• Severe to exceptional drought continued throughout much of the western United States, specifically the Intermountain West. A continuation of above average precipitation in the eastern U.S. brought significant drought recovery, as a turn toward wetter weather which began in September continued in December.
• Unseasonably warm temperatures exacerbated severe drought conditions across Australia. Maximum temperatures in Melbourne reached 35.6°C (96°F) on the 2nd, which is over 11°C (20°F) above normal for the month of December. Temperatures throughout much of Australia were 1-2°C (1.8-3.6°F) above average for the month of December.
• Wildfires which continued in New South Wales in early December were characterized as the worst in nearly 30 years (BBC News). Around 70 brush fires burned north, south and west of the city of Sydney, with about 20 houses destroyed by the flames. Nearly 3,000 firefighters had responded to the blazes.
• An unusual drought that began during the summer of 2002 has left Scandinavians with soaring electricity prices and possible power outages. In Finland, reservoir levels which dropped to 10-year record lows resulted in a 10 percent increase in energy costs (Reuters).
• Precipitation in Helsinki, Finland totaled 9 mm (0.35 inches) for the month of December, which is 49 mm (1.93 inches) below normal.
• Across Africa, drought in Mauritania is described as the worst in 20 years (World Vision). Malnutrition rates for children under 5 years of age rose to between 10 and 15 percent in parts of the country.
• While locally heavy showers fell across parts of Ethiopia during December, ongoing drought in the country was responsible for producing food shortages for nearly 11 million people, as the drought cut cereal production by an estimated 20 to 30 percent in 2002 (WFP/FAO).
• A large dust storm affected parts of Chad and Niger around December 3, significantly reducing visibility

TOKYO, Japan -- Four people are dead after Tokyo was lashed with heavy rains and high winds from the fast-moving Typhoon Higos.

Two people were killed by fallen power lines in Chiba prefecture (state) near Tokyo, The Associated Press news agency reported a National Police Agency spokesman as saying.

A building guard died in Yokohama when he was struck by a steel window frame. In Miyagi prefecture, a 20-year-old Indonesian man drowned while attempting to dock his boat, AP reported.

A woman is still missing and 55 others were wounded in the storm.

The eye of Higos, which means "fig" in the native language of the Pacific island of Guam, passed over a peninsula 45 kilometers (28 miles) west of Tokyo.

Because the typhoon was moving so quickly -- about 80 kilometers an hour -- the destructive power of the weather dissipated.

But the strong winds and fierce rains forced the cancellation of more than 200 flights before the weather system raced north to the island of Hokkaido.

Higos, with occasional gusts as high as 180 kilometers per hour (120 mph), also halted trains and prompted officials in some northern cities to urge people to evacuate, fearing landslides, Reuters news agency reported. At least 23,000 households lost power.

The typhoon was downgraded to a tropical storm as it passed over Hokkaido on Wednesday. It was the third-strongest typhoon to ravage Tokyo since World War II.

Almost a month ago the southern island of Okinawa was lashed by Typhoon Sinlaku, bringing with it winds of up to 145 kph (90 mph), injuring 29 people and cutting power to tens of thousands of homes.

It is July 4, 1054 AD: At dawn, astronomers in China and cave artists of the Anasazi and Mimbres Indian tribes of the future desert southwest of the United States gaze into eastern sky, as they often do. These people know the sky, know each and every star as an old friend. But suddenly there shines a dazzling star where none had been seen before.

Imagine their amazement.

In terms of brightness, the object initially seemed at least several times brighter than Venus and for 23 days was readily visible against a clear, blue daytime sky before it slowly began to fade. For a total of 653 nights it could be seen with the naked eye, before it finally faded completely out of sight.

The Chinese called it a "Guest Star," because it visited for a while and then left.

Leonardo, a mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed dinosaur was only about three or four years old when he died, but he's proving to be a bonanza for paleontologists today.

His fossilized skeleton is covered in soft tissue—skin, scales, muscle, foot pads—and even his last meal is in his stomach. The actual tissue has decayed over the millennia, and has been replaced by minerals. What's left for scientists to study is a fossil of a dinosaur mummy.

"For paleontologists, if you can find one complete specimen in a lifetime, you've hit the jackpot," said Nate Murphy, curator of paleontology at the Phillips County Museum, Montana, where Leonardo makes his home. "To find one with so much external detail available, it's like going from a horse and buggy to a steam combustion engine. It will advance our science a quantum leap."

