Snow, ice hit northeast US, slowing recovery and leaving thousands without power | Free Speech Radio News

Residents in the northeast dealt with new power outages and a halting recovery after a storm brought snow and ice to the battered region. In New Jersey, more than a foot of snow came to some parts of the state and and the storm left 110,000 people without power as of Thursday afternoon, according to the utility Public Service Enterprise Group.

Sandy Sweeps Away New York City’s Only Day Laborer Center

A storm surge from Hurricane Sandy unmoored the Bay Parkway Community Job Center, and New York City’s only center for day laborers, online and moved it a couple hundred feet inland from the Bensonhurst shore, cracking one of its walls in the process. Ligia Guallpa of the Worker Justice Projects, which operates the center, and Lionel, one of the center’s founders, tried to show it to me Tuesday afternoon, but the New York Police Department objected.   “I’m trying to be nice, okay? You have to go,” Office Dym instructed us. “We’re here for a reason,” he said, getting out of his vehicle to push me away. “It’s not safe.”   “See?” Guallpa lamented. “This is what they do to us every morning when we have workers.” The police have blocked off the “hazard area” around the center, though just why was not remotely apparent, when we subsequently snuck in the back way. Despite repeated inquiries form Guallpa and the Worker Justice Center, the authorities have refused to estimate when the “hazard area”…

Centreville Day Laborers Site Almost Ready

It’s been more than a year since Fairfax County Supervisor Michael Frey called a public meeting to discuss the proposal to open a hiring site for immigrant day laborers in Centreville. “The atmosphere was obviously pretty heated,” he says.  But Frey, a Republican, says most of the objections came from residents who had a problem with federal immigration policy. “The people that were objecting were objecting because they believed all the day laborers were here illegally, and wanted that problem solved,” Frey says.  Frey understands those concerns. But he points out the county has little power to influence federal immigration enforcement, and the center is a way to keep immigrant workers who are looking for work from gathering on street corners and impeding commerce and traffic. It will also keeping the workers themselves safer, Frey adds. Alice Foltz is the temporary director of the Centreville Immigration Forum, a coalition of churchgoers that came up with the idea…