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January 24, 2005Across Northeast, Out Come Shovels and SledsBy ROBERT D. McFADDEN Air travel remained a mess, but highways and many streets were passable, railroads ran mostly on time and New York metropolitan area residents began digging out yesterday as a powerful weekend storm that buried much of the Northeast under a foot or two of snow churned out into the Atlantic. As the trailing edge of the vast storm passed, blue skies and brilliant sunshine broke through the gloom just after noon in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. And as if on cue, battalions of shovelers, sledders, skiers and dog-walkers emerged from a day of hibernation - bundled up against 20-degree cold and 30-mile-an-hour winds - to labor and frolic in the drifts.But with 12 to 18 inches of snow on the ground in New York City and 18 to 21 inches in parts of New Jersey, Long Island and Connecticut, a huge cleanup remained. City officials said the snowplows would be out all night, and the commuter railroads and bus lines for this morning's commute would be near normal, if the hordes that usually drive to work heed the officials' advice to use mass transit.A fire in a subway signal relay room, however, meant that service on the A and C lines, two of the city's busiest, would be suspended or sharply reduced throughout today, transit officials said. Five storm-related deaths were reported in the city, including that of a 10-year-old Brooklyn girl who was struck by a city plow as she played in a snowbank at Wolcott and Richards Streets in Red Hook. The driver, who apparently did not notice the child, drove away and was being sought, the police said. Four other people died, apparently of heart attacks, while shoveling snow, city officials said. A woman was killed by a Long Island Rail Road train at the Malverne station, but it was not clear whether the death was weather-related. New York City schools will be open today, but all after-school programs and field trips have been canceled, said Margie Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the city's Department of Education. Some buses may be canceled or delayed, she noted. In New Jersey and Connecticut, the decision to open late or cancel classes is usually made by individual districts. The morning forecast called for sunshine and temperatures in the 20's.The aftermath of the storm brought a quiet loveliness to the landscape. The snow filled country hollows, painted the corners of windowpanes and left creamy sculptures atop homes and fences. Cars were buried at curbsides by plowed snow or drifts, but owners were told not to worry: The city has suspended alternate-side parking regulations until Saturday.Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University, called the storm memorable but hardly a record-breaker in New York. "This will be in the top five January snowstorms since 1900," he said. January, perhaps because it is the coldest month on average, is less snowy, he noted.As recorded by the National Weather Service, accumulations in the city totaled 13.8 inches in Central Park and up to 17.5 inches in Brooklyn, 15.5 inches in Queens and 17 inches on Staten Island. On Long Island, West Babylon had 19.6 inches, Baiting Hollow 19, the Hamptons 18 and Farmingdale 16.5. In New Jersey, Rutherford in Bergen County and West Milford in Passaic County both had 21 inches. In Connecticut, Old Saybrook had 17 inches, and Milford and Montville Center 18.5 each.The girl killed by the snowplow, identified by the police as Markita Weaver, was sitting atop a large snowdrift waiting for a friend to cross a street when a city plow drove by and struck her about 3 p.m., police and witnesses said. As the driver turned right from Richards Street onto Wolcott Street, he struck the girl and her friend ran to her sister, who was in an apartment nearby, said Paris A. Salley, 23, who lives in the building. He said he came down and saw Markita covered in snow, bleeding from her face."There was blood everywhere," Mr. Salley said.Police and sanitation investigators inspected four snowplows that had covered the area, but found no evidence, the authorities said.In the New York area, it was an air traveler's nightmare. Thousands of passengers were stymied by flight cancellations and delays. All three metropolitan airports - Kennedy International, Newark Liberty International and La Guardia - remained open throughout the storm, but few flights got out, and passengers checked into airport hotels or camped out in airline lounges. More than 1,200 flights were canceled as of 7 p.m. yesterday - 400 at La Guardia, 454 at Newark and 380 at Kennedy - atop the 700 cancellations at the three airports