Leonardo is one of the most complete brachylophosaurus dinosaur fossils uncovered to date, and the first sub-adult. He is also only the fourth dinosaur fossil in the world to be classified as a "mummy" because of the soft tissue that is preserved.

An onsite restoration drawing of how "Leonardo" may have looked before burial based on observations and measurements of the specimen. The drawing was done by paleolife artist Greg Wenzel.

The other three mummies were uncovered in the early 20th century, when excavation and preservation techniques were not as advanced as they are today.

"Paleontologists back then didn't have the techniques we have today to coax out the secrets these fossils are holding," said Murphy. "This specimen gives us a chance to apply modern scientific techniques to answer old questions."

The mummified fossil was named Leonardo because graffiti near its burial site in northern Montana read "Leonard Webb and Geneva Jordan, 1917." Leonardo made his debut to the scientific community today at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, taking place October 9-12, in Norman, Oklahoma.

Remarkable State of Preservation

When he died, Leonardo was a 22-foot-long (seven meters) teenager, weighing between 1.5 to 2 tons. He sported polygonal, five-sided scales that ranged from the size of a BB (airgun pellet) to the size of a dime, and soft-tissue structures on his back suggest that he had a little sail frill running up it.

Scales and tissue parts have been found on less than one-tenth of one percent of all dinosaurs excavated. Leonardo's fossilized skeleton is about 90 percent covered in soft tissue, including skin, muscle, nail material, and a beak.

Skin impressions have been found on the underside of the skull and all along the neck, ribcage, legs, and left arm.

"When the animal was alive, the skin was almost as soft as your earlobe," said Murphy.

A three-dimensional rock-cast of the right shoulder muscle and throat tissue, and the pads on the bottom of the three-toed foot were also preserved.

Leonardo's stomach contents are so well-preserved that researchers can tell what he had for his last supper; a salad of ferns, conifers, and magnolias. The stomach also contained the pollen of more than 40 different plants.

All of these qualities should go a long way to providing concrete information about the diet, range of movement, methods of locomotion, and paleo-environment dinosaurs during the late Cretaceous (89 to 65 million years ago) experienced.

"We have the shoulder muscle to look at, so we can see how much range of motion he had," said Murphy. "We should be able to tell the size of his average step, how his chest muscles worked, and if he was truly a quadruped or if he was bipedal."

"Paleontology is not an exact science," he said. "All we have are bones, and from there we develop theories about what the animals looked like, how they moved, and what they ate. A specimen like Leonardo will take a lot of guess work out and really tell us if Steven Spielberg's getting it right."

Discovery and Excavation

Dan Stephenson, of Minot, North Dakota, discovered Leonardo during the last hour of the last day of a summer expedition in 2000 sponsored by the Judith River Dinosaur Institute.

"He had the wisdom to not mess with it," chuckles Murphy. "He went and got me and I knew right away we had a complete skeleton. Looking at the geology, I told the team that this was a great scenario for skin fossilization."

Excavation began in the summer of 2001, when a demolition expert, using low-impact charges, cleared away the huge boulders on the top of the hillside. A road to the site was cut, and a bulldozer was called in to scrape off the hilltop. Team members dug a six-foot -deep (two meters) trench around the fossil's perimeter, and then went in with hand tools—the scalpels, brushes, and dental picks that are a paleontologist's tools of trade.

Leonardo was disinterred from his cement-like grave as a single 6.5-ton block to preserve the skeleton. "He's in the record books as the largest dinosaur taken out in one chunk; it was a monumental undertaking," said Murphy.

The scientific work on Leonardo will keep paleontologists occupied for years.

"It's like looking through a frosted glass window. With bones you get an idea of what the animal looked like, but with soft tissue you get to see how the animal is put together—it goes a long way to clearing the frost," said Murphy.

This scene was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), flying aboard NASA’s Terra satellite, on October 24. Category 5 hurricanes, the strongest category, are capable of causing catastrophic damage. The storm is predicted to make landfall by late morning on Oct. 25.

Image by Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory; data provided by the MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC

Hurricane Kenna, the sixteenth tropical disturbance of the 2002 eastern Pacific hurricane season, explosively intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in less than 48 hours. On October 25, 2002, Kenna made landfall on the western Mexican coast as a Category 4 storm. Kenna was born in the warm tropical waters of the eastern Pacific south of Mexico on October 22 to become the strongest storm to threaten the Americas in 2002.

This Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) overpass from the afternoon of October 23 shows the rain structure inside the rainbands and inner core of Kenna. Red and yellow colors indicate the most intense rains. TRMM shows that the rainfall pattern is highly asymmetric, with most of the rain falling west of the storm center. TRMM also reveals that the tight, compact eye is well formed and is flanked by towering thunderstorm clouds. These towers, which are 16-17 km tall, contain the heaviest rains and act to energize the core of the storm, sustaining winds of nearly 140 mph.

Images of Kenna and other 2002 hurricane season storms can be found by visiting the official TRMM website at http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/.

No one should necessarily start building dikes right away, say the researchers, who reported their work yesterday in the journal Nature. The stormy periods they identified each lasted a millennium or more, and giant floods occurred only sporadically in those stretches.

Still, the work illustrates that natural extremes of weather — what one researcher, Paul R. Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont, called a "drumbeat of storminess" — are many times greater than those experienced in the modern era.

The researchers spent several years extracting 12- to 20-foot-long cores of sediment that accumulated over 13,000 years in the beds of 2 lakes in eastern New York and 11 in Vermont.

Buried in the muck were layer-cake patterns of sandy soil, each layer evidently formed when slopes crumbled under torrents of water and were washed into the lakes. Some of these layers are 10 times as thick as one apparently left by the greatest flood recorded in Vermont, which killed 84 people, drowned thousands of cows and demolished 1,200 bridges in November 1927.

Layers that thick could be explained only by deluges far more potent than the storm of 1927, the scientists said.

By helping to reveal elusive long-term patterns, the findings could eventually improve long-term climate forecasts and models, said Richard B. Alley, a Pennsylvania State University geologist who is an expert on post-ice-age conditions and was not involved with the new study.

"This work shows that extremes are not just acts of God that happen to happen," Dr. Alley said. "They are linked to larger patterns in the climate system that may prove to be predictable."

Experts in the emerging science of paleotempestology, which uses such buried clues to discern past patterns of destructive weather, called the work a significant advance. In particular, it is the first study to compile data from many separate lake beds, reducing the chance that the patterns resulted from fluky local conditions, said Kam-biu Liu, a geographer at Louisiana State University who has used the technique to study ancient hurricanes. Dr. Liu called the new work "a triumph."

The clues from the lakes appear to mesh with evidence of other periods of stormy weather around the North Atlantic, including variations in traces of salt from sea spray locked in layers of Greenland glaciers, the authors said. They also appear synchronized with the occasional cold snaps in Europe that sent glaciers grinding forward down alpine valleys, the study says.

The similar storm rhythms seen around the North Atlantic may mean that the overall pattern is driven by slow cycles in a pole-girdling wind and pressure pattern called the Arctic oscillation, which in turn could be caused by cycles of solar activity, they said.

The lake records from the Northeast show that the region had much stormier eras that peaked 11,900, 9,100, 5,800 and 2,600 years ago. Then, about 600 years ago, another period of storminess appeared to begin and has been "ramping back up again," Dr. Bierman said.

The current trend is so prolonged and diffuse that the century-plus history of recorded weather data is not long enough to pick up a pattern. But it is etched quite clearly in the lake beds, said another author, Eric J. Steig, a climatologist at the University of Washington.

The scientists checked to see whether influences other than big storms might have made the surrounding earth more apt to crumble. They considered forest fires, but found no evidence of raised concentrations of charcoal in the lake bottom.

The likeliest source of each layer is an intense burst of precipitation, perhaps on already soggy soil, over just a day or two, the researchers said. Given the much greater thickness of many of the ancient layers compared with those left by floods like the 1927 disaster in Vermont, they said, society should at least ponder the potential for much greater catastrophes.

In an interview, the researchers emphasized that there was no way to quantify how severe the flooding might be, but they said rainfall could reach several inches an hour — easily enough to cause massive landslides, particularly if the soil was already soggy.

"This shows that in human experience, at least historical human experience, we don't know what this climate system is capable of," Dr. Steig said.

While revealing the rising potential for epic storms, the new findings are likely to confound efforts to discern whether human alterations of the atmosphere, particularly a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, are increasing the frequency of severe downpours, as many climate experts have predicted.

But the research could indicate that engineers and planners, when considering the design of public works like bridges and reservoirs, should take into account the possibility of extremely rare, but extremely destructive, floods, said the study's lead author, Anders J. Noren, formerly of the University of Vermont and now at the Limnological Research Center of the University of Minnesota.

