In the aftermath of the hurricane, volunteers mobilized to provide aid to Rockaway residents. Twelve hundred and fifty one surveys were collected from residents living in Far Rockaways.

In the last two weeks of December, NYCC organizers called and visited a sample of the initial survey takers to assess the current habitability situation, two months after Hurricane Sandy hit.

The results document a clear failure by the Bloomberg administration to solve several problems of habitability, including electricity, heat, wet sheetrock removal and mold remediation.

A significant number of Rockaway residents have still not returned to their homes. And for those that have been lucky enough to return home, things are still not back to normal.

Following the tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, a habitually abusive public school administration in Harlem subjected over 300 disabled students and staff to a horrific staged school shooting.

Planned in secrecy, without any warning or notice to any of the victims, desperate students and staff were traumatized and struggle today with the aftermath. Hundreds of stories have emerged of teachers holding doors down to save their students while calling loved ones to say good bye. Staff falling to the floor in prayer. And brave acts of protection and heroism. Some arrived at hospitals for heart pain. 300 fragile students, starting at the age of 12, who have worked all their lives to be strong and overcome emotional hardships were terrorized by this action, and most do not have the voice to respond. Or even to tell their parents.

NYT:

Police officers raced to the school. Some students trembled as they crouched in corners trying to hide. A few staff members began to pray.

“We really thought we were not going home that night,” one teacher said. “It was probably the worst feeling I ever had in my life.”
...

P.S. 79, the Horan School, serves 300 students with special needs, including those with severe emotional disabilities, autism, cerebral palsy and other disorders. The students range in age from 12 to 21, one staff member said.

The lockdown drill began about 10 a.m. on Tuesday with a woman’s voice on the school’s loudspeaker saying, “ ‘Shooter,’ or ‘intruder,’ and ‘get out, get out, lockdown,’ ” said the staff member, who added that it seemed so realistic that it was hard to tell if the woman speaking was actually talking to a gunman or to teachers and students throughout the school.

At 10:01 a.m., a woman dialed 911 from her cellphone and said she had heard a message over the loudspeaker “that there was an intruder in the school, and that she was in the class with her students,” said a Police Department spokeswoman.

Officers from the 25th Precinct station house responded, she said. When they arrived a minute later, school officials told them that it was just a drill.

The school had already been under a genuine alert the same Friday of the Sandy Hook shooting due to a volatile former student who was believed to have entered the building.

On the day of the "lockdown drill," many students began to cry, shake, and scream in horror. Some students ran and hid into classroom closets, under their desks, and others became aggressive —not knowing how to deal with the chaos and fear.

A movement is growing to hold the school's administration accountable for terrorizing the students and staff. The students need help after being traumatized, and the teachers need to be protected from retribution by the administration for exposing this cruel and unusual assault.

There is a petition calling for justice for the students and staff of that Horan school that will be submitted to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, if enough signatures are gathered. If you'd care to join the friends of Horan and sign the petition, it's available online here.

On Saturday, several hundred citizens affected by Hurricane Sandy, healthcare professionals, activists, and members of Occupy Sandy relief effort participated in a rally and march near Fifth Avenue and East 79th Street to protest what organizers said was a lack of care and concern by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Two months after Superstorm Sandy the disaster is not over and relief needs are still great. Homes are uninhabitable with black mold taking hold, heat and sanitation are still absent in many places. Yet the government response has been glaringly absent. As with Katrina and other recent disaster-and-recovery events city, state and federal agencies have handed off reconstruction resources and responsibility to corporations and markets.

Hospitals that were evacuated due to hurricane damage have not reopened. Healthcare professionals describe conditions that could lead to a public healthcare crisis. Yet, rally participants kept asking, "Where is Mayor Bloomberg?" "Where is FEMA?"

For more information about Occupy Sandy and current lists of urgent needs for the recovery or to make much needed donations, please visit:
http://interoccupy.net/occupysandy/

Diane Sawyer and ABC News report as Hurricane Sandy hits the eastern coast of the United States.

