Blizzard Drops 2 Feet of Snow on Northeast

A behemoth storm packing hurricane-force wind gusts and blizzard conditions swept through the Northeast on Saturday, dumping more than 2 feet of snow on New England and knocking out power to 650,000 homes and businesses.

More than 28 inches of snow had fallen on central Connecticut by early Saturday, and areas of southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire notched 2 feet or more of snow — with more falling. Airlines scratched more than 5,300 flights through Saturday, and New York City's three major airports and Boston's Logan Airport closed.

The wind-whipped snowstorm mercifully arrived at the start of a weekend, which meant fewer cars on the road and extra time for sanitation crews to clear the mess before commuters in the New York-to-Boston region of roughly 25 million people have to go back to work. But it also could mean a weekend cooped up indoors.

For a group of stranded European business travelers, it meant making the best of downtime in a hotel restaurant Friday night in downtown Boston, where snow blew outside and drifted several inches deep on the sidewalks.

The six Santander bank employees found their flights back to Spain canceled, and they gave up on seeing the city or having dinner out.

AP Photo/Standard Times, Peter Pereira

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"We are not believing it," said Tommaso Memeghini, 29, an Italian who lives in Barcelona. "We were told it may be the biggest snowstorm in the last 20 years."

The National Weather Service says up to 3 feet of snow is expected in Boston, threatening the city's 2003 record of 27.6 inches. A wind gust of 76 mph was recorded at Logan Airport.

In heavily Catholic Boston, the archdiocese urged parishioners to be prudent about attending Sunday Mass and reminded them that, under church law, the obligation "does not apply when there is grave difficulty in fulfilling this obligation."

Halfway through what had been a mild winter across the Northeast, blizzard warnings were posted from parts of New Jersey to Maine. The National Weather Service said Boston could get close to 3 feet of snow by Saturday evening, while most of Rhode Island could receive more than 2 feet, most of it falling overnight Friday into Saturday. Connecticut was bracing for 2 feet, and New York City was expecting as much as 14 inches.

Early snowfall was blamed for a 19-car pileup in Cumberland, Maine, that caused minor injuries. In New York, hundreds of cars began getting stuck on the Long Island Expressway on Friday afternoon at the beginning of the snowstorm and dozens of motorists remained disabled early Saturday as police worked to free them.

About 650,000 customers in the Northeast lost power during the height of the snowstorm, most of them in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Mass., lost electricity and shut down Friday night during the storm. Authorities say there's no threat to public safety.

At least four deaths were being blamed on the storm, three in Canada and one in New York. In southern Ontario, an 80-year-old woman collapsed while shoveling her driveway and two men were killed in car crashes. In New York, a 74-year-old man died after being struck by a car in Poughkeepsie; the driver said she lost control in the snowy conditions, police said.

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Berlusconi fraud trial delayed until after election

ROME: An Italian court on Friday ruled to postpone Silvio Berlusconi's appeal against a tax fraud conviction until after the election on February 24-25 following a request from lawyers for the scandal-tainted former premier.

Prosecutors will present their final arguments against the business tycoon at a hearing on March 1 and the final verdict is expected on March 23.

Berlusconi, who is running for a parliamentary seat in the vote, was convicted in October last year for fraud linked to his business empire Mediaset.

He was sentenced to one year prison and given a five-year ban from holding public office.

The sentence has been suspended pending his appeal.

Berlusconi's lawyers said their client planned to make a speech at the hearing on March 1.

The 76-year-old media tycoon and three-time prime minister, who has been a central figure in Italian politics for two decades, has been involved in dozens of court cases.

All previous convictions against him have either been overturned on appeal or the trials have expired under the statute of limitations.

Berlusconi is also a defendant in another trial for having sex with an underage prostitute and abusing the powers of his office when he was prime minister.

In both trials, Berlusconi's lawyers have argued the court cases should be suspended because he cannot attend hearings during the campaign.

A verdict in the sex trial is expected after the election.

-AFP/fl

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Govt attacks CAG Vinod Rai for criticizing it on foreign soil

CHENNAI: Slamming the CAG for criticizing the government on foreign soil, information and broadcasting minister Manish Tewari on Friday said constitutional authorities should circumscribe by lakshman rekha propriety.