"If this cycle continues," Mr. Noren said, "the frequency and severity of intense rainstorms that can cause massive flooding should continue to increase for the next several hundred years."

An Indian NGO recently reported the deaths of at least 30 children in Baran district, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the state capital, Jaipur.

NGOs say the spectre of starvation looms large in several parts of the desert state, triggered by drought and subsequent heavy crop losses.

But the authorities in Rajasthan have strongly denied these reports.

The black hole at the heart of our galaxy is being starved of food, say astronomers studying polarised radio waves coming from the Milky Way's centre.

"Our observations show that the black hole is on a starvation diet," says Heino Falcke, of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany. The findings explain why this supermassive black hole burns less brightly than monstrous black holes in other galaxies.

The gravitational energy of matter falling into a black hole is thought to be converted into radiation. Falcke and his colleagues studied Milky Way's center using the Berkeley Illinois Maryland Association (BIMA) array telescope.

They found high levels of polarised radiation thought to come from the black hole's accretion disc - the hot layer of material swirling around the hole. Radiation passing through the material in the disc should be depolarized, so the high degree of polarisation observed indicated that the disc had only a small amount of matter.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia -- Ethiopia is facing a famine that could affect as many as 15 million people, the country's prime minister has warned.

Meles Zenawi called for urgent international aid to help avoid a catastrophe on a scale that would dwarf the country's 1984-85 famine.

He told the BBC's Today programme: "The disaster we had in 84-85, the number involved was roughly one-third to one-half of the number of people involved now. If that was a nightmare, this will be too ghastly to contemplate."

Ethiopia needed huge amounts of food aid from international donors to avoid another famine.

"Even if we had the food available in the domestic market the government doesn't have the money to buy this surplus food for redistribution," Mr Zenawi said.

"The current draught is unique because the short rains and the long rains have failed.

"The latest information we have is that the number of affected people could be as high as 15 million."

Christian Aid spokesman Andrew Pendleton said part of the problem was Ethiopia's commitment to repaying international debts."Ten percent plus of the Ethiopian government's revenues are spent on repaying international debts.

"That is an enormous amount of money to take away from a country that is critically poor."

"In the long term we have to take a look at why this keeps happening again and again. Now we have to respond to the immediate problem."

Emergency workers and stunned residents across the South and Great Lakes regions picked through shattered homes and buildings Monday after a string of tornadoes left at least 36 people dead and dozens injured.

Homes, schools, churches and businesses were flattened from Alabama to Pennsylvania after more than 70 tornadoes touched down.

Most of those killed were in Tennessee, where 17 people died; 12 died in Alabama, five in Ohio, one in Pennsylvania and one in Mississippi.

One of the hardest-hit communities was Mossy Grove in northeastern Tennessee, where a tornado cut a swath about a mile wide and a mile long, killing eight people in the Appalachian town and surrounding Morgan County.

One of the town's residents remained unnaccounted for Tuesday, according to Steve Hamby, director of emergency management in Morgan County. As many as 150 people had been missing as late as Monday afternoon.

On the wet grass on a rural road lay a television remote control, prescription bottles and family photographs.

"Everybody's hugging each other and just glad to see that everybody's all right," said Paulette Dyke, owner of a Citgo gas station.

Dyke said her store survived intact only because the front and back doors had blown open, allowing the wind to move through.

Four of the dead were in a car trying to outrun the storm when the tornado tossed their vehicle. Another was a volunteer firefighter who rushed to a scene and had a heart attack.

The storm hit during Sunday night services at the New Life Apostolic Church in Mossy Grove, badly damaging the church. The storm partially collapsed the building's roof and shattered glass, sending parishioners scrambling under pews for safety. No one in the church was injured.

David Gunther said he grabbed his 3-year-old daughter, jumped under a pew and started praying.

"When you have a child, you just want to protect them. That was my first instinct," he told CNN. "We got in the doors just in time."

"We were just praying like we had never prayed before. ... God kept his hand on us," said another congregation member, Kevin Davis.

In northwest Ohio there was vivid evidence of the devastation that might have been. Rows of plush blue seats were all that remained of the movie theater in the town of Van Wert, where dozens of people were watching a movie minutes before the tornado hit with winds topping 207 mph.

"All heck broke loose," said Scott Shaffer, who manages the theater and evacuated the patrons to the cinema's cinder-block interior. Some told stories of crowding inside the women's bathroom for cover.