For the last 30 years New York officials were warned of a storm of historic proportions that could flood the subways, create widespread power outages, and hit the Rockaways peninsula especially hard. A 2006 report read: “It’s not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City. It’s just a question of when.” But tight budgets meant the warnings went unheeded—and when Hurricane Sandy hit, many of the problems were dealt with on the fly. “I don’t know that anyone believed it,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the Associated Press. “We had never seen a storm like this. So it is very hard to anticipate something that you have never experienced.”

Associated Press:

"It wasn't as if the legislative actions over the years were subtle. They all had a common, emphatic theme: Act immediately before it's too late.

The 1978 executive law required a standing state Disaster Preparedness Commission to meet at least twice a year to create and update disaster plans. It mandated the state to address temporary housing needs after a disaster, create a detailed plan to restore services, maintain sewage treatment, prevent fires, assure generators "sufficient to supply" nursing homes and other health facilities, and "protect and assure uninterrupted delivery of services, medicines, water, food, energy and fuel."

Reports in 2005, 2006 and 2010 added urgency. "It's not a question of whether a strong hurricane will hit New York City," the 2006 Assembly report warned. "It's just a question of when."

A 2010 task force report to the Legislature concluded: "The combination of rising sea level, continuing climate change, and more development in high-risk areas has raised the level of New York's vulnerability to coast storms. ... The challenge is real, and sea level rise will progress regardless of New York's response."'

New York City had taken some concrete steps, such as requiring some new developments in flood zones to be elevated, eliminating roadblocks to putting boilers and electrical equipment above the ground and restoring wetlands as natural storm-surge barriers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a recent speech that the city wasn't expecting Sandy, and that FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency) had estimated only a one percent chance that NYC would see the water levels that came in with the storm. NYC is now reassessing safety measures, including an engineering analysis to determine if levees or other structures are needed to prevent flooding in the future.

New York City's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, stepped out of a helicopter midday Thursday in St. Camillus' parking lot, ironically an Occupy Sandy relief distribution hub in the Rockaways, Queens. The visit had been kept under wraps and not listed on his official schedule.

Bloomberg and a small party accompanying him were whisked off in black cars. He missed a greeting from community members in an area still reeling from Hurricane Sandy, with quickly-lettered signs: "Rockaways in Health Crisis," "We Need Safer Housing."

Bloomberg made his way to the still-shuttered offices of The Wave, the Rockaways weekly newspaper. As word spread about the stealth visit, a crowd gathered outside hoping to explain those signs to the mayor: a month after Sandy hit, swamping homes with seawater, many residents -- homeowners and tenants -- are still living without electricity, without heat, without working appliances, with black mold taking hold of walls and other surfaces. Temporary housing is desperately needed, absentee landlords must fix their properties.

The mayor emerged behind a row of police, thanked the group, and was quickly driven away -- avoiding a repeat of his November 4th visit when residents lambasted him for ignoring them.

[Via OccupyWallSt.Org]

Hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction in its wake on Tuesday, October 30, as it moved inland after battering the US northeast coastline. This video shows the devastation in Seaside Heights, in New Jersey, as a National Guard helicopter flies overhead searching for displaced residents on Tuesday.

The official death toll in the U.S. from the superstorm Sandy climbed to 33 by Tuesday, with most of the fatalities being attributed to falling trees. Outside the U.S., one person was killed in Canada and 67 in the Caribbean, including 51 in Haiti. The storm weakened as it made its way west through the U.S., but still dropped three to four inches of snow in West Virginia, where one storm chaser called it a “nor’easter on steroids.” Wind and rain also damaged the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. As of 5 a.m. Tuesday, the storm was centered about 90 miles west of Philadelphia, with winds of about 65 miles per hour.

14th St. NYC Con Ed Coal Plant (Or the substation, conflicting reports) explodes.

In a press conference in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that the storm’s destruction will be felt for quite some time, and it might be the worst the worst the city’s ever experienced. He said that the death toll in the city is at 10, but the number is expected to rise. The main priorities are getting the subway system up and running and restoring power, which may take three to four days. Bridges are being cleared and reopened. Con Ed says there has been “unprecedented damage” and there are approximately 750,000 New Yorkers without power.

