New York City’s transit chief called Hurricane Sandy the most “devastating” event to the city’s subway system ever while the rest of the city reeled from the storm early Tuesday morning. As of Monday night, seven subway tunnels under the East River had flooded, as did the Queens Midtown Tunnel—and Metropolitan Transit Authority chairman Joseph Lhota said there is “no firm timeline” for when the system would be back up and running, even as nearly every bridge and tunnel out of Manhattan was closed down. A backup electrical system failed New York University Medical Center, one of the city’s best hospitals, forcing the evacuation all 215 patients in the strong wind gusts. Meanwhile, a six-alarm fire at Breezy Point in southern Queens had destroyed 50 houses, with 198 firefighters fighting the blaze.

The lights are out all over the East Coast, after the superstorm Sandy ravaged the mid-Atlantic power grid Monday night. An estimated 8 million homes are reported without power. Hundreds of thousands of those homes are in New York City, where electrical provider ConEdison preemptively shut several circuits to lower Manhattan and transformers exploded, leaving the skyline eerily dark. Central New Jersey Power & Light and Public Service Enterprise Group reported at least 620,000 customers were without power in the Garden State, while the Long Island Power Authority put its blacked-out customers at roughly 589,000. Hundreds of thousands were also without power in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and throughout the East Coast.

The official death toll in the U.S. from the superstorm Sandy hit 13 early Tuesday morning, with five of those deaths in New York City alone. Outside the U.S., one person was killed in Canada and 67 in the Caribbean, including 51 in Haiti. The storm weakened as it made its way west through the U.S., but still dropped three to four inches of snow in West Virginia, where one storm chaser called it a “nor’easter on steroids.” Wind and rain also damaged the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. As of 5 a.m. Tuesday, the storm was centered about 90 miles west of Philadelphia, with winds of about 65 miles per hour.

The famed Atlantic City boardwalk was flooded Tuesday morning, hours after the storm made landfall nearby at 8 p.m. on Monday night. “The city is under siege,” said Thomas Foley, the chief of the city’s emergency management. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” At least two deaths in the city were blamed on the storm. While the casinos’ lights still shone, winds whipped by at 80 miles per hour while water washed into the city’s streets, trapping anyone who had stayed. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie lashed out at Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford on Monday, with the governor saying he could not “in good conscience send rescuers in” since the mayor had told residents they could stay if they could not find a way to leave.

Haiti still reeled on Tuesday from the effects of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the country with three days of rain and killed 51 people so far, the highest death toll of any country. The United Nations warned that flooding and unsanitary conditions could lead to a cholera epidemic, two years after a cholera epidemic in 2010 sickened 600,000 people and killed more than 7,400. Crops were also wiped out by the storm, with Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe saying the hurricane had been devastating “even by international standards,” and the country would be making an appeal for emergency aid.

Hurricane Sandy brought the financial world to its knees as well, with the stock market closing Tuesday, for the second straight day, in the aftermath of the hurricane. Wall Street worried about whether the markets will open by Wednesday, the last day of trading for the month of October,— when traders price portfolios. Economists said the massive storm is unlikely to cause financial damage as severe as 2005’’s Hurricane Katrina, and the damage to the economy should be short-lived. But, economists warned, gross domestic product in the Northeast is about $2.5 trillion, and every day the region is shut down could cost about $10 billion in forgone output.

Twin blasts rocked Damascus on Monday, with activists saying at least 80 people were killed on that day alone—, bringing an official end to an attempted four-day ceasefire where at least 500 people were reportedly killed. In Damascus, 11 people were estimated to have been killed in a bomb blast at a bakery, with another 10 reportedly dying in a bus explosion that Syrian government forces blamed on “terrorists.” Activists also said there were at least 60 government air strikes on Monday, making it the most intense air raids since the crackdown began 19 months ago.

In a 2005 video that recently resurfaced, Mitt Romney is seen saying that same-sex parental rights are “wrong”—, although he said earlier in 2012 that gay couples should be allowed to adopt, just not marry. The Boston Globe reported last week that while Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he tried to prevent a state agency from creating new birth-certificate forms that would allow both same-sex parents to be listed as parents of their children. And in the 2005 video, Romney touts this effort and says same-sex parents are “not right on paper and not right in fact. Every child has the right to a mother and a father.”

Swiss bank UBS announced on Tuesday that it will wind down its fixed-income business over the next three years and shed 10,000 bankers. The bank will focus its efforts on its private bank and a smaller investment bank—, abandoning much of its trading business that accounted for nearly $50 billion in losses sine the financial crisis began. Of the job cuts, 2,000 will be from the front-office investment-banking staff with 2,500 of the total cuts occurring in Zurich and the rest in New York and London. The bank’’s shares soared on Monday in anticipation of the announcement.

No time for jokes in New York City. The massive Hurricane Sandy caused late-night comedy shows to cancel their performances on Monday night, and even Jimmy Kimmel canceled his much-touted Barclays’ Center performance. David Letterman made the best use of the phrase “The show must go on,”” taping his show but without the live studio audience. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both canceled tapings, and there was no word yet whether they would resume on Tuesday. Journey’’s Barclay’s Center performance, scheduled for Tuesday, was canceled, and the benefit concert Freedom to Love Now! was postponed to spring 2013.