All Things Considered

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You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

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The storm on the East Coast is making a devastating impression on New York City. Storm surge coupled with a high tide have swelled the water to record levels in some places that includes Battery Park, and now, reports of flooding in the subway and in automotive tunnels.

NPR's Margot Adler joins us from New York with more details. And, Margot, what can you tell us about these reports of flooding?

Robert Siegel talks with Associated Press correspondent Katie Zezima, who was in Atlantic City, N.J., close to where Sandy made landfall.

Sandy hit the East Coast on Monday and knocked out power for millions of people. Utility companies face major challenges to get power back online after the massive storm.

A poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center shows that President Obama has failed to regain much of the support he lost in the days after the first presidential debate.

The poll shows that among likely voters, the race is now a statistical dead heat with both Obama and Mitt Romney receiving 47 percent support. Among registered voters there is what Pew calls a "statistically insignificant two-point edge" of 47 percent to 45 percent for Obama.

The rest of the government may have been shut down for the hurricane, but not the U.S. Supreme Court.

The justices were in court Monday to consider a challenge to the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The new law broadly expanded the government's ability to conduct large-scale monitoring of international phone calls and emails to and from people in the United States.

Here are a few reasons government forecasters at the National Hurricane Center and emergency management officials are so concerned about Sandy:

1. Sandy is one of the largest hurricanes ever to strike the U.S. Sandy's winds cover an area of more than 1,000 miles in diameter. That's enormous by hurricane standards. So instead of affecting an area a couple of hundred miles across, Sandy will cut a huge swath. That means many millions of people are probably going to be exposed to high winds, heavy rains, and, for those on the coast, powerful storm surge.

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JACKI LYDEN, HOST:

You know what the ticking means. It's time for Three-Minute Fiction, our contest where we ask you for original stories that can be read in about three minutes. Our judge in this round, the thriller writer Brad Meltzer, the challenge: to write a story that revolves around a U.S. president who could be fictional or real. And, of course, the story had to be 600 words or less. We received nearly 4,000 entries, and here are two that stood out.

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