Second Newspaper Chain Joins Copyright Trolling Operation

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A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain.

Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement.

Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media. Righthaven has issued more than 100 lawsuits since its spring inception on behalf of the Las Vegas Review Journal — Stephens’ flagship.

“I can tell you we also have near finalization for contracts with a substantial number of other publishers,” Gibson said in a telephone interview. He declined to divulge their names until Righthaven begins filing suits on their behalf.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has received “several dozen” inquiries from Righthaven defendants seeking legal representation, said Eva Galperin, the EFF’s referral coordinator.

“We’re up to our armpits in Righthaven defendants,” she said in a telephone interview.

The EFF, she said, has yet to take a case and has been helping the defendants obtain other counsel, she said.

For its part, WEHCO controls 28 papers, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and 13 cable stations largely in the south. Its president, Paul Smith, said in a Democrat-Gazette story last week that “it’s a pretty serious matter when someone takes your copy, information you’ve spent a lot of money to produce.”

Smith did not return a telephone message seeking comment.

In July, Gibson told Threat Level that more Righthaven clients would be forthcoming. He also gave a brief accounting of how Righthaven works. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, Righthaven acquires the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.

Righthaven usually demands $75,000, but will settle for a few thousand dollars.

(Photo courtesy Steve Gibson, Righthaven)

Quantitative Easing Won't Help the Economy, But Will Just Create Another Wave of Mergers and Acquisitions

As I noted when the government started bailing out the big banks:

[The] Treasury Department encouraged banks to use the bailout money to buy their competitors, and pushed through an amendment to the tax laws which rewards mergers in the banking industry.

Yesterday, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich pointed out that quantitative easing won't help the economy, but will simply fuel a new round of mergers and acquisitions:

A debate is being played out in the Fed about whether it should return to so-called "quantitative easing" -- buying more mortgage-backed securities, Treasury bills, and other bonds -- in order to lower the cost of capital still further.

The sad reality is that cheaper money won't work. Individuals aren't borrowing because they're still under a huge debt load. And as their homes drop in value and their jobs and wages continue to disappear, they're not in a position to borrow. Small businesses aren't borrowing because they have no reason to expand. Retail business is down, construction is down, even manufacturing suppliers are losing ground.

That leaves large corporations. They'll be happy to borrow more at even lower rates than now -- even though they're already sitting on mountains of money.

But this big-business borrowing won't create new jobs. To the contrary, large corporations have been investing their cash to pare back their payrolls. They've been buying new factories and facilities abroad (China, Brazil, India), and new labor-replacing software at home.

If Bernanke and company make it even cheaper to borrow, they'll be unleashing a third corporate strategy for creating more profits but fewer jobs -- mergers and acquisitions.

Similarly, Yves Smith reports that quantitative easing didn't really help the Japanese economy, only big Japanese companies:

A few days ago, we noted:

When an economy is very slack, cheaper money is not going to induce much in the way of real economy activity.

Unless you are a financial firm, the level of interest rates is a secondary or tertiary consideration in your decision to borrow. You will be interested in borrowing only if you first, perceive a business need (usually an opportunity). The next question is whether it can be addressed profitably, and the cost of funds is almost always not a significant % of total project costs (although availability of funding can be a big constraint)…..

So cheaper money will operate primarily via their impact on asset values. That of course helps financial firms, and perhaps the Fed hopes the wealth effect will induce more spending. But that’s been the movie of the last 20+ years, and Japan pre its crisis, of having the officialdom rely on asset price inflation to induce more consumer spending, and we know how both ended.

Tyler Cowen points to a Bank of Japan paper by Hiroshi Ugai, which looks at Japan’s experience with quantitative easing from 2001 to 2006. Key findings:

….these macroeconomic analyses verify that because of the QEP, the premiums on market funds raised by financial institutions carrying substantial non-performing loans (NPLs) shrank to the extent that they no longer reflected credit rating differentials. This observation implies that the QEP was effective in maintaining financial system stability and an accommodative monetary environment by removing financial institutions’ funding uncertainties, and by averting further deterioration of economic and price developments resulting from corporations’ uncertainty about future funding.

