To the east of here, Texans argue that Hurricane Rita, which took an unexpected turn away from Houston shortly after Hurricane Katrina last fall to wreak havoc from Jasper to the northeast to Sabine Pass near the Louisiana border, has been forgotten in the swirl of attention given to the devastation in New Orleans.

In fact, they say, the nation never really took notice of the 77,000 homes made uninhabitable by Hurricane Rita's force, 40,000 of which were not insured, or the piles of debris and garbage that still fester along the roads. "Personally I am sick of hearing about Katrina," said Ronda Authement, standing outside her trailer in Sabine Pass, where she will live until she can get the money and the workers to put her three-bedroom house back on its foundation. "I would like to throw up, frankly, hearing about Katrina."

In its frustration, Texas has thrown its hat in the great Congressional money game, arguing vociferously for federal money to help pay for new police officers in Houston, where the force has dwindled in recent years, and to repair homes in East Texas, where many poor residents lack the means and the insurance to do it on their own.

Though the state has requested $2 billion in federal aid to pay for law enforcement, education and housing, state officials say they have received only $22 million so far.

"We were told we would be taken care of by everybody on the federal level," said Chris Paulitz, a spokesman for Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, who recently helped get $380 million in aid added to President Bush's latest supplemental request for Texas. "But clearly that isn't the case. Texas opened its doors and hearts, and that is something we will continue to do today. However, we need to be reimbursed."

Houston's relationship with its added population is subtle and at times ambivalent. Residents, atomized over a broad swath of land with few interneighborhood connections, seem at one level to be dedicated to helping their neighbors, and are quick to cite numerous examples of continued volunteerism and the improved lives of children who they say are getting a better education than they received in New Orleans.

But they are also keenly aware of spikes in crime, especially in Southwest Houston, where the majority of the poorest New Orleanians settled.

"The city of Houston bent over backwards for these people, and I am glad we did it," said Scott Wilson, 43, who lives in the Montrose section. "But now we are absorbing some of their problems."

Evacuees have been victims of or accused of committing 39 of the 235 murders in Houston since last September, said Houston's police chief, Harold Hurtt. In January alone, there was a 34 percent rise in felonies over the previous year in the city.

"I can't tell you what percentage of that group is evacuees," Chief Hurtt said. "But I am sure they are really represented in that group."

Chief Hurtt said that some of the gangs that once operated in New Orleans housing projects had relocated to Houston, a city plagued with its own gang problems.

In response, the city moved 100 officers working in city jails to high-crime areas, and greatly increased overtime, a tall order for a department that has lost 800 officers to retirement over the last two years.

The city has asked the federal government for $77 million to hire 560 officers over five years. At Senator Hutchison's request, the Department of Justice recently sent the Police Department $20 million to help pay for patrolling high-crime areas.

The Houston public school system, with about 208,000 students, also wants money to pay for more teachers, additional facilities and tutoring help for its roughly 30,000 evacuee children. The New Orleans schools, surrounded by far greater poverty than Houston, are among the nation's most troubled.

Houston's school system has also experienced fighting between local and New Orleans students in its schools - 27 students from the two sides were arrested in one melee - but school crime is down over all.

"It has been a challenge," said Terry Abbott, a spokesman for Houston Independent School District, "but generally the vast majority of the children are well behaved and many are grateful to be here."

But results on standardized tests suggest that "the students from Louisiana were substantially behind the Texas kids," Mr. Abbott said.

"We have asked the state government for resources to get them up to speed," said Mr. Abbott, with an eye toward regulations of the federal No Child Left Behind law. "That will be a concern, but these children are ours now, and we don't look at them in any other way."

In East Texas, state officials are seeking roughly $1 billion in new federal block-grant money to house people whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Rita.

Texas officials concede that their coast was not pummeled nearly as badly as their neighbors in Louisiana, but they argue that their residents did not evacuate and were now trying to live in squalid, mold-infested conditions.

"I have been to the Ninth Ward," said Mark Viator, chairman of the Recovery Coalition of Southeast Texas, speaking of the most devastated neighborhood in New Orleans. "There is debris in the Ninth Ward, but you don't have people. We say, send the money where the people are."

Henry Bowie, who lives in Port Arthur, a city with high unemployment and many poor residents, is the sort of person Mr. Viator thinks should get federal housing money. His house is a patchwork of broken roofing, and light is visible through the floorboards because the house is off its foundation. Black mold grows up the sides of the walls, but Mr. Bowie, who undergoes dialysis three times a week, remains there with his wife and teenage son.

Not everyone is sympathetic to the needs of Texas, where oil refinery businesses continue to take in millions of dollars in profits monthly, even though state officials say they do not have enough workers because of a housing shortage. In testimony at a recent appropriations hearing, Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, said he did not believe Texans needed housing money.

"Texas, in the best role of traditional Judeo-Christian charity, provided benefits," Mr. Bond said. "I think it's time we get back to being a good neighbor and not a paid companion."