on Saturday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey reported. Even for flights getting out, there were extensive delays at La Guardia. Passengers at home were told it would be folly to go to an airport without checking with their airlines. The AirTrain remained shut down yesterday at both Newark and Kennedy Airports, and travelers relied on buses to take them to terminals. One passenger trying to fly home to Minneapolis, Mark O. Sullivan, said he arrived more than two and a half hours early for his flight, but still missed it because of the long lines to get on the buses."They've had since Saturday night to be ready for this, and they still aren't," Mr. Sullivan said. "There's nobody there who knows what is going on, and there's no other way to get to airplanes."The Long Island Rail Road reported several disruptions, including a morning suspension of service between Great Neck and Port Washington because of a power problem. Service on the Ronkonkoma branch was suspended later for plowing. Brian P. Dolan, a spokesman, predicted a near-normal rush today, with 10- to 15-minute delays. Metro-North Railroad, which normally runs 320 trains on a Sunday, cut service to a quarter of that yesterday, to one train every two hours on most of its lines to keep the fleet in working order - especially the older diesels on the New Haven line - for this morning's commute, said Marjorie Anders, a spokeswoman."It was a conscious and, I believe, prudent decision to limit service during the height of the storm in order to preserve the fleet and prepare for the morning rush tomorrow," she said. The railroad began adding trains about 4 p.m. yesterday and said it would restore full service by this morning, she said.New Jersey Transit, which operates rail and bus services across the state and into Manhattan, noted that Amtrak, which uses some of the same tracks and switches on its Northeast Corridor, was planning to restrict switch movements today. As a result, New Jersey Transit said it would limit its corridor trains to every 15 minutes between 5 and 10 a.m. between Trenton and New York.In addition, it said, diesel trains will be run on the North Jersey Coast Line, and on its Morris and Essex Lines its Midtown Direct service will run to and from Hoboken, where customers may connect to a PATH train for New York. New Jersey Transit trains, buses and light-rail trains were running on or close to schedule yesterday.There were, in retrospect, relatively few power failures in the metropolitan area. The Jersey Central Power and Light Company, serving central and northern New Jersey, reported that about 1,000 customers were briefly without power in scattered areas of Monmouth and Ocean Counties early yesterday. In Connecticut, about 2,200 homes were blacked out.The apparent reason, said Mr. Warner of Penn State, was that the snow was relatively dry. Unlike wet snow, dry flakes are light and fluffy and do not weigh down and snap tree branches and power lines. Dry snow is also easier to shovel and plow. But there is one downside, Mr. Warner noted: It does not make a good, hard-packed snowball.Contributing reporting for this article were Sewell Chan, Anne Farmer, John Holl, Jennifer Medina, Adam Sank and Robin Stein
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today's papersGoodnight, JohnnyBy Sam SchechnerPosted Monday, Jan. 24, 2005, at 5:00 AM PT
The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal world-wide news box all cover the final week before the Iraqi election. The NYT pushes an agreement among prominent Shiite leaders to keep it secular if they win: "There will be no turbans in the government," said one bigwig. "Everyone agrees on that." Another Iraqi Shiite leader said Iran, which has funded several of the Shiite parties, actually counseled against putting clerics in power: "They said it caused too many problems." The WP highlights a supervillainous turn by Abu Musab Zarqawi, who purportedly threatened everyone who participates in the election during a speech posted to a Web site yesterday: "We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology." The LAT goes with an aggressive wave of American raids that have caused the detainee population in Iraq to balloon beyond 8,000. "We want to eliminate as many of these guys as possible to stabilize things for the election," explained a Marine intel officer stationed in still-restive Ramadi. Meanwhile, USA Today stuffs the election and leads with the Navy and Air Force far outpacing their recruiting goals this year, in stark contrast to the struggling Army and Marine Corps. One explanation: Out of the approximately 1,370 troops killed so far during the Iraq war, only 41 have come from the Air Force or Navy.