"... it is most unfortunate that C and AG rather than validating the integrity of his numbers (on 2G presumptive loss of Rs 1.76 lakh crore) chooses to criticize the Government on foreign soil and at a foreign fora," Manish Tewari told reporters here.

He was responding to questions about CAG Vinod Rai's remarks at Harvard Kennedy School on Thursday rebutting criticism that he was exceeding the mandate and saying that the auditor was treading a "new path in the belief that the final stakeholder is the public at large".

"... The question is about the integrity of numbers. Our question to Mr C and AG, where is the 1.76 lakh crore (loss), still continues to hang in the air," Tewari said.

He said this was not the first time he (the CAG) had done it (criticizing the government). "And this is not the first time that he has done it, I think constitutional authorities, you know, should circumscribe by the lakshman rekha propriety."

Delivering a lecture at the Harvard Kennedy, Rai, whose reports on various scams had raised hackles of those in government, had said the CAG would endeavour to uncover instances of crony capitalism and counselled the government to support enterprises per se and not entrepreneurs.

"We may not be able to wipe out corruption, but our endeavour is to uncover instances of crony capitalism. Government should be seen to support enterprise per se and not particular entrepreneurs," Rai, who has come under government criticism for reports on various scams like in telecom and coal, said.

Asked about European Union raising the issue of accountability for 2002 Gujarat riots, Tewari said he wondered why chief minister Narendra Modi could not stand up and take responsibility as it happened under his watch rather than India being subjected to these homilies from foreign diplomats." I think, there is a certain ignominy attached to it."

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Asteroid to Make Closest Flyby in History

Talk about too close for comfort. In a rare cosmic encounter, an asteroid will barnstorm Earth next week, missing our planet by a mere 17,200 miles (27,700 kilometers).

Designated 2012 DA14, the space rock is approximately 150 feet (45 meters) across, and astronomers are certain it will zip harmlessly past our planet on February 15—but not before making history. It will pass within the orbits of many communications satellites, making it the closest flyby on record. (Read about one of the largest asteroids to fly by Earth.)

"This is indeed a remarkably close approach for an asteroid this size," said Paul Chodas, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Earth Object (NEO) program office in Pasadena, California.

"We estimate that an asteroid of this size passes this close to the Earth only once every few decades."

The giant rock—half a football field wide—was first spotted by observers at the La Sagra Observatory in southern Spain a year ago, soon after it had just finished making a much more distant pass of the Earth at 2.6 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) away.

This time around however, on February15 at 2:24 pm EST, the asteroid will be passing uncomfortably close—ten times closer than the orbit of the moon—flying over the eastern Indian Ocean near Sumatra (map). (Watch: "Moon 101.")

Future Impact?

Chodas and his team have been keeping a close eye on the cosmic intruder, and orbital calculations of its trajectory show that there is no chance for impact.

But the researchers have not yet ruled out future chances of a collision. This is because asteroids of this size are too faint to be detected until they come quite close to the Earth, said Chodas.

"There is still a tiny chance that it might hit us on some future passage by the Earth; for example there is [a] 1-in-200,000 chance that it could hit us in the year 2080," he said.

"But even that tiny chance will probably go away within the week, as the asteroid's orbit gets tracked with greater and greater accuracy and we can eliminate that possibility."

Earth collision with an object of this size is expected to occur every 1,200 years on average, said Donald Yeomans, NEO program manager, at a NASA news conference this week.

DA14 has been getting closer and closer to Earth for quite a while—but this is the asteroid's closest approach in the past hundred years. And it probably won't get this close again for at least another century, added Yeomans.

While no Earth impact is possible next week, DA14 will pass 5,000 miles inside the ring of orbiting geosynchronous weather and communications satellites; so all eyes are watching the space rock's exact trajectory. (Learn about the history of satellites.)

"It's highly unlikely they will be threatened, but NASA is working with satellite providers, making them aware of the asteroid's pass," said Yeomans.

Packing a Punch

Experts say an impact from an object this size would have the explosive power of a few megatons of TNT, causing localized destruction—similar to what occurred in Siberia in 1908.