Granted the positive above effects of preventing further deterioration of the economy reviewed above, many of the macroeconomic analyses conclude that the QEP’s effects in raising aggregate demand and prices were limited. In particular, when verified empirically taking into account the fact that the monetary policy regime changed under the zero bound constraint of interest rates, the effects from increasing the monetary base were not detected or smaller, if anything, than during periods when there was no zero bound constraint.

Yves here, This is an important conclusion, and is consistent with the warnings the Japanese gave to the US during the financial crisis, which were uncharacteristically blunt. Conventional wisdom here is that Japan’s fiscal and monetary stimulus during the bust was too slow in coming and not sufficiently large. The Japanese instead believe, strongly, that their policy mistake was not cleaning up the banks. As we’ve noted, that’s also consistent with an IMF study of 124 banking crises:

Existing empirical research has shown that providing assistance to banks and their borrowers can be counterproductive, resulting in increased losses to banks, which often abuse forbearance to take unproductive risks at government expense. The typical result of forbearance is a deeper hole in the net worth of banks, crippling tax burdens to finance bank bailouts, and even more severe credit supply contraction and economic decline than would have occurred in the absence of forbearance.

Cross-country analysis to date also shows that accommodative policy measures (such as substantial liquidity support, explicit government guarantee on financial institutions’ liabilities and forbearance from prudential regulations) tend to be fiscally costly and that these particular policies do not necessarily accelerate the speed of economic recovery. Of course, the caveat to these findings is that a counterfactual to the crisis resolution cannot be observed and therefore it is difficult to speculate how a crisis would unfold in absence of such policies. Better institutions are, however, uniformly positively associated with faster recovery.

But (to put it charitably) the Fed sees the world through a bank-centric lens, so surely what is good for its charges must be good for the rest of us, right? So if the economy continues to weaken, the odds that the Fed will resort to it as a remedy will rise, despite the evidence that it at best treats symptoms rather than the underlying pathology.

As I pointed out on August 11th:

"Deficit doves" - i.e. Keynesians like Paul Krugman - say that unless we spend much more on stimulus, we'll slide into a depression. And yet the government isn't spending money on the types of stimulus that will have the most bang for the buck: like giving money to the states, extending unemployment benefits or buying more food stamps - let alone rebuilding America's manufacturing base. See this, this and this. [Indeed, as Steve Keen demonstrated last year, it is the American citizen who needs stimulus, not the big banks.]

***

Keynes implemented his policies in an era of much less debt than we have today. We're now bankrupt, with debt levels so high that they are dragging down the economy.

Even if Keynesian stimulus could help in our climate of all-pervading debt, Washington has already shot America's wad in propping up the big banks and other oligarchs.

***

Keynes implemented his New Deal stimulus at the same time that Glass-Steagall and many other measures were implemented to plug the holes in a corrupt financial system. The gaming of the financial system was decreased somewhat, the amount of funny business which the powers-that-be could engage in was reined in to some extent.

As such, the economy had a chance to recover (even with the massive stimulus of World War II, unless some basic level of trust had been restored in the economy, the economy would not have recovered).

Today, however, Bernanke, Summers, Dodd, Frank and the rest of the boys haven't fixed any of the major structural defects in the economy. So even if Keynesianism were the answer, it cannot work without the implementation of structural reforms to the financial system.

A little extra water in the plumbing can't fix pipes that have been corroded and are thoroughly rotten. The government hasn't even tried to replace the leaking sections of pipe in our economy.

Quantitative easing can't patch a financial system with giant holes in it.

What's needed has been obvious to independent observers for years: Break up the big banks, prosecute the criminals whose fraud caused the financial crisis, and restore the rule of law and transparency.

Until those basic steps are taken, nothing else will work to fix our broken economy.

Islamophobia–Israel’s Most Cherished Weapon of Mass Destruction Destined to Destroy The West If Not Stopped

Yes, it certainly paints a frightening picture for sure. The inhabitants of the most powerful countries in the world–militarily and economically speaking–transformed into sub-humanoids, bled completely dry of all the characteristics distinguishing them as members of a higher, more intelligent species and who now roam the earth in search of healthy, uninfected people so they can eat them…

No, I am not talking about the storyline from the movie I Am Legend starring Will Smith (a screen shot of which is featured above) where mankind has been decimated by a genetically-engineered virus that has mutated what’s left of human beings into irrational, incoherent, savages devoid of reason and morals…

Rather, what we’re referring to here is that OTHER man-made virus epidemically sweeping through the West and America like wildfire that has mutated entire swaths of otherwise normal humans into irrational, incoherent, savages who are devoid of reason and morals.

