FILE – In this Nov. 2, 2011 file photo, Connecticut Light & Power workers tend to a high voltage power line in Windsor Locks, Conn. Over 90% of the town has been without power since the Oct. 29, 2011 snowstorm. Tens of thousands of Connecticut residents went to bed wondering whether they would awake Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, to find themselves among an unenviable fraternity: the small percentage of people entering their second week without power.(AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)

FILE – In this Nov. 2, 2011 file photo, Connecticut Light & Power workers tend to a high voltage power line in Windsor Locks, Conn. Over 90% of the town has been without power since the Oct. 29, 2011 snowstorm. Tens of thousands of Connecticut residents went to bed wondering whether they would awake Monday, Nov. 7, 2011, to find themselves among an unenviable fraternity: the small percentage of people entering their second week without power.(AP Photo/Jessica Hill, File)

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) ? Businesses big and small have taken a beating from the power outages caused by the record-setting October snowstorm and the losses are only beginning to be tallied, owners and experts said Monday as tens of thousands of Connecticut homes and companies entered a second week without electricity.

“I think there’s going to be a huge trickle-down effect and we may not know the results for several months,” said Andy Markowski, Connecticut director for the National Federation of Independent Business. “I don’t know of any small business that can afford to lose a week or more of sales. … We’re just literally and figuratively beginning to pick up the pieces.”

The Oct. 29-30 storm dumped heavy snow across the Northeast and downed scores of trees and utility wires. Three million homes and businesses lost power at the height of the storm.

Connecticut was hit the hardest, racking up more than 830,000 outages, and more than 37,000 utility customers remained in the dark Monday. New Jersey utilities said everyone was back on line, while Massachusetts power companies were working to restore electricity to about 300 customers.

The storm also is affecting municipal elections Tuesday in Connecticut, where nine cities and towns were moving and consolidating their polling places. Secretary of the State Denise Merrill said some polling locations do not yet have electricity while others have been damaged or are being used as shelters and warming centers.

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has called the duration of the outages unacceptable and has launched an independent probe of the utilities’ response. He said the state is keeping its legal options open in case there are grounds for recourse in the courts once the circumstances are examined.

When asked how he planned to hold the utilities accountable for the slow recovery response, as he has promised, the governor said it will be through the state’s regulatory process.

“We can bring dockets and ask for things to happen with respect to how they conduct their business and what way they conduct their business and what they recover losses for, for instance,” said the governor, who said he presumed that the investigation of Connecticut Light and Power, the state’s largest utility, would uncover “some degree of malfeasance” and could lead to legal action by the state.

Some homes and businesses weren’t expected to get their power back until Wednesday night.

No power and no water meant no work for Angela Campetti, who runs a small house-cleaning business in Simsbury, Conn. All 10,100 electricity customers in the town were without power for several days and nearly half still weren’t restored by Monday.

Campetti said she lost a significant amount of money because of the outages and hasn’t been able to pay herself or her two employees at First Class Housekeeping.

“I’m not very happy,” she said. “All the houses I was supposed to clean the power was out and my employees weren’t able to go out and clean. You can’t go in there with your vacuum.”

The outages have affected a wide variety of companies, Markowski said, including small machine shops, home-based businesses and restaurants that were hit with the double whammy of losing sales and having to throw out food.

Peter Gioia, an economist at the Connecticut Business and Industry Association, said large companies also took big hits to their revenues. Though some businesses such as tree trimming and gas stations did well during the extended outages, many others were forced to shut, he said.

“The net effect is a minus,” Gioia said.

He added that the CBIA’s incoming email and website visits were down 50 percent during the week when power was out, reflecting that many businesses were not open.

Insurance agents, meanwhile, are reporting higher volumes of claims for business interruption insurance than what was submitted during hurricanes Irene and Lee, said Dan Corbin, director of research at Glenmont, N.Y.-based Professional Insurance Agents.

Business interruption insurance could include payments for lost profit and extra expenses such as moving to a different site that has electricity. To make a claim, the insured must prove property damage.

Insurance typically pays for continuing expenses such as rent or mortgage payments, payroll to avoid laying off workers and replacements of perishable goods, Corbin said.

One place that was not affected was the mall in Manchester, Conn.

General Manager Nancy Murray said that because The Shoppes at Buckland Hills are served by underground wires, they did not lose power and became a magnet for people in search of food, heat and power to charge cellphones and other equipment.

“It especially affected people the first Sunday,” she said. “We were packed that day.”

___

Associated Press Writer Susan Haigh contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/apdefault/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2011-11-07-US-October-Storm/id-58d5b30513834cf096c0e7abaf03c8fd

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MOSCOW ? Russian military officers flew to North Korea for talks about renewing military ties on Monday as North Korean leader Kim Jong Il’s armored train rolled through the resource-rich far east of Russia on his secretive journey to a summit with President Dmitry Medvedev.

Kim is to meet Medvedev later this week near Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia during his first visit to his country’s Cold War ally in nine years. North Korea is increasingly showing signs it is prepared to restart six-nation disarmament talks in exchange for aid, after more than a year of tension during which it shelled a South Korean border island and allegedly torpedoed a South Korean warship.