In what's known as the "Tunguska event," an asteroid is thought to have created an airburst explosion which flattened about 750 square miles (1,200 square kilometers) of a remote forested region in what is now northern Russia (map).

In comparison, an impact from an asteroid with a diameter of about half a mile (one kilometer) could temporarily change global climate and kill millions of people if it hit a populated area.

Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that while small objects like DA14 could hit Earth once a millennia or so, the largest and most destructive impacts have already been catalogued.

"Objects of the size that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs have all been discovered," said Spahr. (Learn about what really happened to the dinosaurs.)

A survey of nearly 9,500 near-Earth objects half a mile (one kilometer) in diameter is nearly complete. Asteroid hunters expect to complete nearly half of a survey of asteroids several hundred feet in diameter in the coming years.

"With the existing assets we have, discovering asteroids rapidly and routinely, I continue to expect the world to be safe from impacts in the future," added Spahr.

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Door-to-Door Search for Suspected Cop Killer

More than 100 police officers were going door-to-door and searching for new tracks in the snow in hopes of catching suspected cop-killer Christopher Dorner overnight in Big Bear Lake, Calif., before he strikes again, as laid out in his rambling online manifesto.

Police late Thursday night alerted the residents near Big Bear Lake that Dorner was still on the loose after finding his truck burning earlier in the day.

San Bernardino County Sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Bachman said authorities can't say for certain that he's not in the area. More than half of the 400 homes in the area had been searched by police as of late Thursday. Police traveled in two-man teams.

Bachman urged people in the area not to answer the door, unless they know the person or see a law enforcement officer in uniform.

After discovering Dorner's burning truck near a Bear Mountain ski resort, police discovered tracks in the snow leading away from the vehicle. The truck has been taken to the San Bernardino County Sheriffs' crime lab.

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Bachman would not comment on Dorner's motive for leaving the car or its contents, citing the ongoing investigation. Police are not aware of Dorner's having any ties to others in the area.

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She added that the search in the area would continue as long as the weather cooperates. About three choppers were being used overnight, but weather conditions were deteriorating, according to Bachman.

"He could be anywhere at this point," said San Bernardino County Sheriff John McMahon, who is expected to address the media later this morning.

Dorner, 33, a former Los Angeles police officer and Navy reservist, is suspected of killing one police officer and injured two others Thursday morning in Riverside, Calif. He was also accused of killing two civilians Sunday. And he allegedly released an angry "manifesto" airing grievances against police and warning of coming violence toward cops.

In the manifesto Dorner published online, he threatened at least 12 people by name, along with their families.
"Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family," Dorner wrote in his manifesto.

One passage from the manifesto read, "I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty."

"I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," it read. "I'm terminating yours."

Hours after the extensive manhunt dragged police to Big Bear Lake, CNN's Anderson Cooper said Dorner had sent him a package at his New York office that arrived Feb. 1, although Cooper said he never knew about the package until Thursday. It contained a DVD of court testimony, with a Post-It note signed by Dorner claiming, "I never lied! Here is my vindication."

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It also contained a keepsake coin bearing the name of former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton that came wrapped in duct tape, Cooper said. The duct tape bore the note, "Thanks, but no thanks Will Bratton."

Bratton told Cooper on his program, "Anderson Cooper 360," that he believed he gave Dorner the coin as he was headed overseas for the Navy, Bratton's practice when officers got deployed abroad. Though a picture has surfaced of Bratton, in uniform, and Dorner, in fatigues, shaking hands, Bratton told Cooper he didn't recall Dorner or the meeting.

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Top Clinton aide headed to Georgetown University

Melanne Verveer
(Mandel Ngan - AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Team Hillary is decamping from Foggy Bottom.

Melanne Verveer, one of the former secretary of state’s closest pals and her chief of staff in the Clinton White House years, is leaving Friday to run Georgetown University’s new Institute on Women, Peace and Security.

President Obama appointed Verveer in 2009 to be the first-ever ambassador-at- large for global women’s issues, an area of particular focus and concern for Clinton. Verveer visited some 60 countries to promote women’s economic and political participation, including garden spots like Afghanistan and the violence-torn, not-so-Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Her husband, top communications lawyer Phil Verveer, left his job at State last week, where he’d been coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy. He’s said to be mulling his options.

