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GOP Funds DOMA Defense, Blocks Sandy Relief, Violence Agst Women

Priorities, priorities, priorities ...

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said today that it was "disgusting" that the House adjourned without voting on a $60 billion relief package for the victims of superstorm Sandy and put the blame squarely on a fellow Republican -- House Speaker John Boehner.

Christie, who is considered a possible Republican presidential candidate four years from now, said there was "only one group to blame, the Republican Party and Speaker Boehner." ... Christie in an angry news conference decried the "selfishness and duplicity," the "palace intrigue," "the callous indifference to the people of our state."

The governor said his four calls to Boehner Tuesday night went unanswered, but he said he spoke to the House speaker today. Christie would not disclose any details of the conversation, but clearly his anger over the no-vote was not mollified. Following Christie's press conference Republican representatives from New York and New Jersey announced that the speaker promised a vote on the bill on Jan. 15.

Violence against women is NOT a priority of the House Republican leadership ...

Despite a late-stage intervention by Vice President Joe Biden, House Republican leaders failed to advance the Senate's 2012 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, an embattled bill that would have extended domestic violence protections to 30 million LGBT individuals, undocumented immigrants and Native American women.

"The House leadership would not bring it up, just like they wouldn't bring up funding for Sandy [hurricane damage] last night," said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), a key backer of the Senate version of the bill, in an interview with HuffPost. "I think they are still so kowtowing to the extreme on the right that they're not even listening to the moderates, and particularly the women, in their caucus who are saying they support this."

Additional funding to defend anti-gay discrimination and legal challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act is a priority, though ...

A GOP source told The Huffington Post that, during a closed-door meeting of the House Republican Conference, lawmakers gave a green light to including language in the 113th Congress rules package that authorizes the House legal team, known as the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), to keep paying outside counsel to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court. The proposed House rules package also states that BLAG continues to "speak for" the House in its defense of DOMA ...

A spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Thursday slammed Republicans for taking "the extraordinary measure" of using the opening day rules package of the new Congress to authorize themselves to keep defending DOMA. "Today, House Republicans will send a clear message to LGBT families: Their fiscal responsibility mantra does not extend to their efforts to stand firmly on the wrong side of the future," said Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill.

Hammill also noted that the rules package "for the first time" explicitly states that BLAG speaks for the full House on DOMA matters -- something he said is definitely not the case.

Your tax dollars at work!

EBONY: "2012's Biggest News Stories" Report + Photos

It's the last day of the year and my latest for EBONY wraps the year that was: "2012's Biggest News Stories." Obama, gun violence, LGBT rights, reproductive justice, HIV/AIDS ... It's not a comprehensive list—just a Top Ten—but the list should have something for everyone. Check out the amazing photo gallery created by the producers.

Read the report and photo gallery HERE.

New York City: Massive Flooding, Fires and Blackouts After Sandy

PHOTOS: REUTERS, NY1, GETTY

Much of lower Manhattan is shrouded in darkness and hundreds of thousands of people across the New York metropolitan area are without power in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.  Dozens are dead across the U.S., at least 70 were killed in the Caribbean, millions are without power and thousands need rescue as the storm heads into the Great Lakes and into Canada.

The storm damage was projected at $20 billion, "meaning it could prove to be one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history," reports the New York Daily News.

The devastation includes massive flooding, transportation outages, flooded tunnels and a wind-swept fire that claimed dozens of homes in the New York City borough of Queens.

At least 80 flooded homes were destroyed by a fast moving blaze in Breezy Point, Queens "before firefighters, some battling flames while standing neck deep in floodwaters, got it under control," reports NBC 4.

The six-alarm blaze was contained by 11A Tuesday, a full 12 hours after it was first reported. It erupted in a flooded Zone A area during a peak part of the superstorm and nearly 200 firefighters responded. "The winds were just devastating, blowing from one building to the next one," [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg said. City officials say it appears most of the area had been evacuated prior to the fire and no serious injuries have been reported.

A 13-foot surge of seawater at slammed the city, flooding its tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers lower Manhattan. Bridges remained closed and seven subway tunnels under the East River remained flooded, reports the New York Times.

The storm was the most destructive in the 108-year history of New York City’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.

As the storm lashed the city, waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating down streets. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, known officially as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in memory of a former governor, flooded “from end to end,” the MTA said, hours after Governor Cuomo ordered it closed to traffic. Officials said water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.

After the flooding: The power blackout.

Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester County were without power. Con Edison, fearing damage to its electrical equipment, shut down power pre-emptively in sections of Lower Manhattan on Monday evening, and then, at 8:30 p.m., an unplanned failure, probably caused by flooding in substations, knocked out power to most of Manhattan below Midtown, about 250,000 customers. Later, an explosion at a Con Ed substation on East 14th Street knocked out power to another 250,000 customers.