Russian military officials arrived in the North Korean capital on Monday for a five-day visit, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported from Pyongyang. The Russian Defense Ministry said the talks will focus on the renewal of military cooperation between the countries, possible joint exercises “of a humanitarian nature” and an exchange of friendly visits by Russian and North Korean ships.

Russia and North Korea also will discuss “possibilities of joint exercises and training of search and rescue operations for sinking vessels as well as providing assistance to people during natural disasters.”

Military expert Alexander Golts said North Korea’s goal in inviting the Russian military could be to assuage fears of instability as Russia is considering building a natural gas pipeline through North Korea. The pipeline is expected to be one of the main topics of Kim and Medvedev’s talks.

Golts said it was highly unlikely Russia would renew arms sales to North Korea, which would not be in its interests as a participant in the six-party talks. He also noted the low level of the Russian delegation, which is led by the commander of Russia’s eastern military district.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that Russia ? as “a partner in the six-party talks” shares the view we all have: “In order to get back to the talks, we need an improvement in North-South relations, and we need the DPRK to show concrete steps towards denuclearization.”

She said that “one would hope and expect that if we have the leader in Russia, that these points are being made to him.”

Kim’s train crossed into Russia on Saturday morning and passed through Khabarovsk before heading west along a railway running roughly parallel with Russia’s borders with China and Mongolia. The itinerary for his visit, expected to last about a week, has been largely kept secret because of what appear to be North Koreans’ high security concerns.

The first and so far only time Kim is known to have gotten off the train was during a stop Sunday at the small Bureya station in the Amur province. Flags of the two countries fluttered at the railway station, while a military band played welcoming music and Russian women in national dress offered Kim traditional gifts of bread and salt.

Kim then was taken in his armored Mercedes for a tour of a hydroelectric power plant and its 139-meter (456-foot) dam on the Bureya River. He was briefed on the plant’s history and electricity production capacity and praised the enormous building, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported from Pyongyang.

“Inexhaustible is the strength of the Russian people,” Kim wrote in the visitor’s book, KCNA said.

Russia has proposed transmitting surplus electricity produced by the Amur plant to both North and South Korea, South Korean media have reported.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, while on a visit to Mongolia, said Monday that “if (Kim) frequently visits and looks at an open society, that will eventually positively affect North Korea’s economic development,” spokesman Park Jeong-ha said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.

A Russian regional news agency, PortAmur, posted some of the only photographs of Kim’s visit, showing the 69-year-old leader wearing his trademark Mao-style khaki jumpsuit. In all but one of the photographs he is seen wearing dark sunglasses. He traded them for regular eyeglasses when presented with a framed picture as a gift.

The Amur.info news website reported Monday that people living near the Bureya rail station were told to stay away from windows and prohibited from taking pictures. The local residents, however, were grateful for the makeover of the station’s square, which was newly paved for Kim’s visit, the website said.

Kim’s next stop was unclear. Yonhap, however, citing an unidentified Russian intelligence source, reported Monday that the North Korean leader’s train could be heading toward the city of Skovorodino.

Skovorodino is the starting point for a 600-mile (1,000-kilometer) oil pipeline linking oil fields of eastern Siberia and China that was inaugurated last year. Yonhap said Kim’s expected stop at Skovorodino could be related to Russia’s proposal to provide energy to the Korean peninsula.

Kim’s train is traveling along the Trans-Baikal Railway and believed to be headed for Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, a Buddhist province near Lake Baikal, for the summit with Medvedev.

There were signs that preparations were being made for Kim to visit the village of Turka, located on the shores of Lake Baikal. The Baikal Daily website quoted residents as saying that a local police officer has been making the rounds to take down the names and addresses of all the people in the village.

One key topic for Medvedev and Kim’s talks is expected to be the construction of a pipeline that would stream Russian natural gas through the North’s territory to the South. South Korea media said the North could earn up to $100 million every year, but negotiations haven’t reported much progress because of the nuclear dispute.

Officials from Russia’s state-controlled natural gas giant Gazprom visited North Korea in early July for talks on the gas pipeline. North Korean officials at the time reacted positively to the project, a change from a previous reluctant position, according to South Korea’s Foreign Ministry.

The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper, however, raised worries Monday that the North could abruptly shut down the gas supply depending on relations with the South.

“As long as there is the possibility that the gas supply would be interrupted by the North for political or military reasons, it is difficult for Seoul to put a final stamp on the deal,” the paper said in an editorial.

North Korean diplomats separately met U.S. and South Korean officials last month to discuss the resumption of the nuclear talks, which have been stalled for more than two years.

Russia announced Friday that it was providing food assistance, including some 50,000 tons of wheat, to the North, which might face another food crisis this year due to heavy rains.

Kim traveled to China in May in a trip seen by many as an attempt to secure aid, investment and support for a transfer of power to his youngest son Kim Jong Un. It was Kim’s third visit to his country’s closest ally in just over a year.

Kim last visited Russia in 2002, a four-day trip limited to the Far East. A year earlier, however, he made a 24-day train trek across the country to Moscow and back.

___

Hyung-jin Kim reported from Seoul, South Korea.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110822/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_nkorea

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