A major winter storm moving across the nation Wednesday is threatening to disrupt travel plans for millions of Americans heading home for Christmas. The weather system even has package delivery companies nervously checking out the forecast, with the timely delivery of precious gifts on the line.

"We're closely monitoring the storm," FedEx spokesman Scott Fiedler told NBC News. "We have a team of 15 meteorologists who track the weather around the world every day."

FedEx is seeing only minor delays so far but has contingency plans in place to help mitigate any effects of the weather, Fiedler said.

UPS, which projects that Thursday will be its busiest day of the holiday season, also has its staff meteorologists tracking the storm.

An "unidentified substance inconsistent with oil" is emitting from several areas of BP's Deepwater Horizon rig wreckage, but no sources of leaking oil were identified. That's according to the Coast Guard, which oversaw BP's recent week-long mission to inspect the undersea wells and wreckage from the 2010 explosion.

The exact content of the leaking substance and how much is coming out is one mystery. But if it's not oil, then it means the source of recurring oil sheens that have recently been spotted around the Deepwater Horizon site remains unknown.

"No apparent source of the surface sheen has been discovered by this effort," said the Coast Guard's Capt. Duke Walker in a press release this afternoon. The Coast Guard did not say whether there are other parts of the Deepwater Horizon wreckage yet to be examined for leaks.

Dozens of sea turtles, all of them near death, rely on 'round-the-clock care from a team of experts. The animals will call a re-purposed building on the grounds of the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy home until they're ready to go back to the sea. It's an expensive journey, but one advocates say is vital if the species are to survive.

"There's 85 endangered and threatened species swimming around us right now," explains Connie Merigo, the Director of the New England Aquarium's rescue program. "We do think it's going to be a bad season."

Already this year, close to 200 sea turtles have stranded along the Cape. They include loggerheads and Kemp's Ridley turtles. It is the "highest number of sea turtle strandings we've ever experienced in the history of the aquarium" says Merigo. No one knows for sure why the animals get stranded, but all of them are hypothermic when they are found. In some cases, their body temperatures fall into the 40s, and their heart-rate drops to one or two beats per minute. Even so, with proper care, most can be rehabilitated.

The Mayan calendar is about to end, and with it, the world.

People love nothing more than an apocalypse. Meteor collisions, gamma-ray bursters, alien invasions, super volcanoes, nuclear winter and global warming all provide great material for mass entertainment and breathless news reporting.

The latest apocalypse to capture our imagination is the idea that, along with the Mayan calendar, the world will end on the twenty-first day of this month. The Mayan "Long Count" calendar, which began in 3114 BC, ends on December 21, 2012. The calendar is supposedly the measure of days from the beginning of humanity to the end. As a result, some doomsayers predict the end of the world in a few days.

Proposed scientific reasons why we won't have a merry Christmas include a coronal mass ejection from the sun, a sudden switching of Earth's magnetic poles, a massive meteorite collision with Earth, and a sudden shift in Earth's crust. At this very moment, people across the world are stockpiling guns, machetes, kerosene, matches, sugar and candles in preparation for the coming disaster. But our National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) assures us that the world won't end on December 21.

Over that last two centuries, most doomsday threats have been blamed on humanity itself. Consider overpopulation. The Anglican minister Thomas Malthus postulated in 1798 that because population grows geometrically and food production was growing arithmetically, global population would outstrip mankind's ability to feed itself, leading to economic disaster. Dr. Paul Ehrlich followed up with his 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicting that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death during the decade of the 1970s. But the agricultural revolution of the twentieth century and slowing population growth have confounded the predictions of Malthus and Ehrlich.

The death toll from Typhoon "Pablo" (international name: Bopha) has reached 1,043 as Philippine government workers with the recovery of 23 more cadavers in Compostela Valley, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said yesterday.

In its latest report, the NDRRMC said the typhoon destroyed more than 24.1 billion pesos worth of properties, including close to 16.4 billion pesos in agricultural crops and products.

The agency said searchers found and identified 22 bodies in Monkayo town and another cadaver in Compostela town, both in Compostela Valley province.

Of the total number of recovered bodies, it said 645 had been identified.

More than 6,000 people have been evacuated following heavy rain and flooding across parts of Sri Lanka, say officials.

"The number will likely increase," Pradeep Kodipilli, assistant director of the Sri Lankan Disaster Management Center (DMC), told IRIN on 18 December in Colombo, noting flood warnings remain in effect across 10 of the country's 25 districts - Galle, Matale, Kandy, Nuwara Eliya, Polonnaruwa, Badulla, Baticaloa, Hambantota, Moneragala and Kurunegala.

Heavy snow caused a traffic jam that extended to about 20 kilometers on a highway linking the Ukrainian capital and the Hungarian border as of late Sunday, authorities said.

The jam took place after a highway section between Buh and Brody districts was blanketed by snow as deep as three meters, said the Emergencies Ministry.

As of Monday morning, traffic were resumed for small vehicles as emergencies workers were struggling to clear the snow.

A woman stuck in the traffic jam had to give birth to her baby in her car before the emergency crews arrived. The mother and the baby were later sent to a local hospital.

Witnesses told Xinhua that they saw hundreds of cars were trapped, with snow piled up to the car roofs. The trapped were seeking help from nearby village for food and heating.

Souce:Xinhua

Cold has killed 37 people in Ukraine so far this month as temperatures reached minus - 23 degrees in parts of the country, the government said.

The health ministry said 190 people had sought medical help and 162 had been hospitalised.

Night temperatures are expected to drop to -28 degrees in northern, central and eastern Ukraine this week, weather forecasters say.

The cold snap followed heavy snowfall which left some areas covered with as much as 53cm of snow.

The emergencies ministry said this week it was setting up hundreds of heated tents across the country where people could get hot drinks and receive first aid.

Last February, as Ukraine went through its coldest winter in six years, more than 130 people died of cold in the country of 45 million.

The area of the warning covers the adjacent provinces of Tungurahua and Chimborazo, according to the national civil defence agency. Greater activity has been building since Wednesday, along with a slight increase in gas emissions from the 5,029-metre volcano, located about 135km south of the capital Quito, the Geophysical Institute said.
Eruptions at Tungurahua, which means "Throat of Fire" in the indigenous Quechua language, peaked in 2006, killing six people in a Chimborazo village. Several communities near Tungurahua, including the tourist town of Banos with 15,000 people, also were forced to evacuate during the volcano's violent eruption in 1999. Residents could only return to their homes a year later.