These last two images from Atlantic City, New Jersey. "Much of the city is underwater" and "parts of the famed historic boardwalk were washed" away by the ferocious superstorm.

Watch raw video and news reports AFTER THE JUMP ...

Romney: Privatize FEMA, Federal Disaster Relief Spending "Immoral"

This is particularly relevant as the massive Hurricane Sandy prepares to make landfall ...

Gov. Mitt Romney was asked in a June 2011 debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney suggested eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, privatizing disaster relief and said it would be "'immoral" for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere," notes Think Progress.

CNN: Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?

Apparently this was the "severely conservative" Mitt Romney speaking. Not sure what today's Romney Version 8.0 would say. Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...

PHOTO: Satellite Photos Show Hurricane Sandy's Colossal Size

PHOTOS: NASA/NOAA

A view of the frightening size of Hurricane Sandy as it appeared on the entire disk of Earth. The image was captured by NOAA and NASA's GOES-13 satellite Sunday morning at 0902 ET.

Another image shows the monstrous Hurricane captured from the International Space Station. Hurricane Sandy was positioned off the North Carolina coast and continues on a northwest track as of Monday 0900 ET. The storm is expected to bring a "life-threatening storm surge, coastal hurricane winds and heavy Appalachian snows."

More photos at NASA.

REPORT: Anti-LGBT Violence Rises in Post-Earthquake Haiti

(PUNTA CANA, D.R.) LGBT Haitians have been largely ignored by international aid organizations and the government in post earthquake Haiti—resulting in increased discrimination, violence and the rape of gay men, lesbians and transgender women.

Those are the findings of a damning new report (PDF) released this week by the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and SEROvie, a Haitian community organization that helps LGBT individuals. It is just the latest chapter in the massive humanitarian crisis that emerged after the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, which flattened much of Port-au-Prince

R20 readers may recall that several HIV clinics and their staff were quake casualties. At least 14 gay HIV positive activists were killed after the collapse of SEROvie, Haiti’s largest organization serving gay and transgender people with HIV. Thousands of HIV positive Haitians were cut off from their life-saving anti-retroviral medications. Sadly, that was just the beginning.

When asked to identify the greatest impact of the earthquake on their lives, the majority of LGBT people interviewed for this paper indicated that it decimated the already limited physical spaces, social networks and support services available to them. According to one Port-au-Prince lesbian, "Loneliness, invisibility, and social isolation are persistent problems for us." ...

Overcrowding, flimsy structures, inadequate lighting, public bathing facilities, and general insecurity in IDP camps have increased the risk of gender-based violence for all women and people viewed as gender non-conforming, including LGBT people. SEROvie has documented the rape of lesbians, gay men and transgender women in or near camps. In August, 2010 for example, Sandy, a 24-year-old lesbian was brutally raped by eight men at the Champs de Mars camp. Additionally, SEROvie documented more subtle forms of sexual exploitation in which LGBT people were coerced into engaging in sexual relations with straight-identified men for food or money. A group of lesbian and bisexually-identified women interviewed by SEROvie and IGLHRC reported that sexual violence and corrective rape were “definitely a problem” in the IDP camps.

Rape was already a very serious problem in Haiti before the quake. The situation for women has become worse, human-rights groups say. Reported rapes have more than tripled in Port-au-Prince, according to the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, which has been monitoring HIV/AIDS in post-earthquake Haiti.

Even some well-intentioned policies have led to the suffering of LGBT people. International relief organizations distribute emergency food to female heads of household, but that excludes many gay men and transgender people living without families. "One man reported dressing as a woman to receive food. He was later beaten by people standing nearby," adds the report.

Download the full report HERE.

VIDEO: Massive Earthquake Triggers Tsunami in Japan

A massive tsunami slammed the Japanese coast overnight in the wake of an offshore 8.9 magnitude earthquake. The most powerful earthquake in Japan's history triggered death, destruction and widespread power blackouts in Japan. Countries across the Pacific Rim, from Russia to South America and including Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States, are bracing for possible tsunami waves. 

The Wall Street Journal:

  "The death toll [is] expected to rise as communications were cut off to some of the worst-hit areas in the north and helicopter footage showed tsunami waters racing across rice fields, dragging houses and vehicles in their wake. ...

Television pictures showed coastal regions of northern Japan disappearing under a sea of debris as the tsunami waters advanced inland. Numerous fires have been reported, including at the Onagawa nuclear plant in northeastern Japan near the epicenter and an oil refinery in Chiba prefecture, next to metropolitan Tokyo.

