Big Pharma has been trending this direction for a long time: marketing medicines to people who don't need them and who have nothing wrong with their health. It's all part of a ploy to position prescription drugs as nutrients -- things you need to take on a regular basis in order to prevent disease.
The FDA recently gave its nod of approval on the matter, announcing that Crestor can now be advertised and prescribed as a "preventive" medicine. No longer does a patient need to have anything wrong with them to warrant this expensive prescription medication: They only need to remember the brand name of the drug from television ads.
This FDA approval for the marketing of Crestor to healthy people is a breakthrough for wealthy drug companies. Selling drugs only to people who are sick is, by definition, a limited market. Expanding drug revenues requires reaching people who have nothing wrong with them and convincing them that taking a cocktail of daily pharmaceuticals will somehow keep them healthy.
All this is, of course, the greatest quackery we've yet seen from Big Pharma, because once this floodgate of "preventive pharmaceuticals" is unleashed, the drug companies will be positioned to promote a bewildering array of other preventive chemicals you're supposed to take at the same time. Did you take your anti-cancer pill today? How about your anti-diabetes pill? Anti-cholesterol pill? Don't forget your anti-Alzheimer's pill, too.
Medications are not vitamins
The very idea that these drugs can somehow prevent a person from becoming sick in the future strains the boundaries of scientific credibility. Only natural therapies like nutrition can prevent the onset of disease, not patented chemicals that don't belong in the human body in the first place.
The logical argument of the drug companies who push these "preventive" prescriptions is essentially that the human body is deficient in pharmaceuticals, and that deficiency can only be corrected by taking whatever brand-name drugs they show you on television. Forget about deficiencies in zinc, or vitamin D, or living enzymes; what your body really needs is more synthetic chemicals!
The FDA agrees with this loopy logic. And why wouldn't it? Subscribing to this pharmaceutical delusion is an easy way to instantly expand Big Pharma's customer base by tens of millions. Overnight, the market for Crestor ballooned from a few million people with high cholesterol to the entire U.S. population of 300 million people.
If Crestor can help healthy people be healthier (which it can't, but let's play along with this delusion for the sake of argument), then it's only a matter of time before they start adding Crestor to infant formula. I mean, why not? If it's so good for healthy people, then it must make babies healthier, too, right?
So let's add Crestor to sports drinks. Let's sprinkle it into the iodized salt supply. Let's drip it into the municipal water! (Don't laugh: This idea of dripping cholesterol drugs into the water supply has already been suggested by more than one doctor.) Let's merge the pharmaceutical supply with the food supply and charge people prescription drugs prices for "functional" foods laced with these chemicals!
Pharmaceutical deficiency
That's really where all this is headed. When medicines are approved as preventive "nutrients" for the human body, it's only a matter of time before the industry starts talking about your "pharmaceutical deficiency."
Not taking any medications? You have a pharmaceutical deficiency, and it needs to be corrected by taking more prescription drugs. But don't bother with actual nutrition, because nutrients have absolutely no role in preventing disease, the FDA claims. No nutrient has ever been approved by the FDA for the prevention or treatment of any disease whatsoever.
The message from the FDA is quite clear on this: Nutrients are useless, and you should eat medications as if they were vitamins.
Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/027834_Crestor_marketing.html
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Rare New Year's Eve 'blue moon' to ring in 2010
LOS ANGELES – Once in a blue moon there is one on New Year's Eve. Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor.
A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.
"If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.
The New Year's Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.
However, the Eastern Hemisphere can celebrate with a partial lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve when part of the moon enters the Earth's shadow. The eclipse will not be visible in the Americas.
A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year's Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won't come again until 2028.
Blue moons have no astronomical significance, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"`Blue moon' is just a name in the same sense as a `hunter's moon' or a `harvest moon,'" Laughlin said in an e-mail.
The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer's Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three.
Though Sky & Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on. For purists, however, this New Year's Eve full moon doesn't even qualify as a blue moon. It's just the first full moon of the winter season.
In a tongue-in-cheek essay posted on the magazine's Web site this week, senior contributing editor Kelly Beatty wrote: "If skies are clear when I'm out celebrating, I'll take a peek at that brilliant orb as it rises over the Boston skyline to see if it's an icy shade of blue. Or maybe I'll just howl."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091230/ap_on_sc/us_sci_blue_moon
A full moon occurred on Dec. 2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.
"If you're in Times Square, you'll see the full moon right above you. It's going to be that brilliant," said Jack Horkheimer, director emeritus of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of a weekly astronomy TV show.
The New Year's Eve blue moon will be visible in the United States, Canada, Europe, South America and Africa. For partygoers in Australia and Asia, the full moon does not show up until New Year's Day, making January a blue moon month for them.
However, the Eastern Hemisphere can celebrate with a partial lunar eclipse on New Year's Eve when part of the moon enters the Earth's shadow. The eclipse will not be visible in the Americas.
