Last week, Dow announced that because the USDA has not yet approved its 2,4-D Corn "Enlist" variety yet, it will not be ready for planting until at least 2014. This is great news for all of the groups and individuals who have garnered over 400,000 petition signatures telling the USDA not to approve the toxic corn.

This delay is certainly worth celebrating, but the fight to stop the approval of this corn is not over. Dow has gained approval in Canada and Japan for its Enlist brand and is still ramping up production of its 2,4-D herbicide and 2,4-D-resistant corn seeds with every expectation that it will be approved in the U.S.

Regulators and biotech companies are still fumbling to try to find chemical solutions to America's weed resistance problem despite the fact that overreliance on weed killers linked to GE crops is making the situation worse. Agricultural biotechnology companies continue to watch their herbicide and seed sales rise, while weeds develop resistance to all types of chemicals thrown at them at an alarming rate.

Speaking of meteors and their local impact, as we were on Friday, the Siberian fireball brought the mind of Stephen Fybish, City Room's Omniscient Weather Nudge, back to the Tunguska Event, a cosmic burp inflicted on Siberia in 1908 when the airburst of a still-unidentified object believed to be a meteor or a comet fragment flattened tens of millions of trees across 800 square miles.

Normally, Mr. Fybish limits his encyclopedic observations of meteorological data to New York City, at least here on this blog, so what's the connection?

Well.

It turns out that the Tunguska Event, which occurred on June 30, was immediately followed by one of the hottest Julys ever in Central Park. How hot was it? Let's go to the voice mail left by Mr. Fybish:

The price of food may rise in the wake of the horsemeat scandal, the boss of Tesco has suggested.

Philip Clarke, the chief executive of Britain's supermarket chain, admitted he could not promise that sweeping reforms to the company's supply chains would not leave customers paying more.

While he denied price rises were "inevitable", he acknowledged that he could not "guarantee" they would remain at present levels.

Publicly commenting for the first time since the food crisis erupted six weeks ago, he admitted that he had been left "shocked" and "appalled" by revelations.

He said horsemeat contamination was "wider than anyone imagined" and had been a "significant breach in trust" to his company's customers, which had been caused by "sloppy" suppliers "cutting corners for their own gain".

In a series of interviews, Mr Clarke announced a raft of reforms by the retail giant in response to the crisis.

Phillip Prince has been sitting in his tractor-trailer, stuck on Interstate 40 near Groom, Texas, for hours.

Nine hours and four minutes, to be precise.

Prince and his co-driver were due in California at 1 p.m. Tuesday, where they were going to drop off 25,000 pounds of frozen pizza.

But then they came upon what the National Weather Service is calling "a crippling, historic blizzard."

"It was pretty nasty when we first got into it," he said. "But then it turned into a whiteout."

Prince, who has been a long-haul driver for nine years, says he's never seen it this bad, as he explained his situation on CNN.com's iReport. The line of trucks is five to six miles long.

It's frustrating, the west-bound driver said, because he can see snowplows in the east-bound lanes. He hopes to get moving soon; he's down to eating his last box of Lucky Charms.

The good news is that it has stopped snowing. The winds are still 55 mph, but the skies are clear though the roads are not.

The storm has been moving east during the day, dumping records amount of snow along the way.

In Woodward, a town in northwest Oklahoma, firefighters were unable to reach a burning house because they ran into 4-foot snow drifts. The snowplow sent to dig them out also became stuck, Matt Lehenbauer, the director of Woodward, said Monday afternoon.

The burst of winter weather on Mauna Kea over the weekend has apparently come to an end. Snowfalls were replaced by freezing rain and high winds on Hawaii island summits Monday and temperatures are expected to rise above freezing today and Wednesday.

"With more sunshine and warmer temperature, I would expect what's left of the snow will melt pretty quickly over the next couple of days," said Robert Ballard, a forecaster with the National Weather Service Honolulu office.

Forecasters issued a high wind watch for the summits above 8,000 feet starting this morning through 6 a.m. Wednesday. Winds of 45 mph with gusts over 60 mph may blow over the summits, Ballard said.

A wind advisory is also in effect for parts of Maui County and Hawaii island through late tonight because of strong trade winds. Forecasters expect sustained winds of 20 to 40 mph, with gusts over 50 mph that could bring down tree branches, cause power outages and make driving difficult.

