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Though the federal government allocated more than $1.8 billion in Hurricane Sandy disaster relief aid for New Jersey more than a year ago, less that a quarter has been distributed to cash-strapped residents struggling to rebuild, according to a new state report. State officials, however, say they are making considerable progress with recovery programs, addressing concerns and making changes where needed to speed up the delivery of aid. But advocates claim a botched rollout of major housing recovery programs has taken its toll on distributing funding more quickly. More than $1.3 billion of federal aid is "in the pipeline or...

Joey Giardello, a former middleweight boxing champion who won a decision over Rubin Carter in 1964 and then sued over how the fight was depicted in the 1999 film "The Hurricane," has died. He was 78. Giardello died Thursday of congestive heart failure at a nursing home in Cherry Hill, N.J., the International Boxing Hall of Fame announced.

The once-budding friendship between President Obama and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie reached its zenith in May on a storm-ravaged boardwalk in Point Pleasant, N.J. After Obama missed four throws at a carnival game, Christie stepped in, picked up a football and tossed it through a hoop, winning the president a stuffed bear. “One and done,” the governor said as a crowd cheered and the two men exchanged a high-five. On Thursday, however, Christie used an appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference to blast Obama in personal terms, as a weak leader. Accusing Obama of sitting on the sidelines...

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may stand accused of using Sandy money as both carrot and stick in his political battles, but that's not stopping him from asking the federal government for more help. The Star-Ledger reported Wednesday that Christie sent a letter to President Obama asking FEMA to extend its housing program. The program, the paper reports, would not directly bring money into the state, but instead cost the Federal government thousands in maintaining temporary homes for displaced victims. The housing, located in the Central Jersey facility of Fort Monmouth, currently houses 49 families but takes care of 80...

WASHINGTON -- The St. Tammany Parish school district is getting $67.8 million in disaster loans and accumulated interest for Hurricane Katrina forgiven by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Sen. Mary Landrieu's office announced Monday. The announcement follows FEMA's earlier decision to cancel a $9.9 million loan for the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office and a $14.5 million loan to the St. Tammany Parish government. The loan forgiveness is a response to a provision Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, added to a 2013 Homeland Security Appropriations that changed the criteria for loan forgiveness affecting some $211 million in Katrina-related loans.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season ended Saturday, and — unless a new sponsor pops up with wads of cash — so did Colorado State University’s hurricane forecasting team. Fine with us. We won’t miss either one. The Colorado team, officially the Tropical Meteorology Project, has been issuing forecasts for the upcoming hurricane season each summer for 30 years. At the beginning of this year’s season, the team predicted 18 named storms. Nine of those, it said, would become hurricanes. Four would be major hurricanes. Here’s how it shook out: There were 13 named storms. Only two became hurricanes. Neither was...

A hurricane hunter aircraft sent to the Arctic to study ice formations returned this month with critical data that might explain why an increasing number of tropical storms seem to be taking irregular paths. Scientists are trying to determine how much heat is released into the atmosphere when Arctic ice builds up in autumn. That heat release is believed to shift the jet stream, a fast-moving, high altitude river of air, farther to the south. That shift, in turn, might be slowing down or even stalling tropical systems, before they can re-curve east and out to sea, scientists say. [Snip]...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Under a reforming president, the Philippines emerged as a rising economic star in Asia but the trail of death and destruction left by Typhoon Haiyan has highlighted a key weakness: fragile and patchy infrastructure after decades of neglect and corruption. Authorities fear that the storm that tore through Leyte province in the country's east has killed thousands. More than 600,000 people have been displaced. Low rates of insurance in the Philippines mean the disaster is likely to sap government finances but analysts say it might not slow growth significantly because of the small role the affected region plays in the...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) - Typhoon-ravaged Philippine islands faced a daunting relief effort that had barely begun Monday, as bloated bodies lay uncollected and uncounted in the streets and survivors pleaded for food, water and medicine. Police guarded stores to prevent people from hauling off food, water and such non-essentials as TVs and treadmills, but there was often no one to carry away the dead - not even those seen along the main road from the airport to Tacloban, the worst-hit city along the country's remote eastern seaboard.....