"It was all confusion and chaos. I never want to experience that again," Shaffer said. "I'm still confused for words."

The town's mayor said an early-warning system gave them enough time to find safety.

"I'm telling you today, there are 70 people alive, at least in Van Wert County, that wouldn't have been had that system not been put in place," said Mayor Steven Gehres.

Five people were killed and dozens more injured in Van Wert, Putnam and Seneca counties. Ohio Gov. Bob Taft declared a state of emergency in Van Wert and Ottawa counties.

Alabama officials credited early warnings and watches for saving lives in their state. Still, the storms left 12 people dead -- 10 of them in Walker County, northwest of Birmingham.

"It's like somebody wrapped up sticks of dynamite and just blew these homes into little tiny pieces," said Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman on a tour of Walker County.

Siegelman declared a state of emergency across the state and said officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency would be heading to the state Tuesday.

"This was a huge, devastating impact for the state of Alabama," Siegelman said. "We're going to do everything we can to help get their lives, and their homes, and their businesses back together."

In Walker County, Carbon Hill Junior High was one of many buildings badly damaged in the storm. That the storm struck on a Sunday, when school was not in session, was a blessing, the governor said.

"There's always a silver lining on any dark cloud," Siegelman said. (Read more about damage in Carbon Hill)

In Mississippi's Lowndes County, a man was killed Sunday night when storms swept through the area, an official said. Fifty-five people were injured, 60 homes were damaged or destroyed and 10 businesses were destroyed in the county, which borders Alabama.

Introduction

The Hutton Commentaries (THC) has been saying from the beginning that a shift in the poles of Earth’s rotational axis can only be caused by a significant shift of mass somewhere within our planet. Now, two scientists studying data on Earth’s gravity field have found evidence of just such a mass shift that began in 1998. This is the year in which Cayce readings 3976-15 and 378-16 said that a forty-year-long period, from 1958-1998, marking the beginning of predicted Earth changes would come to an end. Then, in 1998 and beyond there would be “the changes wrought in the upheavals and the shifting of the poles.”

We present evidence here that the “upheavals” may have begun in the inner Earth between 1998 and 2002, where the liquid outer core meets the overlying plastic mantle. This is the core-mantle boundary, or CMB. Upheavals along the CMB may have been detected by means of precision satellite-ranging measurements conducted since 1979. Interpretations of the voluminous measurements between 1979 and 2002 have been published by two scientists, Christopher Cox and Benjamin Chao, in the August 2 issue of Science magazine (p. 832). Here follows their reasoning and their conclusions.

The Measurements

Earth’s equatorial diameter is about 27 miles longer than its polar diameter. This slight pumpkin-like shape results from axial rotation and large-scale mantle convection.

...and Ice Age Now!

ZURICH, Switzerland -- Torrential rain and strong winds have whipped across parts of Europe causing massive mudslides and severe flooding.

Worst affected are Switzerland where a mud bank swept through the centre of one town, Austria where a derailed train left one person dead, and northern Italy where a mother and daughter are feared dead after their car was swept away.

But the heavy downpour has also forced dozens of residents to find emergency accommodation in Scotland and tourists to wade knee-deep in water around Venice.

While some parts have seen the worst of the weather, some heavy rain was expected in Tuscany, Venice and Lazio in Italy on Monday.

Tonnes of mud dislodged by torrential rain slid through the Swiss Alpine village of Schlans in the mountainous eastern canton of the Grisons on the weekend, running right through the middle of the town but sparing residents' lives.

The 10-metre wide (30-foot) wall thundered down the hill smashing into a mill and farm buildings. A helicopter was used to evacuate residents.

Dozens of people were also evacuated from the villages of Clavaniev, Curaglia and Surrein and 100 more had to leave their homes in the village of Lully near Geneva.

Landslides in the central canton of Uri and southern canton of Ticino also shut down several roads and some rail links.

Major rail lines, including the Gotthard and Simpon routes through the Alps that connect northern Europe with Italy, were closed on Saturday, but later re-opened, Reuters said.

Hurricane-like winds derailed an Austrian train at Salzburg, killing one person and injuring others after it came off the tracks, rescue services told Reuters.

The area has been hammered by winds of up to 160 kilometres (100 miles) an hour since Thursday.

The whole of the Salzburg region was declared a "disaster zone" on Saturday and a Red Cross spokesperson appealed to local people to stay indoors.