The advisory includes Manele, Lanai City, Kahului, Haleakala National Park above 6,000 feet, south Point, Pahala, Hilo, Volcano, Honokaa, Kamuela and Waikoloa.

The winds shouldn't be as strong on Oahu and Kauai, where forecasters predict 15 to 30 mph winds, with higher gusts up to 50 mph in a few areas.

Good Harbor, Michigan - She's lived near the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore for nearly seven years but a Northern Michigan woman says she's never seen anything like this.

Leda Olmstead came across dozens of ice boulders during her daily walk Thursday afternoon. The giant formations were scattered across a 100 foot section of the beach and were too heavy for her to pick up.

"I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially since I've never seen anything like it" Olmstead told WZZM 13. "I have a small English bulldog and they were as tall as her. They were pretty massive."

A rare glimpse of a "gigantic jet" - a huge and mysterious burst of lightning that connects a thunderstorm with the upper atmosphere - was made over China in 2010 and was recently described by scientists.

The gigantic jet took place in eastern China on Aug. 12, 2010 - the farthest a ground-based one has ever been observed from the equator, according to the research team.

Previous jets were mainly seen in tropical or subtropical regions, but this one took place around 35 degrees latitude, about the same as the southern part of Tennessee in the United States.

"This is the first report from mainland China," lead researcher Jing Yang, an atmospheric scientist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, told OurAmazingPlanet. The results were recently published in the Chinese Science Bulletin.

Researchers got a good look at the storm using a variety of tools, including Doppler radar data and weather pictures in the infrared band of radiation.

Blizzard warnings issued in New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.
A ferocious blizzard blasted the southern Plains with heavy snow and high winds Monday, burying much of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles under more than a foot of snow, wreaking travel havoc on the roads and in the air.

Overnight Monday and through the day Tuesday, the storm will slowly slog to the north and east, bringing a swath of snow across Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, the National Weather Service reported.

"This storm will have a huge impact, with additional heavy snows likely over portions of eastern Kansas and northern Missouri which received very heavy snowfall amounts last week," weather service meteorologist Robert Oravec wrote in an online bulletin.

The storm is being blamed for two deaths on Monday. In northwest Kansas, a 21-year-old man's SUV hit an icy patch on Interstate 70 and overturned. And in the northwest town of Woodward, Okla., heavy snow caused a roof to collapse, killing one inside the home.

Among the big cities that will see accumulating snow Tuesday are Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit, according to AccuWeather. The heaviest snow is forecast Tuesday around Kansas City, which should easily see a foot of snow. Chicago should receive about 3-6 inches of snow.

The storm will continue to dump snow across the Lower Great Lakes region Tuesday night and into northern New York State and northern New England on Wednesday, Oravec says.

Residents in southern Ontario and southern Quebec are in for more messy, mixed winter weather over the next few days as a storm system making its way north from Texas is expected to swing through the area from Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday.

According to an Environment Canada Special Weather Statement from this morning, precipitation from this storm should start to fall as rain tomorrow afternoon, along a line from Sarnia to St. Catherines. The rain is expected to switch over to snow in the evening and then spread to the north and east during the night, reaching eastern Ontario by Wednesday morning and pushing into southern Quebec in the afternoon and evening.

Up to 15 cm of snow is expected across southern and south-central Ontario from the system by Wednesday morning, and for eastern Ontario by Wednesday afternoon or evening, with higher amounts possible before the storm completely passes. However, as there is still some uncertainty with the exact track of the storm, these amounts could be lower if the storm tracks slightly further north, bringing more warm temperatures with it and keeping the precipitation a mix of rain and snow, or they could be higher if the storm tracks a bit further south, keeping southern Ontario temperatures below freezing and keeping the precipitation as all snow.

No weather statements are in effect for southern Quebec as of today, as the system isn't expected to arrive there for at least another 48 hours. However, since there is far less uncertainty about the precipitation type for eastern Ontario and southern Quebec, residents should prepare themselves for the possibility of significant snowfall amounts on Wednesday and Thursday.

Environment Canada will issued updated weather statements and warnings as the storm approaches, which can be accessed from their website.