The NYT off-leads its follow-up on yesterday's big WP story on the existence of a shadowy new military spy unit, which Sen. John McCain has announced he wants to investigate. The story's mostly a rehash, but the Times deserves credit for ignoring the artfully worded sentences in a Pentagon statement that appear to contradict the Post: "There is no unit that is directly reportable to the Secretary of Defense for clandestine operations as is described in the Washington Post," the statement claims, but later concedes, "[i]t is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its long-standing human intelligence capability." USAT nevertheless takes the bait: "PENTAGON DENIES REPORT OF NEW SPY UNIT."
A rare, fragile peace has settled over Gaza in the last few days as newly elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has deployed security forces to discourage rocket attacks, and leaders of militant groups say they are coming closer to an agreement that would trade a long-term suspension of attacks for a power-sharing arrangement that could last until July's legislative elections. "There is now calm," Ariel Sharon said. "We don't know if this is a genuine change yet. We hope so."
Meanwhile, the WP says that Israel has been quietly seizing Jerusalem land owned by Palestinians who live on the other side of the new security wall. The move, first reported last week by Haaretz, could affect thousands of Palestinians and amount to half of all property in East Jerusalem.
Germany announced yesterday that it has arrested two suspected al-Qaida members who prosecuters say were planning suicide attacks in Iraq. One suspect, an Iraqi, allegedly fought in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, tried unsuccessfully to buy 48 grams of uranium from a Luxembourg dealer in 2002, and later enlisted the other suspect, a Palestinian, to attack American troops in Iraq. Oddly, there's no word at all on who the uranium dealer was, whether he has been arrested, or how easy it actually is to buy 48 grams of the big U.
Even as the Bush administration tries to invoke (or, some might say, twist) the words of Bill Clinton and Daniel Patrick Moyinhan to support its partial privatization of Social Security, USAT fronts (and the WP and NYT mention) some breaks in the Republican phalanx. On the Sunday talk shows, Sen. Olympia Snowe and Rep. Bill Thomas both expressed some misgivings about Bush's focus on privatizing part of the system. "I don't think we want to erode the principles of that system," Snowe said, adding, "I'm certainly not going to support diverting $2 trillion from Social Security into creating personal savings accounts."
The WSJ mentions that the Department of Labor has suspended the only detailed survey of migrant farm workers (subscription required). Potential motives for the cancellation include dissatisfaction with one of its key findings: More than half of all crop workers in the United States are illegal immigrants, up from only 12 percent in 1990.
The Journal also polled a group of economists, some of whom project that China's economy may overtake the U.S.'s within 20 years to 40 years (sub. req.). If its GDP is calculated at purchasing-power parity, China is already No. 2. It wouldn't be the first time: Around the turn of the second millennium, technological advances propelled China into the economic pole position for most of the subsequent 700 years. The development of early-ripening rice and use of New World crops like maize and sweet potatoes created food surpluses, allowing the growth of the porcelain and silk industries, which dominated global trade.
Today, after more than 3,000 columns, the NYT's Op-Ed page publishes a grand finale by its self-described "twice-weekly vituperative right-wing scandalmonger," William Safire. In four (yes, four) final columns marked above all by self-aggrandizing gestures toward humility, Safire explains his plans, lampoons his style, and pats himself on the back for, among other things, championing Ariel Sharon and knowing a lot of former first ladies.
And everyone but the WSJ unfurls an elaborate front-page obituary of Johnny Carson, who died yesterday of emphysema at the age of 79. "Virtually every American with a television set saw and heard a Carson monologue at some point," the NYT writes, echoing all the papers' reverence for his vast pop culture influence. "At his height, between 10 million and 15 million Americans slept better weeknights because of him." According to the LAT and WP, The Tonight Show hosted some 22,000 guests during his tenure, enough to fill a couch eight miles long.