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WP's call to freeze foreign manpower growth will hurt S'poreans: Tan Chuan-Jin

SINGAPORE: Acting Manpower Minister Tan Chuan-Jin has said that the opposition Workers' Party's proposal for a zero-foreign manpower growth in this decade, when put in practice, will hurt Singaporeans.

Speaking in Parliament on Thursday on the Population White Paper, Mr Tan noted that in fact, the strategies outlined in the paper has opted for slower growth and a significant reduction in the foreign labour force numbers.

He noted Singapore cannot continue on the same growth trajectory as before but what it needs to decide on is the pace of growth that will bring benefits to citizens.

And in achieving this, he said the country will need to transit carefully.

Mr Tan said the Workers' Party's decision to freeze the foreign labour force growth rate immediately is an "alarming" one.

He also asked for details on how the opposition party proposes to keep the foreign workforce growth rate at 1 per cent for the next decade, especially when there are limits to how much the resident labour force participation rate can grow, with an ageing population.

Mr Tan also rejected the Workers' Party's proposal that the government could dip into the country's reserves to help fund the productivity efforts of businesses.

He said the government needs to be careful when dealing with the reserves and that this "is not a rainy day".

"Singaporeans have also indicated a desire to slow down because they feel that pace of growth, because we have crossed that physical and social threshold. We cannot continue on as before. We can't.

"And we are also at a stage, from a profile perspective, different stage of economic development. This is where we need to change in terms of the direction we are going. So the White Paper is the product of this desire to get it right and chart the course for the future," Mr Tan said.

- CNA/ck

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DMK leader Kushboo's house in Chennai attacked by party workers

CHENNAI: Actor-turned politician Kushboo's house was attacked by her own partymen after a Tamil magazine, which carried her remarks about party's heir-apparent and DMK treasurer MK Stalin, hit the stands on Thursday.

The Chennai police said about 25 DMK youth wing cadres gathered in front of Kushboo's residence in Santhome in the city and raised slogans against her.

Later they threw stones at her house, damaging the window panes and a car parked in the portico.

At the time of the attack, the actor and her husband Sundar were not in the house. She was away in Trichy to attend the marriage function of DMK Rajya Sabha MP Siva's daughter. Some cadres also protested in front of the Trichy hotel where she was staying.

"We cannot say who is responsible for the attack now. Only after police investigation, we can say definitely who is behind the attack," Kushboo told reporters in Trichy.

In an interview to a Tamil weekly, Kushboo, when asked about Stalin's possible elevation within the DMK, said the party general council will choose a successor and just because DMK chief M Karunanidhi announced Stalin as his successor, it cannot be taken as the final word.

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Humans Swap DNA More Readily Than They Swap Stories

Jane J. Lee

Once upon a time, someone in 14th-century Europe told a tale of two girls—a kind one who was rewarded for her manners and willingness to work hard, and an unkind girl who was punished for her greed and selfishness.

This version was part of a long line of variations that eventually spread throughout Europe, finding their way into the Brothers Grimm fairytales as Frau Holle, and even into Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. (Watch a video of the Frau Holle fairytale.)

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it's much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

The study, published February 5 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that about 9 percent of the variation in the tale of the two girls occurred between ethnolinguistic groups. Previous studies looking at the genetic diversity across groups in Europe found levels of variation less than one percent.

For example, there's a part of the story in which the girls meet a witch who asks them to perform some chores. In different renditions of the tale, the meeting took place by a river, at the bottom of a well, or in a cave. Other versions had the girls meeting with three old men or the Virgin Mary, said Atkinson.

Conformity

Researchers have viewed human culture through the lens of genetics for decades, said Atkinson. "It's a fair comparison in the sense that it's just variation across human groups."

But unlike genes, which move into a population relatively easily and can propagate randomly, it's harder for new ideas to take hold in a group, he said. Even if a tale can bridge the "ethnolinguistic boundary," there are still forces that might work against a new cultural variation that wouldn't necessarily affect genes.

"Humans don't copy the ideas they hear randomly," Atkinson said. "We don't just choose ... the first story we hear and pass it on.

