governments are ill-equipped to stop it.
  • In Afghanistan, the Islamic State’s local affiliate organization, ISIS-K, has dramatically expanded its reach since U.S. troops withdrew in August 2021.
  • The most immediate threat to the U.S. seems to emanate from Syria, where a surprise rebel offensive overthrew the government of longtime dictator Bashar Assad last month. The U.S. quietly increased the number of troops in Syria from 900 to about 2,000 during the regime’s collapse and carried out strikes against ISIS fighters who set up shop in areas once controlled by Mr. Assad’s forces and their Russian allies.
  • With an untested rebel force now governing in Damascus, the door may be open for neighboring Turkey to pursue Kurdish rebels who have been key U.S. partners for the past decade in the war against ISIS.
  • “We’re going to see a lot more Islamic State and copycat attacks,” said former Defense Department official Michael Rubin, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Islamic State is on the rebound, and tens of thousands of its militants might soon go free if Turkey or their proxies overwhelm the camp where Kurds keep them under guard in northeastern Syria
  • “If ISIS goes free in Syria, don’t expect them to remain there,” Mr. Rubin told The Washington Times.
  • “It would just be a matter of time until they began crossing the southern border or, for that matter, the northern border with Canada.”

Read the original article by clicking here.

Truly inconceivable: Warnings falling on deaf ears in Washington with the world’s largest government and spying apparatus; They must be ignoring what they know is coming

Important Takeaways:

  • This is truly chilling, especially in the wake of today’s terror attacks in New Orleans and Las Vegas.
  • A former CIA officer named Sarah Adams was interviewed on the Shawn Ryan podcast just two weeks ago, and warned that there are more than a thousand al-Qaeda sleepers in the United States right now who are planning major attacks on the homeland.
  • She clearly implicates Biden’s open southern border as the entry point for these potential terrorists and suggests that they have developed new tactics and bombs that can evade detection through traditional means.
  • Zero Hedge has more details:
    • In a recent discussion on the Shawn Ryan Show, former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams warned of a potentially devastating attack planned by Al-Qaeda terrorists on American soil.
    • The interview offers significant insights into what may be unfolding, as Al-Qaeda sleeper cells could be activating in the wake of the New Orleans terrorist attack and a possible vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) in the rear of a rented Tesla Cybertruck that exploded outside Trump’s hotel in Las Vegas just hours later.
    • Ryan asked Adams: “I just want to clarify. You are 100% certain that there are 1,000 plus Al-Qaeda-trained fighters within the US borders?”
    • Adams, currently a global threat advisor with extensive experience in Middle Eastern affairs, responded: “Well, Al-Qaeda says they trained and deployed a thousand for this attack. First off, I think there are more than a thousand Al-Qaeda members in the United States, but for the Homeland Attack, that number is based on what Al-Qaeda is saying, so they could exaggerate it; however, they did have about 1,400 in the Hamas Attack so the number is not off from what they did in the first round of attacks.”
  • It is difficult to imagine a multi-city attack happening in the United States, but we would be foolish to ignore these warnings. The October 7th attacks in Israel may have just been a preview of things to come here in America.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Authorities seeking accomplices in New Orleans attack

gettyimages-2191481881 Bourbon Street Attack

Important Takeaways:

  • Authorities are still searching for potential accomplices to Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who drove a truck into a New Orleans crowd before being killed in a shootout with police on Wednesday.
  • Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told Fox News that there is evidence that Jabbar worked alongside accomplices to coordinate the attack, although she and other officials have declined to offer specifics. Jabbar’s attack killed at least 15 people and wounded dozens of others.
  • “In Louisiana, we have the death penalty, and we will carry it out!” Murrill wrote on X.
  • Jabbar had posted videos to social media prior to his attack expressing allegiance to the Islamic State. The FBI’s investigation has now spread across multiple states, though the number of potential accomplices remains unknown.

Read the original article by clicking here.

14 million people are under flood warnings from Storm Francine

NBC-News-Now-Screenshot-Storm-Francine

Important Takeaways:

  • The center of Francine has passed over New Orleans and is dumping huge amounts of rain across Louisiana, southern Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.
  • Francine made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane at Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, at 5 p.m. local time yesterday and has since weakened to a tropical storm with sustained wind speeds of 35 mph this morning.
  • More than 400,000 customers were without power in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, according to the PowerOut.us website.
  • A storm surge warning is in effect from Grand Isle, Louisiana, to the Mississippi-Alabama border, meaning there could be life-threatening inundation from the sea.
  • 14 million people are under flood warnings, with heavy rain and possible tornadoes expected through tomorrow.