TACLOBAN, Philippines (AP) - Corpses hung from trees, were scattered on sidewalks or buried in flattened buildings - some of the 10,000 people believed killed in one Philippine city alone by ferocious Typhoon Haiyan that washed away homes and buildings with powerful winds and giant waves. As the scale of devastation became clear Sunday from one of the worst storms ever recorded, officials projected the death toll could climb even higher when emergency crews reach parts of the archipelago cut off by flooding and landslides. Looters raided grocery stores and gas stations in search of food, fuel and water as...

...only a fraction of the aid money earmarked for recovery has been used, in what some claim is a painfully slow and opaque process. Only $5.2 billion of the pledged $47.9 billion had been tapped by cities and states by the end of August, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. And tracking those funds has been complicated, lawmakers said. "Transparency is woefully lacking. We don't know where the money is. We know people have been approved for grants, but the money has not been distributed," said New Jersey Assemblywoman L. Grace Spencer, chair of the environment...

MIAMI (Reuters) - The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season looks set to go down as a big washout, marking the first time in 45 years that the strongest storm to form was just a minor Category 1 hurricane. There could still be a late surprise in the June 1-November 30 season, since the cyclone that mushroomed into Superstorm Sandy was just revving up at this time last year. But so far, at least, it has been one of the weakest seasons since modern record-keeping began about half a century ago, U.S. weather experts say. Apart from Tropical Storm Andrea, which soaked...

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season is an ongoing annual cycle in tropical cyclogenesis. It is the first Atlantic hurricane season since 2002 to feature no hurricanes through the month of August. The season officially began on June 1 and will end on November 30. The first tropical cyclone of the year, Andrea, developed on June 7 in the Gulf of Mexico. This season continued a pattern of unusually early starting hurricane seasons – the first named storm of a season typically forms around July 9. Below average activity continued afterwards into October. The strongest tropical cyclone of the season thus...

Tropical Storm Karen threatens Central Gulf of Mexico states. NHC Public Advisories NHC Tropical Discussions

When Colin and Joyce Elston bought their Florida dream home in May, they were confident they could afford the three-bedroom, two-bathroom ranch with a pool and a backyard overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway. Now they are not so sure. The retirees said they had enough in savings and investments to pay the mortgage and the $1,482 yearly flood insurance on the home, which sits on palm tree-lined Paradise Boulevard on Treasure Island, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. But within two months of moving in, they received a stunning surprise: Due to a recently passed federal law, their flood...

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee held an impromptu press conference outside the House chamber, while the House was voting to defund Obamacare; to demand that C-span stop playing classical music during televised House votes. "This has got to stop," Jackson-Lee said. "Nobody listens to that s**t any more. This is designed to discourage the youth, and minorities, from tuning in and paying attention to their government."

But surprisingly, not a single major hurricane, defined as a Category 3 storm or higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale —with minimum wind gusts of at least 111 mph (178 km/h) — has directly hit the United States in nearly eight years. That's twice as long as any major hurricane landfall "drought" since 1915, and by far the longest on record since data began being collected prior to 1900. As of today (Sept. 12), it's been 2,880 days since Hurricane Wilma, the last major hurricane to strike the United States, made landfall on Oct. 24, 2005. The reasons behind this drought...

Where are all the hurricanes Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Joe Romm, and Brad Johnson say are supposed to happen due to global warming? August is about to end without an Atlantic hurricane for the first time since 2002, calling into question predictions of a more active storm season than normal. Six tropical systems have formed in the Atlantic since the season began June 1 and none of them has grown to hurricane strength with winds of at least 74 miles (120 kilometers) per hour. Accumulated cyclone energy in the Atlantic, a measure of tropical power, is about 30 percent of...

Global average temperature has been flat for a decade. But frightening myths about global warming continue. We're told there are more hurricanes now. We're told that hurricanes are stronger. But the National Hurricane Center says it isn't so. Meteorologist Maria Molina told me it's not surprising that climatologists assumed hurricanes would get worse. "Hurricanes need warm ocean waters," but it turns out that "hurricanes are a lot more complicated than just warm ocean waters." Computer models have long predicted nasty effects from our production of greenhouse gasses. But the nasty effects have not appeared. As far as hurricanes, more hit...