A four-year-old boy and his grandmother were killed on Sunday and up to 200 people were injured when a 6.0 magnitude earthquake destroyed buildings in Malawi's northern Karonga district.

Another quake struck the southwestern region in neighboring Tanzania, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said, but initial reports indicated no serious damage or injuries.

The Malawi quake, which occurred at 0119 a.m. local time (6:19 p.m. EST) and was 9.4 miles deep, was the latest in a series of tremors in the uranium-rich Karonga district this month. On December 8 a one-year old was killed.

"Two people have died, a 4-year old child and his grandmother after the house they were sleeping in collapsed on them," police spokesman Enock Livasoni told Reuters.

The Northeast began digging out on Sunday from a massive snowstorm that buried cities from Washington to Boston under as much as two feet of snow, creating travel chaos and hampering Christmas shopping.

Nearly two feet of snow piled up in the Baltimore-Washington area on Saturday in the largest snowstorm to hit the region since February 2003, while New York City saw totals up to a foot before the monster storm churned into New England.

Boston and Cape Cod areas were expected to see as much as a foot snow before the storm moved out to sea. Areas of eastern Long Island had blizzard-like conditions and nearly two feet of precipitation.

The storm gave Washington its snowiest December on record, said Weather Channel meteorologist Mike Seidel.

Global warming fears aside, all students of climate science know that the Earth is presently in an Ice Age and has been for approximately the past 2 to 2.5 million years. This Ice Age has been characterized by successive advances and retreats of a glacial ice sheet, originating in Greenland and extending across the northern portions of the North American and Eurasian continents. Just 12,000 years ago, the undisputed geological evidence shows that New York, Chicago, and all of North America up to the Arctic regions were under a sheet of ice, estimated to have been from 1 to 2 miles thick. Mountain glaciers also extended downward from the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians in regions further to the south than the main glacial mass. A similar situation prevailed over most of Germany, northern France, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Poland and other parts of eastern Europe, and Russia.

Such had been the state of things on Earth for probably at least 100,000 years. Before that, a short period known as an interglacial had allowed for a warm climate somewhat like the present, and before it another extended period of glacial advance. The thaw which produced our present geography--the Great Lakes, the southward flowing Ohio River, and much else we take for granted--was not completed until about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, according to the best estimates of geologists and climatologists. Not only were there changes in the internal geography, but the continental boundaries were also greatly changed during the glacial period. Calculations of the volume of water that must have been contained frozen in the continental glaciers, indicate that the global sea level, was lower by as much as 300 to 400 feet at times of glacial advance. A glaciation does not mean sea level rise, but a sharp fall in sea level exposing the continental shelf for miles out to sea. Much of the coastal-dwelling civilization of the past 100,000 or more years, thus lies buried offshore beneath hundreds of feet of ocean.

Can this happen again? The most plausible theory of the causes of the ice ages, the theory of astronomical determination, suggests that the time is ripe for it to happen sometime soon. A Jan. 11 article in the online edition of the Russian daily Pravda was titled "Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age."

Eurostar Group Ltd., operator of high-speed passenger trains between London, Paris and Brussels, canceled all services for a second day, citing unseasonably cold weather in northern France.

The company can't guarantee that a full service will resume before Christmas, Eurostar Chief Executive Richard Brown said in a BBC interview today. The approximately 28,000 passengers affected by today's suspension can request a refund or reschedule their journey, London-based spokesman Paul Gorman said.

All services were suspended yesterday after four Eurostar trains broke down in the Channel Tunnel the previous night. A special service bringing passengers back from Paris broke down in the southeast English county of Kent. Brown said in an interview with Sky News that the temperature change on entering the tunnel created condensation that caused the electrical systems in the locomotives to fail.

Severe weather has continued to hit Europe for a second consecutive day. The cold front comes amid forecasts of more snowfall one week ahead of Christmas.

In Poland, the cold snap caused major disruptions to traffic. Temperatures plummeted in the capital Warsaw, where heavy snow caused havoc on the roads.

Trains also ran into trouble. In the southwestern city of Wroclaw, temperatures fell to minus 12 degrees Celsius and caused trips to be delayed up to two and a half hours.