Rescue workers have been unable to get to a mother and daughter who had been swept away in their car on Friday near the Italian Alpine town of Sondrio, 25 kilometres (15 miles) south of the Swiss border.

Their car slid down a river bank into the water, and searchers had seen no sign of the victims since, Lombardy region press official tole The Associated Press.

Days of heavy rain have battered the northern regions of Lombardy, Piedmont, Trentino-Alto Adige, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Veneto.

Tourists waded through about a metre of water in St. Mark's Square in Venice after levels reached their fifth-highest in the past 40 years.

In other parts of the north, a few small towns had been cut off by landslides, several hundred people had evacuated their homes, and some roads were closed.

In southern France a high-speed TGV train derailed after a mudslide engulfed tracks between Lyon and Chambery, authorities told Reuters. No one was injured.

Almost 200 French homes were evacuated and main roads were cut off in the Valence area near Grenoble as the Rhone river and tributaries swelled to more than two metres above safe levels.

While the total of 12 named storms in 2002 was higher than the 50-year average of 9.6 storms, the total number of hurricanes was lower than the historical average and "half the number we've seen in typical seasons since 1995," said Gen. Jack Kelly, director of the National Weather Service.

Hurricane experts are attributing the mildness of the season to a strengthening El Nino system, in which water warms in the Pacific Ocean off of South America, affecting weather around the world.

Hurricane Lili, which hit the Louisiana coast in early October, was the only hurricane to make landfall in the United States this season. Lili reached a strong Category 4 intensity while churning across the Gulf of Mexico, prompting evacuations. But the storm weakened considerably in the hours before coming ashore and did not cause widespread destruction.

However, six tropical storms that didn't reach hurricane strength hit the mainland in 2002, the highest number since at least 1900, according to an analysis by hurricane researchers at Colorado State University.

CHARLOTTE, North Carolina (CNN) -- An unseasonably early winter storm bore down on the Carolinas late Wednesday, bringing with it ice, freezing rain and heavy snow.

The storm already wreaked havoc from the Oklahoma panhandle to the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee.

Power was cut to thousands in North Carolina, and utilities in other states like Kentucky and Virginia were still waiting for the worst to come.

Temperatures plummeted to freezing and below as rain turned to sleet and ice mixed with snow from the North Carolina mountains to Charlotte.

Forecasters said the storm could leave parts of the Carolinas coated with an inch of ice -- and up to a million people without electricity.

"The most dangerous place for icing remains in the western and central part of the Carolinas," said Wes Junker, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Reports of ice buildup in western South Carolina were already starting to come in Wednesday night.

Street maintenance crews in Charlotte covered all their streets with salt and slag, the pumice-like byproduct from the local steel foundry, said district superintendent Ken Martin. That meant area roadways were still dangerous, but "in pretty good shape" by the evening, he said.

Elsewhere in North Carolina, especially in the western part of the state, most areas were deemed treacherous because of the snow and ice, said Kelly Hutchinson, an engineer with the state Department of Transportation.

"We have bad conditions pretty much everywhere west of I-95, the western two-thirds of the state," she said. The worst areas are those near the Tennessee state line, she said.

South Carolina transportation officials said interstates around Greenville and Spartanburg, in the western part of the state, had ice and slush.

Duke Energy reported 30,000 people without power Wednesday evening, the bulk of them in Greenville and Anderson, near the Georgia state line.

South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges closed state offices in the 22 counties that appeared most likely hit by the storm.

Heavy snow mixed with sleet slipped into east Tennessee's Tri-Cities area about mid-day Wednesday, and quickly got deeper.

Weather warnings expired for Arkansas Wednesday night, but tens of thousands were still without power there after the storm went through the night before.

Some 60,000 people had no electricity at the peak of the outages, said Jennifer Gordon, a spokeswoman for Arkansas Emergency Management.

Several towns on the storm's path through the northern part of the state may have to wait longer, perhaps until Saturday, because of broken power poles as well as downed power lines.

Oklahoma Lt. Gov. Mary Fallin declared a disaster for 42 of the state's 77 counties, stretching from the southwest corner to the northeast. The declaration includes portions of the panhandle, which received as much as a foot of snow, said state Emergency Management spokeswoman Michelann Ooten.

About 22,000 people in Oklahoma were still without power Wednesday evening, Ooten said.

"We haven't had a thaw yet," she said. "The tree limbs are now covered with, in some places, as much as an inch of ice."

That will cause a problem when the ice melts and the unburdened tree limbs snap up and hit power lines.