Everyone mentions the new revelation that Carson had kept writing monologue bits until close to the end, passing some of them on to David Letterman over the last year. "He was like a little kid when Dave would do one of his jokes," Peter Lassally, a longtime friend and producer, told reporters last week. "He was not blasé about any of it."
And both of the Timeses close with the same anecdote, culled from a 1979 interview on 60 Minutes. Mike Wallace asked Johnny, "What would you like your epitaph to be?" Ever the talk-show host, Carson answered: "I'll be right back."Sam Schechner is a freelance writer in New York.Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2112587/

January 24, 2005Northeast Digs Out of Deadly BlizzardBy THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 1:11 p.m. ETBOSTON (AP) -- The weekend winter storm dumped more than 3 feet of snow in parts of New England, creating drifts that reached to the eaves of some one-story buildings and prompting the closure of schools from Maine to Virginia on Monday. Meanwhile, frustrated travelers in Boston, New York and Philadelphia waited for transportation after a weekend in which more than 2,000 airline flights were cancelled.At least 15 deaths were linked to the weather: three in Connecticut, three in Ohio, three in Wisconsin, two in Pennsylvania, and one each in Maryland, Delaware, Iowa and Massachusetts. States of emergency were declared in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey.Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney asked nonessential state workers in the eastern part of the state not to come to work, and Rhode Island Gov. Don Carcieri closed all state and municipal offices Monday.Among those whose court appearances were delayed: ``Survivor'' star Richard Hatch, who had faced arraignment in Rhode Island in a tax case, and defrocked priest Paul Shanley, who faced trial on abuse charges in Boston.On Massachusetts' Nantucket island, where an 84 mph wind gust was reported, the storm plunged the entire island into darkness until most service was restored Sunday night. The island's fire department worked to reach to reach people at risk in areas cut off by drifts up to 6 feet high.``We just don't have the equipment to handle that amount of snow,'' said Nantucket deputy fire chief Mark McDougall.Two eastern Massachusetts communities -- Salem and Plymouth -- got 38 inches of snow each, according to the National Weather Service. Parts of New Hampshire got 2 feet, New York's Catskills collected at least 20 inches and more than a foot fell in parts of New Jersey. Earlier, the weather system had piled a foot of snow across parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and northern Ohio.The main road on Cape Cod, U.S. 6, was reopened during the night but the pavement was snow-covered and traffic was slow, said Barnstable police Sgt. Sean Sweeney, who had to spend the night at a hotel because power was out at his home.Other major roads were restricted to a single lane of traffic, many secondary roads remained impassable and the Cape Cod Times did not publish a Monday edition.``The plows could not keep up with (the snow),'' Sweeney said. ``We were getting 60 mph winds.''Boston's Logan International Airport was shut down for nearly 30 hours until crews were able to reopen one runway at 8 a.m. Monday.More than 900 flights were canceled Sunday morning at the New York metropolitan area's Newark, Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, in addition to about 700 that were grounded Saturday, Port Authority officials said.Philadelphia's airport reopened Sunday, after a shutdown and flight cancellations on Saturday stranded hundreds of travelers. About 50 travelers spent Sunday night at the airport, down from the 800 who had stayed the night before. Airport spokesman Mark Pesce said about 15 percent of arrivals and departures were canceled Monday morning.Chicago's O'Hare International was nearly back to normal with only one flight canceled Monday, and that was because of delays on the East Coast, said spokeswoman Annette Martinez. During the weekend, nearly 1,300 flights were canceled at O'Hare because of the weather.The biggest problem in northern Maine was the teeth-chattering wind. Rich Norton of the National Weather Service, said the wind chill Sunday morning was 33 below zero in Frenchville, and 27 below in Bangor and Presque Isle.The cold air extended all the way south to Florida, where Monday morning lows were in the upper 20s across the northern part of the state. Freezing temperatures registered as far south as Ocala, which fell to 25. Marathon in the Florida Keys reported 49 degrees -- with a wind chill of about 37
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