Storm, Natural Disaster | featured news

Monster Storm Sandy slammed into the East Coast Monday, killing at least 16 people, hurling a record-breaking 13-foot surge of seawater at New York City and knocking out power to more than 7.5 million across the East Coast.

Hurricane Sandy is churning off the East Coast and is expected to join up with two other weather systems to create a huge and problematic storm affecting 50 million people. Here's a snapshot of what is happening or expected, state by state....

Hundreds of thousands of people were told to flee low-lying areas, New York and Washington shut down their subways, federal offices and local schools closed, and presidential candidates curtailed their campaigning as Hurricane Sandy roared ever closer to the Eastern Seaboard on Sunday, promising epic storm surges, howling winds and drenching rain across much of the Mid-Atlantic region and Northeast.

Hurricane Sandy blew the U.S. presidential race off course on Sunday even before it came ashore, forcing Republican Mitt Romney to shift his campaign inland and fueling fears that the massive storm bearing down on the East Coast could disrupt early voting.

Into the carefully scripted Republican convention has come a complication: a natural disaster that not only distracts attention from Mitt Romney but sets up a collision with a fundamental tenet of today's GOP.

More than 2.1 million people from Illinois to Virginia remained without power Monday morning after violent storms struck over the weekend, and a heat wave continued to blanket much of the region.

Emergency management officials in northern Alabama say houses have been destroyed by a tornado as the region braces for a storm outbreak.

Relatives of tornado victims in southern Illinois are bracing for another storm system as they pick through the rubble of their loved ones' homes. Darrell Osman's mother was among six people killed by the tornado that leveled whole blocks in Harrisburg. He said Thursday that it is frustrating to hear more storms are predicted. Osman was searching for his mother's belongings and he fears possessions exposed by the first storm could be ruined by rain.

A strong storm system that produced several possible tornadoes hit the Southeast on Wednesday, damaging dozens of homes and buildings. At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others were injured. Suspected tornadoes were reported in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina, and thousands of people were without power as trees and power lines were downed.

A powerful typhoon slammed into Japan on Wednesday, leaving 13 people dead or missing in south-central regions and halting trains in Tokyo before grazing a crippled nuclear plant in the tsunami-ravaged northeast....