As frightening as this sounds, (and believe me, it should scare the b-Jesus out of everyone) the fact is this is not some Hollywood fantasy like the blockbuster movie Independence Day, where the world stands at the brink of complete annihilation and is saved LITERALLY AT THE LAST FREAKING SECOND by a nice, nerdy Jewish boy with a Messiah complex named David.

No, in this case, the Krippen Virus–as it was called in I Am Legend– threatening destruction of all life on earth is today known as Islamophobia, and along with its attending “war to end all wars”, stands the very good likelihood of turning an otherwise Garden of Eden into Paradise lost.

And despite the fact all this is not some silver screen fantasy, this is not to say however that Hollywood–no, let’s re-phrase that–JEWISH CONTROL of both Hollywood and the mainstream media in the US–has not played the lead role in this action drama by cultivating and propagating this epidemic, because it most certainly has. Indeed, if there is a Dr. Alice Krippen (the scientist credited with creating the virus that destroyed the entire human race in I Am Legend) in all this, it is those bespecled, white-coated Jewish interests working in PR laboratories in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, New York and D.C. controlling what we see, hear, read and think.

Those who doubt such an epidemic exists simply have not been paying attention as of late. Now, thanks to bullhorns and blowhards both in the mainstream AND alternative media, it–the virus–is everywhere, in our air, water, under our fingernails and even in our toothpaste. Whether it is propagandists and Zionist assets from the mainstream-media such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, et al or whether it is those in the patriot/alternative media such as Devvy Kidd, Frosty Wooldridge and others (who foolishly think that by spewing lies about Islam they will endear themselves to Jewish interests and avoid the menacing glare of powerful Zionist groups such as the ADL and SPLC) it is monsoon season as far as anti-Islamic hysteria goes, and with no change of weather in sight for the foreseeable future.

As if the two wars the West is fighting for these Jewish interests weren’t bad enough (and we could certainly characterize 2 million dead innocent civilians and an economy on life support as “bad enough” wouldn’t you agree?) now an already uncomfortably-hot situation has been ratcheted up–not just a few degrees, but indeed enough to flash-fry an 80-lb turkey in about ten seconds. What used to be sporadic incidents such as severed pigs’ heads being left at the front doors of Muslim homes in America or bricks being thrown through the windows of Islamic centers and mosques has now graduated to throat slashings, as recently took place this last week in NYC.

Imagine for a moment if you will fellow earthlings…A father of 4 small children, (no doubt quite hungry, given the fact it is Ramadan and he is fasting) doing his job, following all the laws as laid down by his city, county, state and federal governments, when all the sudden some piece of white trash gets into his car, asks him if he is a Muslim and slashes his throat in some attempted form of weird, Kosher-approved ritual slaughter, as our Muslim father of 4 pleads with his would-be murderer, saying “Please don’t kill me. I’m a very hard worker. I work very hard”.

AND WE ARE TOLD IT IS ISLAM THAT IS VIOLENT AND BACKWARDS AND THAT THE MUSLIMS COULD LEARN A THING OR TWO FROM THE ENLIGHTENED “JUDEO-CHRISTIAN WEST”???

Let us not either make the mistake of thinking the subsequent criminality and violence springing up on a daily basis now by these Gawd-fearin’/Red-bluddid ‘mericans against Muslims is not the result of the tsunami of lying, anti-Islamic rhetoric being organized by Jewish interests and propagated through both the mainstream and alternative media. The two are as inextricably linked with each other as cross burnings and the Klan and anyone who says different is a liar, a fool or both. This epidemic of Islamophobia (just like the Krippen Virus in I Am Legend) is every bit as much an Israeli operation in psychological warfare as are all the other infamous false-flag terrorist operations cooked up in Mossad headquarters in Herzilya, including but not limited to the Lavon Affair, Israel’s attack on the USS LIBERTY, the dead Kennedys, the 1983 attack on the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, the planned assassination of George Herbert Walker Bush in 1990 and, last but not least, 9/11.