Two nuclear plants on the Pacific coast in Fukushima were automatically shut down. Tohoku Electric Power Co. said water was leaking at the Onagawa plant in Miyagi while Tokyo Electric Power Co. said it was looking into a problem at its Fukushima Daiichi Station. The government declared an atomic power emergency, but Edana said there was not currently any risk of radiation leaks from the nuclear plants.

The largest reported tsunami was a 10-meter one observed at Sendai port in northeastern Japan, reports Nikkei. The devastation from Sendai is seen in the image at top.

Authorities in Hawaii ordered evacuations of coastal areas due to the threat of a tidal wave set off.

Watch news reports and raw video AFTER THE JUMP ...

1 Year After the Quake and HIV-Poz Haitians Struggle for Survival

Our special report for the Black AIDS Institute on the one-year anniversary of the devastating Haitian earthquake of January 12, 2010.

By the beginning of 2010, Haiti had made significant progress toward lowering its once-astronomical HIV rate. In 1993, 9.4 percent of the impoverished nation was infected with HIV, a number that represented almost half the people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in the entire Caribbean. By 2008 the adult HIV prevalence in Haiti had fallen to 2.2 percent--approximately 120,000 people, 53 percent of whom were women--reports the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). 

Then came the catastrophic 7.0 earthquake of Jan. 12, 2010, which flattened much of Port-au-Prince. Many hospitals and HIV/AIDS clinics were crippled, if not destroyed, and the health-care system that had proudly enabled the Caribbean nation to control its HIV/AIDS epidemic collapsed .Relief and international funding did not arrive quickly enough. Less than 40 percent of the 24,000 people prescribed antiretroviral medications (ARVs) had access to them. Up to a million people were displaced and began living in camps, which, with their poor sanitary conditions, soon became virtual petri dishes of disease.

Billions of dollars aid was promised to the island and very little has arrived. The earthquake-ravaged, impoverished nation remains in ruins and is now fighting a cholera epidemic.  "I think we could well have 200,000 to 300,000 [more] affected by HIV," says Ester Boucicault, who founded a clinic and was the first Haitian to publicly disclose their HIV-positive status. 

Read the full report HERE.

PHOTOS, VIDEO: New Zealand Rocked by Massive Earthquake

A massive 7.1 earthquake rocked New Zealand's South Island, causing widespread damage to buildings and roads, knocking out power, and ripping facades off buildings in Christchurch, the country's second-largest city. Despite the quake's severity, only several serious injuries are reported. Hospitals are mostly "treating a number of people with broken bones, and others with minor injuries such as cuts and bruises," reports Radio New Zealand.

The quake was initially reported at 7.4 magnitude but later downgraded. "It was centred 30km west of [Christchurch] and 33km underground," reports Stuff.co.nz  "It hit at 4.35am and has been followed by a series of strong aftershocks. It was felt widely across the South Island and as far north as Wellington. "

Christchurch has a population of about 386,000, but no casualties have yet been reported. The quake has disrupted mobile telephone service across the South Island. Rail service has been suspended pending inspections. Christchurch Airport has also been closed as a precaution.

As of yet, no tsunami alerts have been issued.

More photos and via CNN Chile, watch news reports AFTER THE JUMP ...

VIDEO, REPORTS: New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina 5 Years Later

Five years ago today, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf of Mexico coastline, displacing more than 250,000 people from Louisiana to Florida. The damage was catastrophic in New Orleans. The much-heralded levee system failed spectacularly and the rushing waters of Lake Ponchatrain engulfed much of the Crescent City. More than 1,500 people died in the days and months following the flood. Media coverage that followed was often criticized for its bias. 

Across New Orleans and the Gulf, the tragedy was remembered ...

President Obama and the First Lady arrived in still-struggling New Orleans. Obama promised his Administration "is going to stand in the future with you until the job is done."

Watch AFTER THE JUMP ....

The Times-Picayune republishes its entire news and photo archive of the storm. Read the newspapers' pages of the days following the storm. 

Never-seen-before aerial images document the morning after Katrina

Hundreds of N.O. residents marked the anniversary at an ecumenical service in Jackson Square.

St. Bernard Parish residents bid a symbolic "farewell" to Katrina at a "funeral."

Sandra Bullock returns to the high school she helped rebuild.

CBS News visits Plaquemines Parish, where Katrina first made landfall, "nearly wiping that place off the map. Tragically the first place hit has been the last place rebuilt. Before Katrina about 15,000 people lived on the Parish's east and south ends. Today it's about 3,500. Some low-lying communities look like ghost towns."

FEMA admits its mistakes. "'We were spending too much time going back and forth over procedures,' [Administrator Craig Fugate] said, adding that FEMA has learned to "focus on outcomes" since the Obama administration put him in charge of the agency, which was vilified for its slow response in Katrina's aftermath."

Watch the President's speech, news reports and personal stories AFTER THE JUMP