Read the original article by clicking here.

New Orleans Hit by Tornado, Search and Rescue Under Way

Important Takeaways:

  • Tornado wreaks havoc in New Orleans, leaves at least 1 dead
  • A massive tornado struck parts of New Orleans late Tuesday, including the Lower 9th Ward, which had been heavily damaged by Katrina nearly two decades ago.
  • The National Weather Service said Wednesday morning that at least two tornadoes had been confirmed in the region
  • One of which tore through New Orleans East communities and the Lower 9th Ward, and another in the community of Lacombe, located across Lake Pontchartrain to the north of New Orleans. The most heavily concentrated damage was in Arabi.
  • Bernard Parish President Guy McGinnis says a tornado has caused “major damage” there. He said that at least so far, there are no reports of major injuries. Power is out to much of the parish.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Major cities see spike in crime

Mark 13:12 “Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Carjackings soar by up to 510% in major US cities: Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans are all experiencing ‘disturbing’ spikes in crime
  • Critics are blaming a rise in violent car takeovers on lax punishment for offenders, and Covid-era changes in driving habits
  • Last November, Chicago’s top cop revealed that an 11-year-old boy is believed to have committed several of the vehicular hijackings
  • In Chicago, 1,849 carjackings were reported last year – a 510 per cent increase from the 303 vehicular hijackings in 2014, according to city data.
  • Meantime, New York City has seen carjacking rising by more than 350 per cent in the past three years, to 510 in 2021.
  • Philadelphia, which reported 750 carjackings last year, a 34 per cent year-over-year increase
  • The numbers are also moving in the wrong direction in New Orleans, which saw its most marked jump when cases hit 278 in 2020, a 104 per cent increase from 2019, NOLA.com reported.

Read the original article by clicking here.

In Ida’s wake, Louisiana residents could face a month without power

By Devika Krishna Kumar and Nathan Layne

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Residents in southern Louisiana braced for weeks without electrical power and disruption to their water systems in the wake of Hurricane Ida, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S. Gulf Coast.

By early Tuesday, about 1.3 million customers in the region were without power about 48 hours after the storm made landfall, most of them in Louisiana, according to PowerOutage, which gathers data from U.S. utility companies.

The storm killed at least two people in the state, officials said, a death toll that may have been much larger if not for a fortified levee system around New Orleans, which had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina 16 years earlier.

Entergy Corp, a major power supplier in the region, said it could take weeks before electricity is restored in the hardest-hit areas.

Damage to eight high-voltage lines shut off electricity in New Orleans and nearby parishes, and parts of a transmission tower toppled into the Mississippi River on Sunday night.

The power outages have brought commerce to a standstill in New Orleans. The Hyatt Regency downtown was operating under a state of emergency and not accepting customers outside of emergency personnel, according to an automated message.

Restaurants, many of which had closed ahead of the storm, also faced an uncertain future due to a lack of electricity and other infrastructure, mirroring – at least for now – the issues that plagued businesses for weeks in the wake of Katrina.

“This is definitely feeling like Katrina,” said Lisa Blount, the public relations director at Antoine’s, a French Quarter landmark and the city’s oldest eatery. “To hear the power is potentially out for two to three weeks, that is devastating.”

Power officials have told leaders in Jefferson Parish that its roughly 440,000 residents may have to manage without electricity for a month or longer after utility poles toppled across the county, Councilman Deano Bonano told Reuters in a telephone interview.

“The damage from this is far worse than Katrina from a wind standpoint,” said Bonano. “We are going to be without with power for four to six weeks.”

Bonano said an elderly woman in the parish was found under her refrigerator on Monday and pronounced dead, and that he expected the death toll to rise, although not dramatically, once the water levels come down and full-fledged recovery efforts can get underway.

‘THEY HAVE NOTHING’

Some communities outside the levee system, including Lafitte and Grand Isle, were hit especially hard and the damage is still being assessed, the official said. More than half of the parish’s residents rode out the storm at home, Bonano said, and many were left with nothing.

“There are no grocery stores open, no gas stations open. So they have nothing,” he said.

Downed trees damaged underground water lines in the parish, and a majority of households were having to boil drinking water or cope with low pressure, according to Brett Lawson, chief of staff to a parish councilman.

Compounding the suffering, parts of Louisiana and Mississippi were under heat advisories, with temperatures forecast to reach up to 105 Fahrenheit (40.6 Celsius) on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said.