Senator Hutchison, who spoke next, was not amused.

Mayor Guy N. Goodson of Beaumont, where thousands of homes were damaged, said he would like to see federal reimbursements for debris removal there rise to 90 percent of costs from 75 percent, equaling what it was in Louisiana. Mayor Goodson said his area suffered inattention because its residents had done the right thing: evacuating and rebuilding without complaint after Hurricane Rita cut its path.

"There is a great disjoinder in people's minds about disaster," he said. "You see wildfires, you see a tornado, and who can forget the pictures of the Ninth Ward. A vast majority of our area is wind damage. And unfortunately from a sensory standpoint, people just don't coordinate these two very similar disasters."

It's a "cascade of transmission that's going to take a while to curtail and stop," said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

More than 800 of the cases are in Iowa. The CDC has pledged to provide 25,000 doses of measles-mumps-rubella vaccine to the state from the agency's stockpile. And Merck & Co., the vaccine maker, is giving another 25,000 doses to the CDC for distribution to other states, Gerberding said in a briefing in Atlanta.

Iowa, the mumps hot spot, is feeling the pain in some unexpected ways.

When the track and field team from Loras College in Dubuque made the six-hour drive to St. Louis for a Washington University track meet, the runners were sent right back home.

"Washington decided that because of the mumps they didn't want schools from Dubuque competing," said Tim Calderwood, Loras' sports information director. Dubuque is in northeast Iowa, one of the areas of the state hit hardest by the mumps.

"We always have the health and safety of our athletes and of our competitors as our top priority," Calderwood said. He said none of the Loras athletes had mumps, and "we ask our opponents to trust our coaches and know that they would not bring a student who is showing symptoms of mumps to their school."

Just 37 of the college's 1,700 students have caught mumps since the first case surfaced in February, according to the school's health clinic.

Iowa public health officials say the outbreak of the annoying but rarely serious disease is no reason to cancel events or start widespread immunization clinics.

"College graduation, high school proms, we're not recommending any be canceled," said Kevin Teale, a spokesman for the Iowa Department of Public Health. "We just want to ensure that people are aware of the risk."

The source of the Iowa epidemic is unknown, but Britain experienced a mumps epidemic that peaked last year with about 56,000 cases. The Iowa mumps virus is the same variety, but health officials are still evaluating whether there's a connection.

As to its spread in the United States, Iowa health officials last week noted that two infected Iowa airline passengers carried the disease on nine different flights.

Mumps is a virus spread by coughing and sneezing. The most common symptoms are fever, headache and swollen salivary glands under the jaw. But it can lead to more severe problems, such as hearing loss, meningitis and fertility-diminishing swollen testicles.

No deaths and few complications have been reported from the current epidemic. Just one person in Iowa developed encephalitis but has recovered, said Teale.

Once a childhood rite of passage, mumps has been on the wane since a vaccine came along in the late 1960s. A two-dose shot is recommended for all children, and is considered very effective - but not completely - at preventing it. About 10 percent of people who get both doses are still susceptible, Gerberding said.

That's why there are hundreds of people in Iowa - a state of nearly 3 million - who are turning up with the disease, Gerberding said.

So far cases are reported in Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Kansas confirmed more than 140 cases, Nebraska reported more than 100, and Illinois had more than 80 - numbers that dwarf mumps reports in typical years. Most other states affected by the outbreak were still reporting fewer than 50 cases.

However, the CDC said it was investigating cases in seven other states.

Iowa and Wisconsin officials were seeing cases more often in universities than elementary schools. However, Iowa's Waterloo public school district reported 10 cases of mumps - seven students and three adults.

Spokeswoman Sharon Miller said the district is focused on alerting parents.

"We send a letter home to parents explaining the situation and facts about mumps so they can be on the watch," Miller said. "School nurses also review immunization records to look for situations where there may be a gap."

Meanwhile, Teale said health officials are not urging event cancellations.

"On one hand, given the 800-plus cases we have, this is a serious situation," Teale said. "On the same token, we have 2.8 million people in Iowa, so the relative risk of any single visitor getting mumps is extremely low."

"I wish I was in Hawaii," said Bowman County Sheriff Rory Teigen.

Bowman school business manager James Miller said the snow was mostly slush. "It's hard to move in it because it's so wet, heavy and slippery."

North Dakota ranchers in the middle of calving season worked long hours to help their calves survive the storm.

"(Workers) were out all day yesterday, taking out a lot of straw, getting (calves) in sheltered areas," Faye Burke said Wednesday from her farm in the western part of the state. "I guess we're happy for the moisture, but we're a little nervous about our new calves."

Authorities closed about 100 miles of Interstate 94 Tuesday night from Glendive, Mont., to Dickinson, N.D., but had reopened it by midday Wednesday. A stretch of about 140 miles of I-90 was shut down from Gillette, Wyo., to Rapid City, S.D.