"We're kind of bracing for that to happen tomorrow," Ooten said.

Shelters were open in some communities and generators were sent to public facilities like city halls.

A National Weather Service heavy snow warning covered southern Missouri, most of Kentucky, the western half of Virginia, and most of the Carolinas.

Ice storm warnings included northeast Arkansas, northwest and central Tennessee, and northeast Georgia, including Atlanta. Snow advisories were issued for areas just outside the warning zones

The village, in Ethiopia's remote, semi-arid West Harange lowlands, has nothing. This should be harvest time but its sorghum and maize crops are wilting or dead, its grain stores are empty and its animals are dying and worthless.

Water is a three hour walk away, the nearest school and health clinic more than six and the 2,000 people in the scattered community of subsistence farmers exist only because emergency food aid trickles in from Save the Children fund each month.

The villagers share their meagre rations, supplement their diets with nutritionally worthless cactus plants and leaves and fear the death of their animals, which would mean the total destruction of their livelihoods. They do not expect to die, but - almost worse - see themselves becoming permanently dependent on others and unable to recover.

"We are happy to get food, but it is also a curse. We would prefer to depend on ourselves," says village leader Ishmael Youssef. "This is the worst situation we have ever had to face. We used to be self-sufficient but after four years of droughts we have no options, money or access to work".

He holds opens the palm of a thin hand to show how much grain he eats in a day: "The droughts come more often now and each year we grow weaker," he says. "It is the same for everyone else in the whole region. There is nothing good here now. We are illiterate, permanently hungry and must live like animals."

Gewgew is far from alone. On Friday the UN's world food programme will announce that, following new harvest assessments, 11.2 million people in Ethiopia will need food assistance for at least a year, with three million more very likely to need help later.

The figures more or less confirm last month's back-of-the-envelope forecast by Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi who said that 14 million would need help. But they undermine the assessment by the development secretary, Clare Short, that the situation in southern Africa - where the UN's world food programme says up to 28 million are at risk of malnutrition - is "much more worrying".

Up to 2m tonnes of emergency food aid must now be delivered to Ethiopia in one of the biggest relief efforts to a single country in the last 20 years, stretching logistics and donor goodwill to the limit.

Five million Ethiopians need food aid each year even when harvests are good, but aid workers, the government and analysts, while confident of meeting minimum needs, fear that increasing numbers of people like those in Gewgew are in real danger of slipping into permanent destitution and total dependency.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The government's top weather forecasters said Thursday the nation's weather is being affected by a classic "el Nino" weather pattern that is bringing needed rain to the South and will result in slightly warmer temperatures in the North.

"We've already seen the effects," of the el Nino pattern, said Jack Kelly, director of the National Weather Service. "The northern half of the country is going to be warmer than normal and the southern half of the country is going to have more storms than normal. We've already seen that -- we're in December and we've had two winter storms."

People in the northern states may not even notice the temperature difference. "Chicago will still be cold, just not as cold," said James D. Laver, director of the Climate Prediction Center.

Kelly said drought conditions in the southern states have been eased a bit amid recent stormy weather.

"That increased storminess helped relieve the drought that they had been experiencing for some years," said Kelly. "So, in truth, where a lot in this country tend to view (El Nino) as having a negative impact on our weather, from an economic point of view it actually has a positive impact."

A favorite haunt of peace-seeking romantics, the Seine snakes sedately, in drier times, through the French capital. But weeks of rain soaking into waterlogged subsoil have set alarm bells ringing. Experts say it is only a matter of time before the Seine bursts its banks and spills into underground stations, cellars and sewers -- as it did almost a century ago.

"It will happen. If not this year then next year. We are not far from the first alert level, and we're getting a lot of rain," said Paris environmental official Alain Pialat.

Dreading being caught unawares by the kind of floods that swamped central European cities in August, Paris city planners have advised riverside museums like the Louvre to pack up valuables kept in basement rooms and move them to safety.

OKLAHOMA CITY, Dec. 24 (UPI) -- A Christmas Eve storm pushed toward the east Tuesday after dumping heavy snow in the southern Great Plains and spawning tornadoes in Texas.

The storm system was expected to bring snow to the northeast part of the nation and heavy rain and severe thunderstorms in the southeast. Tornado warnings were posted Tuesday in parts of Florida.

A blanket of snow stretched from the Texas Panhandle through Oklahoma to southwest Missouri. Oklahoma City was expected to see its first white Christmas in nearly 30 years.

