A suburb near Oklahoma City was ravaged by a tornado Monday that some estimates put at nearly a mile wide (some onlookers put that size at closer to two miles) and that witnesses say more closely resembled a giant black wall of destruction than a typical twister. The tornado, which struck the community of Moore, was “ripping apart homes” and devastating everything in its path, according to CNN. Entire blocks of homes were destroyed, as well as several schools. A local news station, KFOR, said it was likely the most destructive tornado ever. The National Weather Service issued a tornado emergency for the Oklahoma City area, where more tornadoes could touch down. It’s the second day in a row of severe tornadoes in Oklahoma.

AP:

A monstrous tornado at least a half-mile wide roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods with winds up to 200 mph, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. At least 37 people were reported killed.

The storm laid waste to scores of buildings in Moore, south of the city. Block after block of the community lay in ruins. Homes were crushed into piles of broken wood. Cars and trucks were left crumpled on the roadside.

The National Weather Service issued an initial finding that the tornado was an EF-4 on the enhanced Fujita scale, the second most-powerful type of twister.

Authorities expected the death toll to rise as emergency crews moved deeper into the hardest-hit areas. At least 60 people were reported hurt, including more than a dozen children.

Rescuers mounted a desperate rescue effort at the school, pulling children from heaps of debris and carrying them to a triage center.

The same tornado that struck the city of Moore, OK ravaged not just one, but two local elementary schools, delivering a “direct hit” on Briarwood Elementary School, in particular, according to local officials. At nearby Plaza Towers Elementary School, students from grade 4-6 were moved to a nearby building before the tornado arrived and are reportedly all accounted, but grades K-3 were still in the building. As many as 75 children may have been in the school when the storm arrived. "Students were told to go into the hallways and they were literally hugging the walls; teachers laying on top of kids,” said one KFOR reporter. The station reports that the bodies of seven children have been recovered and 20-30 more children are believed to still be inside the building. Rescue teams don't expect to find more survivors. So far, the AP reports that at least 37 are confirmed dead because of the tornado.

Google has released a map featuring shelters, storm reports, and other helpful information for tornado victims and their families.

KFOR'S @lancewest: "I bring you this news with a heavy heart." 7 schoolkids found dead in pool of water. Approx 20-30 others feared dead.

@CBS News BREAKING NEWS: OK Chief Medical Examiner’s Office is now reporting at least 51 deaths from Moore, OK tornado.

Here are a few ways to help the tornado victims:

- The Salvation Army will have a truck at KFOR-TV taking donations starting 10 a.m. Tuesday.(Be sure to read the info at this link for info on what items are most needed.)

444 E. Britton Rd.
Oklahoma City, OK 73114
NO CLOTHES PLEASE
Donate: Text “storm” to 80888 to make a $10 donation.

- The Red Cross said the best way to assist families is to make a donation to www.redcross.org/okc or www.redcross.org or texting REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

Red Cross shelter information

Safewell.org is the Red Cross site where you can register yourself as safe, or search for friends and family members.

Other facilities open to tornado victims:

University of Oklahoma – student housing (Norman)

Oklahoma Baptist University – student housing (Shawnee)

Graceway Baptist Church, located at 1100 S.W. 104th in Oklahoma City.

Oakcrest Church of Christ at 1111 S.W. 89th Street in Moore.

Victory Church, located 4300 North MacArthur in Oklahoma City.

Journey Church in Norman I-35 and Tecumseh Road is open as a shelter.

Fifth Street Missionary Baptist Church, located at 801 N.E. 5th St. Oklahoma City.

St. Andrews Church, located at S.W. 119th and May.

Trinity Church of the Nazarene is open as an emergency shelter. It is located at 7301 S. Walker, just on the north side of I-240.

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a reporter on Monday that forcing the NYPD to submit to oversight from an inspector general would destroy the city of New York:

Appointing an inspector general to oversee the NYPD is a recipe for disaster, Mayor Bloomberg warned yesterday.

“I think if you want to bring crime back, let’s go politicize control of the Police Department,” the mayor said, responding to a reporter’s question about a new City Council bill requiring an IG for cops getting a hearing tomorrow.

“The last thing we need is some politician or judge getting involved with setting policy, because you won’t be safe anymore. But today, you are. Think about that when you write your story,” Bloomberg added.

