earthquake chicago

Rare earthquake rattles northern Ill.; no damage

A small pre-dawn earthquake has hit northern Illinois, startling residents as far away as Michigan and the Iowa, but no damage or injuries were immediately reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey says the 3.8-magnitude earthquake hit about 45 miles northwest of Chicago at 4 a.m. Wednesday. Scientists say the epicenter was southwest of the village of Gilberts in Kane County.

The USGS initially reported the magnitude as 4.3 but later downgraded it. USGS geophysicist Amy Vaughan says such quakes are rare in northern Illinois.

She says residents in Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan also reported feeling the quake.

In Kane County, sheriff's dispatchers were overwhelmed with calls, and several residential and business alarms were triggered. But spokesman Lt. Pat Gengler says no injuries or damage have been reported.

citigroup earnings

Wary of Earnings Reports, Wall Street Opens Softly

Shares opened quietly Tuesday after Citigroup’s fourth-quarter earnings report kept investors uneasy during this first big week of corporate earnings reports.

Many are wary about bank earnings after a disappointing report from JPMorgan Chase on Friday helped send stocks sharply lower.

Citigroup’s earnings came in as expected. The bank reported a fourth-quarter loss of $7.6 billion loss, or 33 cents a share, with the bulk of that shortfall the result of expenses related to its repayment of $20 billion in government bailout money.

But the report, like JPMorgan Chase’s, reflected consumers’ struggle to repay their loans. Citigroup set aside $8.18 billion to cover bad loans during the quarter.

In early trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was about 46.8 points or 0.12 percent higher, while the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was 5.1 points higher. The Nasdaq was up 17.15 points or 0.39 percent.

In Europe, the FTSE 100 was down 15 points, or 0.27 percent, while Germany’s DAX fell 13.11 points, or 0.37 percent. The CAC-40 was 0.37 percent lower.

News that Kraft Foods and Cadbury agreed to a $18.9 billion deal appeared to push Cadbury to the list of risers on the FTSE 100, gaining just under 4 percent to 837 pence a share, more or less in line with the offer price of 840 pence a share.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell 0.8 percent to close at 10,764.90. However, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 1 percent, to 21,677.98, while Shanghai index rose 0.3 percent, to 3,246.87. JAL shares, which have lost more than 90 percent of their value over the last week, tumbled 20 percent Tuesday to 4 yen before finishing flat at 5 yen.

Wall Street was poised for a subdued start to the week after being closed Monday for the Martin Luther King public holiday.

In the run-up to Wall Street’s open, investors will be turning their attention to the next batch of fourth quarter corporate earnings. Besides Citigroup, other big banks reporting earnings this week include Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

Over the week, 65 companies in the S.&P. 500 post their results this week. As well as the banks, earnings from Google, I.B.M.. and McDonald’s will be closely monitored.

Over all, earnings have been fairly mixed, with upside surprises from the likes of Intel offset by disappointments elsewhere, most notably the aluminum maker Alcoa.

Meanwhile, bond prices were mixed. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite its price, was unchanged from 3.68 percent late Friday. The yield on the three-month T-bill, considered one of the safest investments, rose to 0.07 percent from 0.05 percent.

The dollar mostly rose against other major currencies, while gold prices also rose.

pat robertson haiti comments

Here’s how to help earthquake victims in Haiti

It is hard to know what to say about what’s happened to Haiti. It’s simply heartbreaking to see tragic devastation on such a scale inflicted on a place and a people already struggling just to survive. Governments, international aid groups, church groups and civic associations are scrambling to help, but as usual in the first few days of such tragedies, the immediate challenge is logistics.

The only thing helpful to say is … help.

haiti disaster relief

Miami's anxious Haitian community readies Haiti disaster relief

With more than 350,000 Haitians living in Florida, emotional shock waves from Tuesday's earthquake are severe. In Miami, community leaders begin to organize Haiti disaster relief.

It did not take long for Jean-Robert LaFortune’s telephone to start ringing with calls from the anxious, the desperate, and the bewildered. “What have you heard?” people wanted to know. “What can we do?”

So vast is the scale of the disaster back in his birthplace of Port-au-Prince in Haiti that Mr. LaFortune, a prominent activist leader within Miami’s Haitian-American community, was at a loss to know what to recommend.

“Many people are calling loved ones on the island to learn their conditions, but have not been successful,” he said Tuesday night. “Not a single one that I know has established contact. There’s a lot of panic in Miami.”

With more than 350,000 Haitians living in Florida, the emotional shock waves from Tuesday’s earthquake have stretched far beyond Hispaniola’s own shores.

In Miami’s Little Haiti district – whose residents have mobilized aid to Haiti so many times before, following tropical storms, mudslides, hurricanes, and floods – the scale of the latest natural disaster brought despair and disbelief, said LaFortune, sending them scuttling to their churches to pray, or gathering around their televisions in shocked silence.

“It’s like there is an omen hanging over Haiti; this is what most Haitians believe,” he said. “It’s like nature has revolted against us. We don’t know what we have done, what crime we have committed for this to happen.”

As president of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition, an umbrella organization made up of 15 community-based and advocacy groups in Miami, LaFortune was set to meet Wednesday morning with the Haitian consul to discuss how Florida’s Haitian diaspora might come to the aid of their countrymen once again by donating food, clothing, money, and manpower. Hopes are that aid organizations already on the ground in Haiti will expedite rescue and recovery efforts.

“We’ll be making an assessment of the needs, but it’s going to be a very complex operation that will have to be put in place to bring some kind of relief to the victims. Our hands are going to be very, very full,” he said.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Miami set up an immediate appeal for donations and planned a special mass at the Cathedral of St. Mary this morning, to pray for victims of the earthquake. Among those due to attend were students of the cathedral school, which serves the Haitian community in North East Miami-Dade.

Many headed immediately last night to Notre Dame D'Haiti, a church considered the heartbeat of Miami’s Haitian community. Miami Mayor Tomas Regalado joined them. “We feel their pain,” he said, adding that city firefighters trained in search and rescue techniques stood ready to be dispatched to the disaster zone if asked to go.

At WLQY radio station, listeners called in to plead for news or to share their accounts of loved ones lost. Between bulletins, radio host Marc Jendy dialed his elderly mother in Port-au-Prince over and over, burying his head in his hands as the telephone line came up dead.

Past relief efforts for Haiti – including in 2008, when four hurricanes hit in succession – have failed to unite all sectors of the Haitian-American community in south Florida, says LaFortune.

“In Miami we have two Haitian communities living side by side but mutually exclusive of each other. There are the well-to-do, those you don’t see in times of crisis, [and] then there are the others,” he said. “We are hoping that this time, they can all come out and share the pain, share the suffering, do what is right by their homeland and get involved.”