But, as bad as it is, ladies and gentlemen, it actually gets much, much worse when you understand the ‘logic’ of those who have brought this thing about, and something that those in the West who are beating their breasts the hardest against Islam should take into consideration before proceeding an inch further.

In the first case, what we must recognize is that all this hysteria is a preparatory step to something going BOOM! in America that will then be blamed on Iran (and others) in justifying going deeper into war at a time the US doesn’t have the resources to buy the tissue paper necessary to blow her nose. The aforementioned agents out there whipping up this fever in America against Islam–Geller, Spencer, Gaffney et al, should be seen for exactly what they are–saboteurs who are planting time-bombs that will result in massive loss of life in America and beyond. The Jewish interests overseeing all this are waiting for the right moment when America’s body temperature reaches a certain point that makes the next false flag attack believable, and as soon as that takes place, we will see something take place that will make 9/11 look tame by comparison.

Secondly, what we have to keep in mind is that the destruction of Islam is not the primary objective here. Like a guy asking a girl out for dinner, it is just a precursor to the main event he hopes will be taking place later. It–the Zionist-engineered clash of civilizations between the Islamic and Christian worlds–is merely a stepping stone to something else, something rooted in deep, never-forgotten vendettas and accounting matters that require settling.

The first thing to keep in mind when understanding where these Jewish interests are going with all this Armageddon business is that they do not have a 2,000 year old grudge with Islam. In fact (the 20th century being the exception) Jews chart their “Golden Age” and the period of their greatest prosperity under Muslim rule in places like Spain and Baghdad.

The West however is another matter altogether. As far as Jewry is concerned, there are old scores to be settled, most notably a particular landmark event taking place in 70 A.D., something they don’t consider to be just a minor accounting matter, but rather one requiring the proverbial pound of flesh.

Everything taking place today viz a viz Israel and the Jewish people is about turning back the clock and undoing history. While the rest of the world has moved forward, they are a people who have remained frozen in time, back when a jealous, vindictive God supposedly promised them the world and everything with it. As such, they are holding on to a lottery ticket they say has all the winning numbers on it, even though it is for a lottery that does not exist, and they are out to collect every cent of what they say is theirs.

Now, how did it come to be that they lost out in this lottery? It all goes back to their country being destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans, forcing them to scatter and flee and to live as “guests” in gentile nations for 2,000 years where they suffered rejection and, as we are not allowed to forget, “anti-Semitism” and “persecution“.

And who are the Romans today? Why, wouldn’t ya know, WE ARE–the West, meaning Europe and America. “The sins of the father“…–remember that old line from the Old Testament, where the children pay the price for the evil deeds of the parents generation after generation? As they–the Jews–see it, our great, great grandfathers destroyed their country, reduced these self-perceived kings and princes to beggars and gypsies and robbed them of their lottery winnings and now WE, the great great-grandchildren, must pay the price, first by destroying Israel’s existential threats, and then secondly by going down in flames economically, socially and politically as a result of fighting these wars against over a billion people.

Don’t believe it? Well then, ask yourself–which countries are fighting this war against a billion Muslims? The Chinese? No. The Russians? No. The Indians? No.

It is America, England, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, etc, all countries who today are the great, great grandkids of yesterday’s Romans who destroyed Jerusalem.

And this, friends, Romans, countrymen, is the reason the West today finds herself infected with the Zionist version of the Krippen Virus, the only antidote to which is the truth and the courage to speak it throughout that great leper colony known as Western civilization.

Let us hope there is enough serum to go around before the madmen who have spread this weapon of mass destruction drag mankind past that point of no return as described in one horror story known as the Apocalypse, for if not, as we were told, “no flesh will survive”.

© 2010 Mark Glenn
http://theuglytruth.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/islamophobia-israel%E2%80%99s-most-cherished-weapon-of-mass-destruction-destined-to-destroy-the-west-if-not-stopped/

Marc Faber On Bloomberg 8-29-2010 - Fed and Japan Money Printing

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Summary: Marc Faber talks via telephone about the federal reserve money printing

Alex Jones on RT: 'I'm packing heat, are you?'

