Flood-torn Northeast gets gloomy forecast: More rain
Alstead, N.H. – Residents assessed the damage wrought by the weekend’s deadly floods across the Northeast, but the swollen rivers barely had a chance to recede Monday as more rain was forecast.
At least 10 people died in the heavy downpours and about a half-dozen people remained unaccounted for, including a couple whose house was washed away by a surge of water over Warren Lake dam in Alstead.
Floods tore up highways, tossed vehicles like toys and knocked out electricity from North Carolina to Maine.
“I’ve seen pictures of earthquakes that don’t look as bad as this road,” Alstead resident Glen Frank, 54, said Monday of Route 123 in southwestern New Hampshire.
The most severe flooding in the state was in and around Keene, where some major roads were under as much as 4 to 6 feet of water, officials said. The city had no electricity and reverberated with the sounds of generators and pumps Monday when the governor visited.
Gov. John Lynch returned from a business trip to Europe on Sunday to take charge of relief efforts in New Hampshire. He declared a state of emergency and called in 500 National Guardsmen.
The National Weather Service warned that dams could fail or overflow if more rain falls in the next several days.
NEW YORK
U.S. officials discount report of terror threat
American law enforcement and intelligence authorities have all but discounted the report of a terrorist threat to New York City’s subways, an alert that prompted a sharp increase of police patrols in the subway system and some degree of confusion and conflict between officials in New York and Washington about the severity of any threat.
Officials say that an investigation, conducted largely in Iraq, where three men were detained, has yielded no evidence that a plot was in motion or being actively contemplated: no fake passports, no travel documents, no viable travel route from Iraq into New York, no apparent contact or telephone calls with people in New York.
The fear was that al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq were coordinating with others to hide bombs in baby strollers, packages and briefcases and blow them up in subways.
On Monday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in response to a reporter’s question at the Columbus Day Parade, said the city would scale back the intensive security presence it had mounted Thursday.
“There was no ‘there’ there,” said one senior U.S. counterterrorism official.
MIAMI
Hurricane breaks up over eastern Atlantic
Less than a day after making this hurricane season the second-busiest on record, the former Hurricane Vince began to break up Monday over the cooler waters of the far eastern Atlantic, forecasters said.
Vince weakened to a tropical storm with top sustained winds near 40 mph in the evening, down from 60 mph earlier in the day, said forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. Vince was the 11th hurricane of the season, and the 20th named storm.
Vince’s eye had disintegrated, and the storm was expected to dissipate into a frontal system by Monday night.
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico
Two shot, killed in separate attacks
Two men were shot and killed in separate attacks in this violence-wracked city on the Mexico-U.S. border, authorities said Monday.
Jose Castillo, a 49-year-old mechanic, was driving with his son through downtown Nuevo Laredo on Monday afternoon when armed assailants traveling in a sports car opened fire.
Castillo’s son, Isaac, told reporters the gunmen became enraged after he passed them and honked the horn.
Another victim, Ricardo Lugo, 24, was shot at least seven times late Sunday and died while receiving medical attention.
Since January, 147 people have been slain in Nuevo Laredo, across from Laredo, Texas.
JERUSALEM
Sharon-Abbas summit is postponed again
A first meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas since Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was postponed Monday because of disagreements over troop pullbacks in the West Bank and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
The delay of the summit at least until the end of the month indicated that despite hopes that the Gaza withdrawal would help revive peace efforts, Israel and the Palestinians remain deadlocked even over confidence-building measures.
The summit was to have been held today, in advance of a planned visit to Washington by Abbas on Oct. 20. But persistent disagreements in preparatory talks between Israeli and Palestinian officials led to the postponement.
BEIJING
Chinese astronauts to launch this week
China’s secretive space program planned to launch a pair of astronauts into space as early as this week, pushing ahead with an ambitious program that expects to land an unmanned probe on the moon by 2010.
The flight – China’s second – will last five days and carry two taikonauts, as China’s astronauts are called, state media said. The launch will take place between Wednesday and Saturday, the government said Tuesday.
Foreign reporters are barred from the remote launch base in the Gobi Desert in China’s northwest.
ZANZIBAR, Tanzania
Police arrest 24 who defied ban on rally
Zanzibar police have arrested 24 people in connection with election violence in which police shot and injured eight opposition supporters who defied a government ban on a campaign rally, a senior police officer said Monday.
Police made the arrests Sunday and Monday and will soon charge the supporters of the main opposition party Civic United Front, said Ramadhani Kinyogo, Zanzibar’s head of criminal investigations.