Long line of ambulances outside the NYU Medical Center. Via @bananarams.

New York City’s transit chief called Hurricane Sandy the most “devastating” event to the city’s subway system ever while the rest of the city reeled from the storm early Tuesday morning. As of Monday night, seven subway tunnels under the East River had flooded, as did the Queens Midtown Tunnel, and Metropolitan Transit Authority chairman Joseph Lhota said there is “no firm timeline” for when the system would be back up and running, even as nearly every bridge and tunnel out of Manhattan was closed down. A backup electrical system failed New York University Medical Center, one of the city’s best hospitals, forcing the evacuation all 215 patients in the strong wind gusts. Meanwhile, a six-alarm fire at Breezy Point in southern Queens had destroyed 50 houses, with 198 firefighters fighting the blaze.

The New York City skyline with power out compared to a normal shot. Via the AP.

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These are the stories of the New York Police Department's notorious and illegal Stop and Frisk program, which saw 685,724 illegal searches in 2011 alone. The NYPD is only allowed to stop and search someone if they have reasonable suspicion that they've committed a crime, making stops on the basis of skin color illegal. 87% of New York City's black and latino population has been stopped and frisked at some point, and as The New York Times reports in its Op-Doc, "The Scars of Stop and Frisk", the vast majority of those stopped are never ticketed or arrested - 88%, in fact. In a twisted kind of apartheid, young men and women of color in New York City are being stopped on the basis of their skin color and sometimes detained for hours without reason. Pioneered by the special crimes unit - the same one that killed Amadou Diallo, an innocent man suspected of a rape, in a hail of bullets in 1999 - stop and frisk is truly "the new Jim Crow," as an activist in Nina Berman's short doc on the subject dubs it.

"I'm in fear for my life from the law" RDACBX raps on "Stop! Stop and Frisk!" featuring Rebel Diaz, Vithym and Luss, the video for which features snapshots of recent victims of NYPD overreach and is "dedicated to the mothers of victims of Police Terrorism." It was produced after the February 2 killing of an unarmed 18-year-old, Rahmarley Graham, in the Bronx, which occurred a week after officers administered a Rodney King-style beating on another unarmed youth, 19-year-old Jatiek Reed. As victims of fatal police brutality have piled up - Patrick Dorismond, Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, Malcolm Ferguson, Anthony Rosario - a social movement has formed to reclaim the streets for the people.

[Via]

[Video of the brutal beating of 19-year old Jateik Reed during an NYPD "Stop and Frisk"]

The NYPD on Sunday spoke with glowing praise of their under-fire "Stop and Frisk" policy that allows them to throw anyone they please up against a wall, and sometimes worse (See Jateik Reed video above).

Comparing numbers from the first three months of 2012 to the same period last year, the number of such stops increased 10% while the number of illicit guns taken away went up 31%, according to a New York Police Department statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

Meanwhile, New York's murder rate has plunged 21% year-to-date as of last Friday -- meaning, if the current trend continues, the yearly number of murders in the city would be the lowest since such statistics first were recorded, as such, in 1963.

"New York City continues to be the safest big city in America, and one of the safest of any size, with significantly less crime per capita ... than even small cities," the department said.

Police cited Operation Impact and the "stop and frisk" policy as key reasons for the improving crime statistics. But the policy has been criticized sharply by some as grounds for racial profiling.

The statement drew a harsh response from the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) as executive director Donna Lieberman accused the NYPD of trying to "massage the numbers to make this look like an effective and worthwhile program."

Just last Wednesday, the NYCLU released a report of their own based on the information cited by the NYPD in Sunday's statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne:

More young black men were stopped and frisked by police last year than actually live in the city, according to an analysis by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

About 168,000 black men between the ages of 14 and 24 were stopped under the controversial NYPD program in 2011 -- compared to the 158,406 who live in the five boroughs.

