"It's going to be a long 72 hours, and obviously a lot of families are going to be affected. The biggest concern I'm having right now has to do with flooding and power. It sounds like that's going to be an
enormous
strain."
The storm is expected to hit New York City on Sunday. From Manhattan, Steve Kingstone reports.
Here in New York, 300,000 people have been told to leave their homes. It's part of an
unprecedented
evacuation order, which takes in this area - Battery Park City at the very southern tip of Manhattan; Wall Street is just a few blocks away. I'm seeing boats in the marina being
tether
ed up. And the working assumption of the city authorities is that when Irene really hits New York on Sunday morning, these low-lying areas could flood.
A senior United States official has said the second-in-command of al-Qaeda has been killed in Pakistan. The official was speaking
anonymously
to reporters. Last month, the US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said America was within reach of defeating al-Qaeda by targeting its leaders. Marcus George reports from Washington.
The unnamed official said that Atiyah Abd al-Rahman was killed five days ago in the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan. There's no word on how he died, but it's likely to have been the result of a strike from an unmanned drone. The official described the Libyan national as a key figure in directing al-Qaeda's operations, saying he'd become the organisation's second-in-command. It was a tremendous loss, he said, coming so soon after the death of Osama Bin Laden.