More than 12 inches of snow fell across Oklahoma where at least two traffic fatalities were blamed on snow-packed roads. There were numerous traffic accidents and injuries reported in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

Michaelann Ooten, public information officer for the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management, said there were phone outages in some northeast towns Monday but service was restored by Tuesday.

"The good news is that at the emergency center we have received no requests for assistance mainly because we had no ice this time, just snow, which is much easier to handle," she said.

About 5,300 people were also without power in the Tulsa area but crews were working to restore that service, Ooten said.

Roads in northern Oklahoma, generally north and west of Interstate 44, were still reported slick and hazardous Tuesday, the highway patrol said.

In Texas, more than 8 inches of snow was reported at Dalhart in the Texas Panhandle while hundreds of miles southeast in the Houston area as many as 10 tornadoes were reported late Monday.

Early Tuesday, crews were still cleaning debris blocking all the inbound lanes of the Southwest Freeway leading into Houston. Several other streets were reported blocked by fallen trees and limbs from high winds.

The winter storm also knocked out power to about 120,000 homes and businesses, damaged homes, uprooted trees and toppled a wall at a shopping mall. No serious injuries were reported.

By Christmas night, the storm is expected to have painted a broad streak of snow from the mountains of Arizona, across the Midwest and all the way to Maine. The forecast was for 10 to 20 inches around Albany, N.Y., which has not had snow on the ground on Christmas since 1985. "All those people who wanted a white Christmas – we are going to give it to them," said National Weather Service meteorologist Chuck Tingley in Buffalo, N.Y., where up to 11 inches was forecast. Temperatures Tuesday morning were in the teens as far south as the Texas Panhandle. Since Monday, the weather has been blamed for five deaths in Missouri, three in Oklahoma, three in Kansas and one in New Mexico.

It was my son that finally drove home to me the gravity of the situation. With that innocence that children can only muster until a certain age, Lucas asked: "But Daddy, if the North Pole ice melts, where is Santa going to live?"

I was sitting in front of my computer at home. On the monitor were way-cool maps, with complex patterns of colorful bands, the results of a NASA research project.

The maps show that the part of the Arctic Ocean covered by ice at its minimum for an average year had shrunk 9 percent between the 1980s and the 1990s. And the NASA report warned that if the pattern continued, by the end of the century the Antarctic's permanent ice cover could disappear altogether.

So that's what I was looking at when Lucas came up and asked, "What's that?"

"A study showing the ice at the North Pole is melting," I replied. That's what led to his question about Santa.

And it is a good question, because it underlines the tremendous challenge that the human race is facing from global climate change.

Sorting out the answers

Some people believe that climate change is something new. But our Native American ancestors arrived in the Western Hemisphere on foot. An ice age some 15,000 years ago made that possible. And the global climate has been changing ever since.

Today the ice is retreating, it seems, on virtually all fronts.

We know the ice over the Arctic Ocean is retreating because since the late 1970s we've had satellites watching the entire globe. And scientists fear the rate at which the ice disappears could accelerate.

This is because ice and snow reflect a lot more of the sun's heat and light than liquid water, so the less ice there is in the Arctic Ocean, the greater the tendency for the zone to heat up.

A lot of people immediately think that the danger is that the level of the sea will rise, flooding coastal cities from Boston to Buenos Aires. But in the specific case of sea ice that isn't true, because the ice displaces in the sea the same quantity of water as is contained in the ice.

This year, North Koreans face the prospect of their coldest, hungriest winter in years. The United States and its allies have stopped supplying fuel oil ever since the North revealed that it has been running a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 accord with Washington. And on Friday, the World Food Program said it will not be able to reach 2.9 million vulnerable North Koreans — barring immediate contributions from major donors such as the United States and Japan, which are increasingly unhappy about helping the recalcitrant Pyongyang regime.

The immediate victims will be the North's children and elderly — including 760,000 children in nurseries — who depended on outside relief, says the WFP, the Rome-based U.N. relief agency that coordinates aid shipments to North Korea. - North Korea advocates "juche," or self-reliance, as a national philosophy. But it was reduced to begging for outside aid starting in the mid-1990s when floods devastated its already inefficient, Soviet-style economy, and triggered widespread hunger. - The famine sent tens of thousands of people wandering in search of food, often across the border into China, North Korea's last remaining ideological ally.

"Trains often sat idle for two or three days in each station, waiting for electricity," Lim said at a recent lecture to South Korean college students.