Who the hell is safe in NYC? It sure wasn't this teenager who was forced to submit to the NYPD's version of 'Stop and Frisk':

Continue reading »

Six activists with the environmentalist group Greenpeace International have occupied a Russian oil rig to protest drilling in the Arctic. The rig belongs to the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom, which is set to become the first company to produce Arctic oil through drilling operations in the Pechora Sea. Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! speaks live with Greenpeace’s executive director, Kumi Naidoo, just as he and other activists are being hosed by the rig’s crew in an effort to thwart their protest. Naidoo says the group is being sprayed by ice cold water by Gazprom employees as they remain on the rig. "We want to draw global attention to what is the defining environmental struggle of our time, and time is running out for us to avert catastrophic climate change," Naidoo says. "That’s why we are here." Greenpeace is promoting a resolution at the U.N. General Assembly that would protect the Arctic region from any drilling or unsustainable fishing.

Full transcript available here.

As part of a city-wide protest movement against Chicago City Hall's assault on mental health clinics, a major battle erupted in mid-April, 2012 over keeping open the Woodlawn Clinic on the South Side. Here are nighttime scenes of the occupation, subsequent press conference, and interviews detailing why this decision has spelled disaster for humanitarian health assistance to the City's most vulnerable population. These closing also presage broader social costs. Included are Toussaint Losier (Mental Health Movement); Sophia Kortchmar, activist; N'Dana Carter (Mental Health Movement); Rev. Jose Landaverde (Our Lady of Guadalupe Angelican Catholic Church); Ronald Jackson (mental health activist). Included also is a short tribute to Helen Morley, a mental health clinic consumer and activist who predicted to city officials that if they closed her clinic, she would die. Her clinic closed on April 30, 2012, and she died on June 6, 2012.

[Via Labor Beat]

[Photo credit: Erika Blumenfeld/Al Jazeera]

Major commercial fishing ports on the Gulf Coast bring in over 1.2 billion pounds of fresh seafood annually, but this will likely decline as Gulf fisheries continue to be affected by BP's disaster. Louisiana provides 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, but the state's seafood industry, valued at about $2.3bn, is now fighting for its life.

Dahr Jamail, a reporter for Al Jazeera, has been covering the BP Gulf oil spill since early on in the days of the disaster. He reported last month on the fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the ocean's bounty as they face severely depleted catches and debate whether or not to join in BP’s $7.8 billion “class settlement” or sue the oil giant individually .

This is an important story for America, with the survival of tens of thousands of Gulf fishing families hanging in the balance. But for some reason, it took a journalist from Qatar to get this story out. Jamail's reporting is excellent, and for this report he goes to the fishermen themselves to get the truth.

Al Jazeera:

"I was at a BP coastal restoration meeting yesterday and they tried to tell us they searched 6,000 square miles of the seafloor and found no oil, thanks to Mother Nature," Tuan Dang, a shrimper, told Al Jazeera while standing on a dock full of shrimp boats that would normally be out shrimping this time of year.

Dang's fishing experience has been bleak.

"Normally I can get 8,000 pounds of brown shrimp in four days," he explained. "But this year, I only get 800 pounds in a week. There are hardly any shrimp out there."

When he tried to catch white shrimp, he said he "caught almost nothing".

He is suing BP for loss of income, but does not have much hope, despite recent news of an initial settlement worth more than $7bn. "We'd love to see them clean this up so we can get our lives back, but I don't see that happening anytime soon."

Song Vu, a shrimp boat captain for 20 years, has not tried to shrimp for weeks, and is simply hoping that there will be shrimp to catch next season.

His experience during his last shrimping attempts left him depressed.

"The shrimp are all dead," he told Al Jazeera. "Everything is dead."

There isn't a glimmer of anything that sounds hopeful about the Gulf situation in any of the personal accounts of the fishermen, and as Jamail notes at the end of the article, "Given that after the Exxon Valdez oil disaster in Alaska in 1989, herring have still not come back enough to be a viable fishing resource, this does not bode well for the Gulf seafood industry, whose fisheries are - according to scientists like Cake and Soniat - still in the initial phase of collapse."

Not to mention that the oil continues to seep into the Gulf near the Macondo well.