The NYCLU report also revealed of five precincts with blacks and latinos comprising as little as 8 percent of the population, they still accounted for up to 77 percent of of the stops in those areas.

The NYPD denies any claims of racial profiling, and says that it targets only "those who commit crimes." Yet as was revealed in the case of Jateik Reed, claims by police that he was carrying drugs have been shown to be false, and that his arrest was unfounded and he shouldn't have even been stopped when an outdoor surveillance camera video surfaced.

As for the NYPD claims of being the "safest big city in America," well, see here...and here...here...here...and here to view but a few counter-arguments to that claim.

Another awesome video from the folks at anothernyc.org, and the weekend's scheduled events for NYC.

May 10-15: A Week of Actions Against Budget Cuts and Austerity

Tuesday May 15 @ 6 PM: Mass Convergence in Times Square on Global Day of Action

Say no to the system that produces record profits for the 1% by impoverishing the 99% of us; say yes to a fair city and a better world!

Beginning on May 10th and culminating on May 15th in a mass convergence at Times Square, NYC organizations and individuals from all across the city will join together in action around the many issues we face: from cuts in social services, to an austerity agenda that redistributes your tax revenue into private hands, to the financial institutions (that we bailed out) that continue to make record profits at our expense.

As part of a global resistance, as part of the Occupy movement, as a broad movement for social, political, and economic justice, we say enough! We reject Bloomberg's New York, and we demand another city. We reject the notion that there is no alternative, and we demand a better world. Join the week of actions, take to the streets, raise your voice, and come to Times Square on May 15th at 6 PM to stand together as a global movement and declare that another city, and another world, is possible!

MORE INFO

Website: www.anothernyc.org

Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/events/451664224850611/

Twitter: #AnotherNYC

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@MikeBloomberg #MAYOR13% #ARE OUR KIDS “REALLY” READY FOR COLLEGE? from Rhodes Pictures on Vimeo.

Guest-blog by Jazmine Miller, student leader with New York Communities for Change. She left SUNY Oswego after a tuition hike and is currently enrolled at Brooklyn College.

In 2005, after a lot of hard work and sacrifices, I graduated from Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx with a B average and an SAT score that made me and my family proud. I was ready for the next step, on track to get my college degree, and looking forward to starting a career.

Or so I thought.

Because when I arrived at SUNY Oswego that fall, I found out how unprepared I was.

At Herbert Lehman, I was used to picking up what was covered in class easily. Once I got to college, however, I struggled at retaining all the information we were taught. It turns out that high school in New York City taught me how to pass a test, but in college they wanted me to show my critical thinking skills. I had never encountered that before; I was never given the opportunity to develop those skills. Instead of teaching me how to independently function and succeed in society, I was treated as a padded statistic by the Department of Education.

So, on top of learning new material, I had to study how to think critically rather than just how to take a test and pass it.

I was forced to spend a semester taking remedial classes despite my good grades and high test scores. These remedial classes were not covered by financial aid, so I ended up paying out of pocket to learn things I should have been taught in high school. The City ended up cheating both me and the taxpayers.

Recently, I found out that I am not the only New York City public school graduate who was cheated and entered college unprepared. In fact, only 13 percent of African American and Latino students who graduate from NYC schools are college-ready on graduation day. Thirteen percent!

You often hear the Department of Education brag about our improved graduation rates in NYC. But what good does it do to graduate more students if only a handful of them are prepared for the future and the rest will end up forced to pay out of pocket for remedial classes -- or just drop out?

We needed smaller class sizes, better resources and more support for teachers and students alike.

But instead of fighting for more funding and using existing resources to improve our schools, the mayor and Department of Education dismantled our neighborhood schools and wasted resources by starting new schools from scratch.

The schools aren't getting better. This year nearly half of the schools on the DOE's closing list are schools that were opened by the Bloomberg administration. And students like me, who worked hard in school but weren't given the education we deserve, continue to flood into college.

It's time we take a stand against Mayor 13 Percent and his failed educational policies by stopping school closings and getting schools the resources they need to make sure that students who want to go to college graduate college ready.