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Auntie Irene came to see you this weekend, but you were too busy locking yourself away and getting drunk with your housemates to notice.

The world wondered why America made such a fuss about Hurricane Irene


How Hurricane Irene may have looked if the planet's weather systems were controlled by Michael Bay (via)
It's currently believed that at least 44 people lost their lives as a direct consequence of Hurricane Irene this weekend.

That figure's not as high as the US government had imagined it might be, and the storm has already started to wind down somewhere over Canada, but it's hard to see why the American authorities are being criticised for overreacting given the nation's recent history.

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In New York, mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to force 300,000 people from their homes and shut down the subway system. Other cities in the creeping path of the 400-mile wide hurricane abandoned their transport networks, too, and the US military were put on special alert.

"Time is running out," Bloomberg said as the bad weather drew nearer. "If you haven't left you should leave now. Not later this evening, not this afternoon, immediately."

But by the time Irene arrived in New York, she had been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm. Though a shit-ton of rain fell on the city, winds had dropped to around 65mph.

15 people died in New York, and power lines and trees were blown down. Other places got it, too: as Irene swept up from the Caribbean, it killed one in Puerto Rico, seven in the Dominican Republic and two in Haiti.

Across the States, another 20 or so lost their lives, as North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Jersey (RIP your house, Skid Row guy) and Pennysylvania took a hammering. Businesses were fucked over and the repair bills will run high into the single-figure billions at least. In Maryland, the owners of a nuclear plant were forced to switch off their reactor, mindful of the mess this year's tsunami made of Fukushima.

But for Bloomberg and the others whose jobs it is to deal with this sort of thing, a disaster closer to home was obviously in mind. A repeat of Katrina never came to fruition, but though the writer here has a point, it's hard to knock people for overestimating (or even overstating) Irene's threat when more than 1,800 people were killed and New Orleans ruined around this time six years ago.

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Wanna find out what else happened this weekend? Continue to page two.

No-one rioted or went on the loot at Notting Hill Carnival

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Though there was a stabbing.

Colonel Gaddafi's family have been running around a lot

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The last time someone saw them was in Algeria.

Something else happened, but I'm not sure what

(via)
But I'm positive it took place in one of hell's darkest corners.

MAC HACKETT