Northeast is hit by another storm
Northeast is hit by another storm
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Yet another storm paralyzed the Northeast with heavy snow and sleet Thursday, giving the winter-weary that oh-no-not-again feeling, while hundreds of thousands across the ice-encrusted South waited in the cold for the electricity to come back on.
“Snow has become a four-letter word,” lamented Tom McGarrigle, a politician in suburban Philadelphia, where shoveling out has become a weekly — sometimes twice-weekly — chore.
The sloppy and treacherous mix of snow and face-stinging sleet grounded more than 6,500 flights Thursday and closed schools and businesses as it made its way up the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor.
In its icy wake, utility crews in the South toiled to restore electricity to more than 700,000 homes and businesses, mostly in the Carolinas and Georgia. Temperatures in the hard-hit Atlanta area, with more than 200,000 outages, were expected to drop below freezing again overnight. At least 20 deaths, mostly in traffic accidents, were blamed on the storm.
Among the dead was a pregnant woman who was struck by a mini-plow in New York City. Her baby was delivered in critical condition via cesarean section. The victims also included a man hit by a falling tree limb in North Carolina.
Baltimore awoke to 15 inches of snow. Washington, D.C., had at least 8, and federal offices and the city’s two main airports were closed.
Comcast to buy rival Time Warner
LOS ANGELES (AP) — With a single behemoth purchase, Comcast is creating a dominant force in American entertainment and presenting federal regulators with an equally outsized quandary: How should they handle a conglomerate that promises to improve cable TV and Internet service to millions of homes but also consolidates unprecedented control of what viewers watch and download?
Comcast, which was already the nation’s No. 1 pay TV and Internet provider, says its $45.2 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable will provide faster, more reliable service to more customers and save money on TV programming costs.
If the acquisition is approved, Comcast will serve some 30 million pay TV customers and 32 million Internet subscribers.
But industry watchdogs say the deal will give the company too much power and ultimately raise the price of high-speed connections.
“How much power over content do we want a single company to have?” said Bert Foer, president of the American Antitrust Institute, a Washington based consumer interest group.
The all-stock deal approved by the boards of both companies trumps a proposal from Charter Communications to buy Time Warner Cable for about $38 billion.
Pregnancy clot risk lasts 3 mths.
Associated Press
Women have a higher risk of blood clots that can cause strokes, heart attacks and other problems for 12 weeks after childbirth — twice as long as doctors have thought, new research finds.
Strokes are still fairly rare right after pregnancy but devastating when they do occur and fatal about 10 percent of the time, according to Dr. Hooman Kamel, a neurology specialist at New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College. Blood clots in the legs usually just cause pain but can be fatal if they travel to the lungs.
Kamel led the new study, which was published online in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at an American Heart Association stroke conference in San Diego on Thursday.
Pregnant women are more prone to blood clots because blood components to prevent excessive bleeding during labor naturally increase, and blood from the legs has more trouble traveling to the heart.
“Sometimes there’s the notion that once they deliver they don’t have to worry about these things,” but risk persists for some time after the birth, said Dr. Andrew Stemer, a Georgetown University neurologist.
Doctors now sometimes give low-dose blood thinners to certain women at higher risk of blood clots for six weeks after delivery.
NSA: Snowden copied password
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden gained access to at least some classified documents he later disclosed by copying a password from a co-worker who has since resigned, the NSA reported to Congress. Snowden has previously said he did not steal any passwords.
The unnamed civilian employee who worked with Snowden resigned last month after the government revoked his security clearance, according to a letter that NSA legislative director Ethan L. Bauman sent this week to the House Judiciary Committee.
A military employee and a private contractor also lost their access to NSA data as part of the continuing investigation, Bauman said.
Bauman’s memo, dated Monday, provides some of the first details about what authorities said they have learned about how Snowden retrieved so many classified documents before passing them to news organizations. Top U.S. national security officials have acknowledged they do not know many files Snowden took before he fled the U.S. to seek refuge in Russia.
Snowden, a former NSA contract systems analyst, has denied that he stole computer passwords or tricked some co-workers into giving him their passwords.