“The heat advisory for today does pose a big challenge,” the agency’s New Orleans outpost said on Twitter. “While you need to keep hydrated, know if you’re under a boil water advisory.”

Widespread flooding and power outages also slowed efforts on Tuesday by energy companies to assess damages at oil production facilities, ports and refineries.

HIGHWAY ‘WASHED OUT’

As the weather system traveled north on Tuesday and weakened, it unleashed heavy rain in neighboring Mississippi. At least two people were killed and 10 injured when a deep crevasse opened up on Highway 26 in George County, about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Biloxi.

“We’ve had a lot of rain with Ida, torrential,” Mississippi Highway Patrol officer Calvin Robertson said. “Part of the highway just washed out.”

Seven vehicles plunged into the ditch, which was 50 feet (15 meters) long and 20 feet (6 meters) deep, Robertson said on CNN.

Officials warned residents about the hidden dangers of flood waters that might bring wildlife closer to neighborhoods.

Sheriff’s deputies in St. Tammany Parish were investigating the disappearance of a 71-year-old man after an apparent alligator attack in the flood waters brought on by the storm.

The man’s wife told authorities that she saw a large alligator attack her husband on Monday in the tiny community of Avery Estates, about 35 miles (55 km) northeast of New Orleans on Monday. She stopped the attack and pulled her husband out of the flood water.

Seeing that his injuries were severe, she took a small boat to get help, and came back to find her husband gone, the sheriff’s office said in a statement.

MEMORIES OF KATRINA

Ida made landfall on Sunday as a Category 4 hurricane, 16 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, evoking memories of a disaster that killed more than 1,800 people in 2005 and devastated New Orleans.

But a $14.5 billion system of levees, flood gates and pumps designed in the wake of Katrina’s devastation largely worked as designed during Ida, officials said, sparing New Orleans from the catastrophic flooding that devastated the area 16 years ago.

The state’s healthcare systems also appeared to have largely escaped catastrophic damage at a time when Louisiana is reeling from a resurgence of COVID-19 infections that has strained hospitals.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Peter Szekely in New York, Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut and Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey; Additional reporting and writing by Maria Caspani in New York; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Lisa Shumaker)

Hurricane Ida hits Cuba’s Isle of Youth; U.S. Gulf Coast braces for hit

By Maria Caspani

(Reuters) – Hurricane Ida barreled into Cuba’s Isle of Youth on Friday, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, and the U.S. Gulf Coast braced for a direct hit this weekend as the storm churned toward the region.

Ida reached hurricane status much more quickly than forecasters had expected. New Orleans city officials ordered residents to evacuate areas outside the levee system, with a voluntary evacuation for the rest of the parish.

Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency on Thursday and said on Friday he had sent a request to President Joe Biden for a “pre-landfall” federal declaration of emergency.

“Unfortunately, Louisiana is forecast to get a direct, strong hit from Tropical Storm #Ida, which is compounded by our current fourth surge of COVID-19. This is an incredibly challenging time for our state,” Edwards wrote on Twitter.

Ida smashed into the Isle of Youth packing maximum sustained winds of 75 miles per hour (120 km per hour), meteorologists said.

The storm was expected to keep gaining strength and speed over the warm Gulf waters, endangering the coast lines of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, forecasters said. Ida was expected to make landfall along the northern U.S. Gulf Coast on Sunday.

Officials in U.S. coastal areas preparing for the storm urged residents to move boats out of harbors and encouraged early evacuations.

Officials in Louisiana’s Lafourche Parish said they would enact a voluntary evacuation, especially for people in low-lying areas, mobile homes and RVs. Hurricane force winds of about 110 mph with gusts of 130 mph could hit the state, forecasters said.

“By Saturday evening, everyone should be in the location where they intend to ride out the storm,” Edwards said on Thursday.

Cuba’s meteorology institute said Ida would cause storm surges as far east as Havana. The governor of the Isle of Youth Adian Morera said an evacuation center was ready to receive families in the main town of Nueva Gerona, and sea vessels had already been secured along the coast.