Train commuter of Wroclaw in Poland said, "No one is coping well with this. Particularly the railways, they're not coping."

Meteorological events that happened on December 20th:

1836
A cold wave accompanied by 70 mph winds dropped temperatures from the 40's to near 0° in matter of hours on the Illinois frontier. Many settlers froze to death. Folklore tells of chickens frozen in their tracks and men frozen to saddles, while the streams reportedly froze with ice from six inches to a foot in a few hours.

1942
An early cold wave struck areas from the Great Lakes, Mid-Atlantic to New England. Syracuse, NY set a December record low with -26°.

Locations reporting daily record lows included: Burlington, VT: -23°, Albany, NY: -17°, Milton, MA: -16°, Concord, NH: -16°, Rochester, NY: -16°, Worcester, MA: -15°, Portland, ME: -15°, Alpena, MI: -15°, Ste. St. Marie, MI: -14°, Mt. Pocono, PA: -12°, Boston, MA: -11°: Tied, Hartford, CT: -10°, Providence, RI: -10°, Avoca, PA: -10° (broke previous record by 10 degrees), Elkins, WV: -8°, Buffalo, NY: -7°, New York (Central Park), NY: -4°, Nantucket, MA: -3°, Grand Rapids, MI: -2°, Allentown, PA: -2°, Charleston, WV: -2°, Newark, NJ: -1°, Trenton, NJ: -1°, Reading, PA: 0°, Detroit, MI: 0°-Tied, Philadelphia, PA: 1°-Tied, Wilmington, DE: 2°, Richmond, VA: 2° (broke previous record by 10 degrees), Harrisburg, PA: 3°, Erie, PA: 4°, Baltimore, MD: 6° and Norfolk, VA: 16°.

An El Nino weather pattern warming the Pacific Ocean and linked to drought in South Asia is likely to continue through the first quarter of 2010, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Tuesday.

The phenomenon, which began in June and intensified in October, has "implications for many climate patterns around the world over the next several months", the WMO said.

But a second year of El Nino conditions or rapid transition to a La Nina pattern -- its counterpart in which waters cool -- are considered "unlikely", according to the United Nations agency.

An El Nino, which means "little boy" in Spanish, is driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

In Southeast Asia, people know well the risks that extreme weather can bring, and they worry that a warmer climate will increase those risks.

When Typhoon Ketsana hit Manila this year, the crowded city's planners were stunned at the amount of rain that poured down in a short time. Houses here sit close to the ground, even though the land is lower than a lake nearby.

"The most concerned extreme events in Southeast Asia is probably storm - typhoon and tropical storm," said climate scientist Anond Snidvongs.

Dr. Anond Snidvongs, who has studied climate change for more than a decade, has analyzed storm data over the past 60 years. Storm frequency, he says, comes in cycles of 30 years. But, he warns, warmer global temperatures could bring more, and bigger, storms.

More than 2,000 passengers were stuck under the English Channel after sub-zero temperatures caused Eurotunnel trains to break down. Icy weather has thrown travel plans across Europe into chaos and has even claimed lives.

Four Eurostar trains carrying more than 2,000 people were stranded between England and France as services ground to a halt in freezing conditions.

Up to 1,300 passengers from two of the trains had to be evacuated on a vehicle shuttle as winter brought transport chaos to Europe. The remaining passengers waited for carriages to be pushed out of the tunnel by a rescue train.

A difference in temperatures between cold air inside the tunnel and outside had forced the breakdown, according to train operator Eurostar.

The situation affecting the world's longest undersea rail connection was described as "unprecedented" by the company.

China is attempting to scupper chances of a comprehenive agreement at the Copenhagen climate summit by using delaying tactics, sources inside the negotiations have told The Independent.

At an emergency meeting convened at the Bella Center this morning, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown assembled 26 heads of state in an attempt to revive a deal. But China's Premier Wen Jiabao did not attend and was replaced by vice foreign minister He Yafei.

This afternoon, the US president and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton called another meeting with China, but were snubbed again when only three low-level Chinese delegates arrived.