"We show what's called a conformist bias—we'll tend to aggregate across what we think everyone else in the population is doing," he explained. If someone comes along and tells a story a little differently, most likely, people will ignore those differences and tell the story like everyone else is telling it.

"That makes it more difficult for new ideas to come in," Atkinson said.

Cultural Boundaries

Atkinson and his colleagues found that if two versions of the folktale were found only six miles (ten kilometers) away from each other but came from different ethnolinguistic groups, such as the French and the Germans, then those versions were as different from each other as two versions taken from within the same group—say just the Germans—located 62 miles (100 kilometers) away from each other.

"To me, the take-home message is that cultural groups strongly constrain the flow of information, and this enables them to develop highly local cultural traditions and norms," said Mark Pagel, of the University of Reading in the U.K., who wasn't involved in the new study.

Pagel, who studies the evolution of human behavior, said by email that he views cultural groups almost like biological species. But these groups, which he calls "cultural survival vehicles," are more powerful in some ways than our genes.

That's because when immigrants from a particular cultural group move into a new one, they bring genetic diversity that, if the immigrants have children, get mixed around, changing the new population's gene pool. But the new population's culture doesn't necessarily change.

Atkinson plans to keep using the tools of the population-genetics trade to see if the patterns he found in the variations of the kind and unkind girls hold true for other folktale variants in Europe and around the world.

Humans do a lot of interesting things, Atkinson said. "[And] the most interesting things aren't coded in our DNA."

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Chris Christie's Struggle and the Politics of Weight

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's weight is back in the spotlight this week. On Monday he joined in on the fat jokes with David Letterman, even munching on a doughnut; on Tuesday he seriously addressed his struggles at a press conference.

The usually tough-talking 50-year-old Republican openly acknowledged that he may have good health right now, but his "doctor continues to warn me that my luck is going to run out relatively soon, so believe me, it's something I'm very conscious of."

"If you talk to anybody in this room who has struggled with their weight, what they will tell you is that every month, every year there's a plan … and so the idea that somehow I don't care about this, of course I care about it, and I'm making the best effort I can and sometimes I'm successful and other times I'm not," Christie said at a firehouse Tuesday in Union Beach, N.J.

And with those honest words, an issue that was in the public eye as he contemplated a presidential run in 2012 came roaring back into the spotlight. His communications office even tweeted out the clip from his official @GovChristie Twitter account.

Despite what he claims is good health, he did spend several hours in the hospital in July 2011 after an asthma attack, which he blamed on humidity and high temperatures.

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Christie is far from the only politician who's dealt with a weight issue. Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate, now-Fox News host Mike Huckabee lost over 100 pounds before he ran for president, talking openly and even writing a book about how he went from "zero exercise" to running marathons. President Bill Clinton lost weight in office, but dramatically slimmed down after his heart surgery in 2004, even becoming vegan before his daughter Chelsea's 2010 wedding. Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour once said that it would be clear he was running for president if he lost 40 pounds. Even Dr. Regina Benjamin, President Obama's pick for surgeon general, had to endure criticism that, despite her experience and credentials, she was too overweight for the job.

This past week is hardly the first time Christie has addressed the issue. Last December, in her "10 Most Fascinating People of 2012? ABC News' Barbara Walters, the governor defended his health when he told Walters, "Well, I've done this job pretty well and I think people watched me for the last couple weeks and during Hurricane Sandy doing 18-hour days and getting right back up the next day and still being just as effective, so I don't really think that would be a problem."

Even during his 2009 run for the New Jersey governorship he had to endure his opponent's trying to use his weight against him. Then Gov. Jon Corzine ran an ad that ended with Christie stepping out of a car in slow-motion. The ad also accused him of "throwing his weight around" to get out of a traffic ticket. It was widely panned and political observers, as well as polling, thought it contributed to Corzine's loss.

But politically speaking, the issue may not be as bad as is widely assumed. Two thirds of Americans struggle with their weight and one third are obese. Also, in 2010 political scientist Beth J. Miller and psychologist Jennifer D. Lundgren, of the University of Missouri in Kansas City, published research showing that being overweight did hurt political candidates, but only female ones.

Obese women were evaluated most negatively, but obese men came out well, doing even better than thinner men.

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