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Summary: The United States constitution says that every citizen has the right to carry a gun for self defense. However, five years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina people were having their guns taken from them and collected by law enforcement. Alex J ...

Obama could kill fossil fuels overnight with a nuclear dash for thorium

If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal

We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West.

There is no certain bet in nuclear physics but work by Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) on the use of thorium as a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium in reactors may be the magic bullet we have all been hoping for, though we have barely begun to crack the potential of solar power.

Dr Rubbia says a tonne of the silvery metal – named after the Norse god of thunder, who also gave us Thor’s day or Thursday - produces as much energy as 200 tonnes of uranium, or 3,500,000 tonnes of coal. A mere fistful would light London for a week.

Thorium eats its own hazardous waste. It can even scavenge the plutonium left by uranium reactors, acting as an eco-cleaner. "It’s the Big One," said Kirk Sorensen, a former NASA rocket engineer and now chief nuclear technologist at Teledyne Brown Engineering.

"Once you start looking more closely, it blows your mind away. You can run civilisation on thorium for hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s essentially free. You don’t have to deal with uranium cartels," he said.

Thorium is so common that miners treat it as a nuisance, a radioactive by-product if they try to dig up rare earth metals. The US and Australia are full of the stuff. So are the granite rocks of Cornwall. You do not need much: all is potentially usable as fuel, compared to just 0.7pc for uranium.

After the Manhattan Project, US physicists in the late 1940s were tempted by thorium for use in civil reactors. It has a higher neutron yield per neutron absorbed. It does not require isotope separation, a big cost saving. But by then America needed the plutonium residue from uranium to build bombs.

"They were really going after the weapons," said Professor Egil Lillestol, a world authority on the thorium fuel-cycle at CERN. "It is almost impossible make nuclear weapons out of thorium because it is too difficult to handle. It wouldn’t be worth trying." It emits too many high gamma rays.

You might have thought that thorium reactors were the answer to every dream but when CERN went to the European Commission for development funds in 1999-2000, they were rebuffed.

Brussels turned to its technical experts, who happened to be French because the French dominate the EU’s nuclear industry. "They didn’t want competition because they had made a huge investment in the old technology," he said.

Another decade was lost. It was a sad triumph of vested interests over scientific progress. "We have very little time to waste because the world is running out of fossil fuels. Renewables can’t replace them. Nuclear fusion is not going work for a century, if ever," he said.

The Norwegian group Aker Solutions has bought Dr Rubbia’s patent for the thorium fuel-cycle, and is working on his design for a proton accelerator at its UK operation.

Victoria Ashley, the project manager, said it could lead to a network of pint-sized 600MW reactors that are lodged underground, can supply small grids, and do not require a safety citadel. It will take £2bn to build the first one, and Aker needs £100mn for the next test phase.

The UK has shown little appetite for what it regards as a "huge paradigm shift to a new technology". Too much work and sunk cost has already gone into the next generation of reactors, which have another 60 years of life.

So Aker is looking for tie-ups with the US, Russia, or China. The Indians have their own projects - none yet built - dating from days when they switched to thorium because their weapons programme prompted a uranium ban.

America should have fewer inhibitions than Europe in creating a leapfrog technology. The US allowed its nuclear industry to stagnate after Three Mile Island in 1979.

Anti-nuclear neorosis is at last ebbing. The White House has approved $8bn in loan guarantees for new reactors, yet America has been strangely passive. Where is the superb confidence that put a man on the moon?

A few US pioneers are exploring a truly radical shift to a liquid fuel based on molten-fluoride salts, an idea once pursued by US physicist Alvin Weinberg at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee in the 1960s. The original documents were retrieved by Mr Sorensen.

Moving away from solid fuel may overcome some of thorium’s "idiosyncracies". "You have to use the right machine. You don’t use diesel in a petrol car: you build a diesel engine," said Mr Sorensen.

Thorium-fluoride reactors can operate at atmospheric temperature. "The plants would be much smaller and less expensive. You wouldn’t need those huge containment domes because there’s no pressurized water in the reactor. It’s close-fitting," he said.