Jamaica was flooded by heavy rains and there were landslides after the passage of the storm. Many roads were impassable and forcing some residents to abandon their homes.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta, Arpan Varghese in Bengaluru, Nelson Acosta in Cuba and Kate Chappell in Jamaica; Writing by Maria Caspani; Editing by Jason Neely, Kirsten Donovan and David Gregorio)

New Orleans renters face toxic mix of crumbling homes, weak rights, eviction worries

By Kathleen Flynn and Makini Brice

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – Fifteen years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and triggered a mass exodus, the Crescent City is bracing for new storms as it faces an entirely different crisis – the beginning of a possible wave of evictions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The final eviction protections from the coronavirus relief bill, dubbed the CARES Act, expire nationwide on Aug. 24. Millions of renters around the country are worried, and evictions typically hit Black communities hardest. But those in New Orleans face a particularly toxic combination of steep housing costs, low incomes, weak tenant rights, and housing stock that is crumbling and decrepit.

New Orleans was battered early by the coronavirus, and as tourism shut, nearly one in five residents were put out of work in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As the city slowly tries to reopen, that dropped to 12.9% in June, but many people are still trying to catch up to lost coronavirus income, advocates say. Up to 56% of Louisiana’s renters are now at risk of eviction, the Aspen Institute calculates, the second-highest percentage of at-risk renters in the country after Mississippi.

Potentially making matters worse, Tropical Storm Marco and Tropical Storm Laura are bearing down on the Gulf of Mexico, and threaten to flood the city again.

KATRINA’S LASTING IMPACT

After flooding from Hurricane Katrina damaged 70% of the city’s housing stock in August 15 years ago, tens of thousands of New Orleans buildings stood blighted for years. Large public housing buildings were demolished, over residents’ protests, and replaced with mixed-income housing that pushed many apartment units out of reach for the city’s poor.

According to the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative, a housing rights organization, New Orleans rents have increased by 50% since 2000, while wages have only risen by 2%.

More than half of the city’s 390,000 residents are renters, and of those 61% are considered cost-burdened, paying more than a third of their income on rent, Jane Place calculates.

“People are paying more rent now than they’ve ever paid in their lives,” said Frank Southall, lead organizer at Jane Place. “It’s not uncommon to never see a one-bedroom apartment that’s in good condition for less than $1,200 in a city where the area median income for a single mother with a child (is) $25,000.”

A CEILING IS NOT UNREASONABLE

Amid the pandemic, housing advocates say some landlords are taking advantage of renters’ vulnerable position.

“We are seeing landlords, that if you owe them money right now, they’re refusing to make necessary repairs that they’re legally required to do,” said Amanda Golob, a housing lawyer for Southeast Louisiana Legal Services.

De Borah Wells, a 49-year-old chef who worked at the landmark Creole restaurant Commander’s Palace before being furloughed in March, said her landlord threatened to evict her after she spoke up about her landlord’s treatment of tenants and complained about the repairs her home needed, including the collapse of her kitchen ceiling in June.

“I just wanted something decent. I don’t feel like a ceiling is that unreasonable!” said Wells, who negotiated with her landlord over the August rent because of the needed repairs but the deal fell through, according to correspondence between her and her lawyer. “I can see outside from my kitchen, inside.”

Wells took her landlord to court. On Friday, the landlord let her out of her lease, she said. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

In Louisiana, landlords only need to give five days’ notice before filing eviction notices, which they can do if payment is even one day late.

And, though landlords are supposed to make repairs to keep homes inhabitable, renters cannot withhold rent until they are made, leaving them with little recourse.

“The hard thing is, especially with low-income folks, it is difficult to move,” Golob said, citing unreturned deposits or first month’s rent and particularly COVID-19’s impact on rental searches. “Some people are staying in pretty terrible conditions because it is better than sleeping in their car.”

Brandie Barrow, a 25-year-old cook and mother of two, said she was able to stay current on her rent despite the restaurant where she works cutting her hours during the pandemic.

Still, after she complained last week of mold, maggots and mildew she found in her daughters’ closet, she said her apartment complex gave her 30 days to move out. Her landlord did not respond to requests for comment left by voicemail.

“How inhumane. Why should I have to pay for somewhere that I’m not happy?” Barrow said.

Tammy Esponge, the executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater New Orleans, an association of rental housing owners, said she thought worries about mass evictions were overblown.

The group had been encouraging landlords to work with residents to develop payment plans. So far, in Louisiana, the eviction rate was 5%, she said, though she acknowledged it was higher for some individual properties.

“Landlords don’t want to evict. They lose money,” said Esponge.

Nonetheless, Wells, who moved into her house last September, said she is thinking about leaving the city altogether. “Worse case I can go back home to Chicago where my parents and boyfriend are,” she said.

(Reporting by Makini Brice in Washington and Kathleen Flynn in New Orleans; Editing by Heather Timmons and Lisa Shumaker)