I-90 had icy pavement, zero visibility and trucks blocking parts of the road, said South Dakota Highway Patrol Capt. Greg Ingemunson.

Three people died Tuesday in a crash on an icy North Dakota highway amid blowing sleet and snow, state police said. Authorities said a tractor-trailer collided head-on with a U-Haul truck towing a car, pushing it into an SUV.

A utility worker died Tuesday night in an apparent weather-related accident in northwestern North Dakota. Bill Schell, general manager of Medicine Lake, Mont.-based Sheridan Electric Co-op, declined to release more information about the death, saying the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had not yet finished its investigation.

Wind gusting to 84 mph overturned a mobile home in the Nebraska Panhandle, and gusts to 71 mph were reported in eastern Montana, officials said.

Spring storms with heavy snow aren't unusual in North Dakota, said weather service meteorologist Jim Fors in Bismarck.

"We don't get them every year, but every five to 10 years, we usually get a big dump," Fors said.

Some parts of the region got rain, the weather service said.

"(Winter) seems like it has to have its last hurrah," Burke said.

"My house is a total loss as far as I'm concerned, the basement part of it," said Dale Nobles, whose home in Middle Arm was flooded with raw sewage.

"And it's all done, you know, done just as good as upstairs. You know, the upstairs is just a place to sleep as far as I'm concerned. Downstairs is where we live," he said.

Two days of near constant rain have washed away roads, isolating communities and leaving towns without basic services.

Communities on the Baie Verte Peninsula were under a state of emergency on Wednesday after severe flooding closed nearby roads The main road into the town of Baie Verte was still washed out on Thursday, but is expected to reopen Friday.

The town of Middle Arm has been hit especially hard, with closed roads and damage to the sewer and water lines. About 50 houses in the community of 600 people, have been flooded and at least one person had to be transported to hospital.

Tammy Richards might have lost her new bungalow in the town when the flood sent tons of rock crashing down on top of the house.

"The water flooded my whole entire house, ruining everything on floor level...Now we're just worried about removing the rock and debris from the back of the house and maybe even losing the house totally," she said.

Burlington, Smith's Harbour and Middle Arm were all put under states of emergency Tuesday morning after they were cut off from the rest of the peninsula, located about 150 kilometres northwest of Gander in central Newfoundland, Tuesday morning.

The communities of Lumsden and Peterview are under boil-water orders.

Residents are bracing for more wet weather - the forecast calls for up to 10 millimetres of rain for much of the Baie Verte Peninsula and freezing rain and snow is in the forecast for Thursday night.

Weather forecaster Manfred Greitschus said the storm was about 35 kilometres southeast of Lockhart River and moving west at about 18 kilometres an hour.

"It's just crossing the coast at the moment," he told AFP.

"We've had wind gusts to date of about 100 kilometres an hour near Lockhart River," he said, adding that winds were expected to reach more than 200 kilometres an hour.

Greitschus said the storm, rated a category three on a scale where five is the maximum, was expected to abate during the evening.

"It's still a category three but it's expected to weaken over the next 12 hours," he said.

Peter Buckland, head of the local council, said it was too early to say whether the storm had caused much damage but it had flattened trees like a bulldozer.

"My house backed onto bush, or it used to, and it just looks like a D9 (bulldozer) has gone through the bush," he told ABC radio.

The quake, centered 33 kilometers under the floor of the Indian Ocean some 300 kilometers west of Simeulue, was only moderately felt on the island, said Hardiyanto of the agency's office in the capital Jakarta.

There were no reports of injuries or damage from the quake, which struck at 2.36 am local time.

The US Geological Survey said that the quake occurred not far from the epicenter of the devastating Dec 26, 2004 earthquake which triggered the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 200,000 in the region.

Ubinas, in the Moquegua region 550 miles (900 km) south of Lima, has been belching for much of the month and this week sent smoke and ash 2,600 feet (800 meters) into the air, spreading a thick carpet of ash on areas north of the volcano.

Officials said the volcano continued to spit out ash and smoke on Wednesday, and the wind was carrying it north.

"Approximately 1,000 people from several small towns north of the volcano have had breathing problems and itching eyes from the sulfur in the rain of ash," Agustin Quispe, mayor of the town of San Juan de Tarucani de Arequipa, one of the towns north of the volcano affected by ash, told reporters.

In recorded history, Ubinas has never had a lava eruption, according to experts at the university of Arequipa in southern Peru.

Quispe said ash carried north by the wind had affected five towns that are within six miles (10 km) of the volcano. He also said 20 llamas in his village died from eating "contaminated grasses."

In the hamlet of Querapi, home to 42 farming families three miles (4.5 km) from the 18,700 foot (5,670 meter)-high volcano, Civil Defense authorities distributed gas masks and recommended evacuation earlier this week.

But the people of Querapi were reluctant to leave despite the yellow alert declared by Civil Defense.