Nuclear power could become routine and unthreatening. But first there is the barrier of establishment prejudice.

When Hungarian scientists led by Leo Szilard tried to alert Washington in late 1939 that the Nazis were working on an atomic bomb, they were brushed off with disbelief. Albert Einstein interceded through the Belgian queen mother, eventually getting a personal envoy into the Oval Office.

Roosevelt initially fobbed him off. He listened more closely at a second meeting over breakfast the next day, then made up his mind within minutes. "This needs action," he told his military aide. It was the birth of the Manhattan Project. As a result, the US had an atomic weapon early enough to deter Stalin from going too far in Europe.

The global energy crunch needs equal "action". If it works, Manhattan II could restore American optimism and strategic leadership at a stroke: if not, it is a boost for US science and surely a more fruitful way to pull the US out of perma-slump than scattershot stimulus.

Even better, team up with China and do it together, for all our sakes.

FEMA: US evacuations may be required for Earl

RALEIGH, N.C. – Federal officials urged U.S. residents to prepare for possible evacuations and islanders in the Turks and Caicos braced for high winds Tuesday as powerful Hurricane Earl howled over open seas toward the East Coast of the U.S.

The Category 4 hurricane, with winds of 135 mph (215 kilometers), was expected to remain over the open ocean before turning north and running parallel to the U.S. coast, potentially reaching the North Carolina coastal region by late Thursday or early Friday. It was projected then to curve back out to sea, perhaps swiping New England or far-eastern Canada.

"We can't totally rule out a very close approach to either of the Cape Hatteras areas or Cape Cod and southern New England as the storm progresses further," said Bill Read, director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Earl delivered a glancing blow to several small Caribbean islands on Monday, tearing roofs off of homes and cutting electricity to people in Anguilla, Antigua, and St. Maarten. Cruise ships were diverted and flights canceled across the region. But there were no reports of death or injury.

In Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos, a British territory, Benson Capron was among several fishermen tying their boats to trees lining a beach.

"I hear it is going to pass, but I will not take any chances," Capron said. "Today I will not go out to fish."

Forecasters said it was too early to say what effect Earl would have in the U.S., but warned it could at least kick up dangerous rip currents. A surfer died in Florida and a Maryland swimmer had been missing since Saturday in waves spawned by former Hurricane Danielle, which weakened to a tropical storm Monday far out in the north Atlantic.

Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said evacuations may be necessary along the eastern seaboard later this week if the storm does not veer away from the coast as expected.

"Today is the day to make sure you have your plan completed and your supplies in place," Fugate said.

The storm's center passed just north of the British Virgin Islands on Monday afternoon. Despite a few lost fishing boats and several uprooted trees in Tortola and Anegada, there were no reports of major damage or injuries, said Sharleen DaBreo, disaster management agency director.

Click image to see Hurricane Earl photos

AP/Johnny Jno-Baptiste

By midday Tuesday, Earl's center was about 205 miles (335 kilometers) east of Grand Turk island as it headed west-northwest at 14 mph (22 kph), according to the hurricane center. Hurricane strength winds extended up to 70 miles (110 kilometers) from the center, it said.

Tropical storm conditions were expected to spread into the Turks and Caicos by Tuesday afternoon.

Close on Earl's heels, Tropical Storm Fiona formed Monday afternoon in the open Atlantic. The storm, with maximum winds of 40 mph (65 kph), was projected to pass just north of the Leeward Islands by Wednesday and stay farther out in the Atlantic than Earl's northward path. Fiona was not expected to reach hurricane strength over the next several days.

Residents were cleaning up debris and assessing damage Tuesday on islands across the northeastern Caribbean.

In Puerto Rico, nearly 187,000 people were without power and another 60,000 without water, Gov. Luis Fortuno said. More than a dozen roads along the north coast remained closed as crews removed trees and downed power lines.

In St. Maarten, sand and debris littered the streets, and winds knocked down trees and electricity poles and damaged roofs. But police spokesman Ricardo Henson said there was no extensive damage to property.

In Antigua, at least one home was destroyed but there were no reports of serious injuries. Governor General Dame Louise Agnetha Lake-Tack declared Monday a public holiday to keep islanders off the road and give them a chance to clean up.

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