A full moon occurs every 29.5 days, and most years have 12. On average, an extra full moon in a month — a blue moon — occurs every 2.5 years. The last time there was a lunar double take was in May 2007. New Year's Eve blue moons are rarer, occurring every 19 years. The last time was in 1990; the next one won't come again until 2028.
Blue moons have no astronomical significance, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"`Blue moon' is just a name in the same sense as a `hunter's moon' or a `harvest moon,'" Laughlin said in an e-mail.
The popular definition of blue moon came about after a writer for Sky & Telescope magazine in 1946 misinterpreted the Maine Farmer's Almanac and labeled a blue moon as the second full moon in a month. In fact, the almanac defined a blue moon as the third full moon in a season with four full moons, not the usual three.
Though Sky & Telescope corrected the error decades later, the definition caught on. For purists, however, this New Year's Eve full moon doesn't even qualify as a blue moon. It's just the first full moon of the winter season.
In a tongue-in-cheek essay posted on the magazine's Web site this week, senior contributing editor Kelly Beatty wrote: "If skies are clear when I'm out celebrating, I'll take a peek at that brilliant orb as it rises over the Boston skyline to see if it's an icy shade of blue. Or maybe I'll just howl."
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091230/ap_on_sc/us_sci_blue_moon
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Detroit scare sparks debate on full-body scanners
Technology exists that might have detected explosives hidden in the underwear of a Nigerian man accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, but cost and privacy worries have until now prevented its widespread use.
A sign explains the procedure for going through the whole body scan machine, or millimeter wave machine as passengers wait in line at a security check point at the Salt Lake International Airport in Salt Lake City, Utah, March 10, 2009.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is suspected of trying to ignite an explosive called PETN using a chemical-filled syringe as Northwest Flight 253 approached Detroit on Christmas morning.
He had passed through security checks in Lagos and Amsterdam, where standard metal detector archways failed to spot his weapon.
Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport has at least 15 full-body "millimeter wave" scanners that see underneath passengers' clothes to detect suspicious packages or weapons.
The problem: their use has been only voluntary because of concerns that the scans reveal passengers "naked" to the operators and anyone else passing by the machine's screen.
The costs are also substantial. Whereas a traditional archway metal detector runs up to $15,000, more intensive whole-body scanners cost about 10 times as much.
"I don't anticipate myself that there'll be a rush to buy new equipment because airport operators are strapped for cash at the moment and the equipment itself, whilst good, is not a solution to the problem," said Kevin Murphy, product manager of physical security for Qinetiq Group, a British-based defense and security technology group.
"Some passengers are reassured that there's new technology there and are prepared to give up some measure of their privacy for it, and others have been outraged by it."
Airport operators need effective security plans, behavioral modeling and hiring processes just as much as they need advanced hardware, he told Reuters. Qinetiq is focusing its efforts on "standoff screening" that scans passengers even before they reach security checkpoints.
SEEING UNDER CLOTHES
Both "millimeter wave" and "backscatter X-ray" scanners try to do roughly the same thing -- see under clothes and identify unusual objects by their different densities relative to the human body.
Industry experts say public fears about radiation from the X-ray machines are unwarranted. But stronger than the health concerns are the privacy fears, in the United States and especially in Europe.
Germany's interior ministry, which sets the standards for domestic airport security, declined to use body scanners last year after it decided they were an invasion of privacy, although their usefulness and safety are still being tested.
"They were rejected as going too far into the private sphere of travelers," said Verena Meyer, spokeswoman for the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, an independent parliamentary watchdog.
An interior ministry spokeswoman said on Tuesday that certain conditions had to be fulfilled, including masking people's intimate details and making explosives more easily recognizable.
In Britain, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "We intend to be at the cutting edge of all this new technology and to ensure that we put it in place as quickly as possible."
But progress until now has been slow. A spokesman for Manchester airport said it was running trials but had made no decision on implementation, while Heathrow operator BAA said it was not using body scanners at all.
The European Parliament has consistently opposed body scanners on privacy and health grounds and has asked for more studies in both these areas.
Nonetheless, "there are no EU rules preventing member states from using them if they want to," a spokesman for the Commission said on Tuesday.
NO GUARANTEES
Speculation about increased demand has boosted shares of scanner makers this week. Some smaller companies such as ICX Technologies and OSI Systems, worth only a few hundred million dollars to begin with, rose 10 percent or more on Monday.
Larger players like Smiths Group and L-3 Communications have also benefited, with their machinery already in trials in airports around the world.
Schiphol's chief operating officer and director of security said on Monday they intend to make millimeter wave scanners mandatory once they get EU approval. Schiphol officials rejected X-ray machines as too unsafe for the public for regular use.
They stressed repeatedly that no matter what technology they chose, they could not be certain last week's outcome would have been any different.
"There is no 100 percent guarantee we would have caught him," Schiphol Group COO Ad Rutten said of Abdulmutallab.
The industry was quick to praise Schiphol's decision but just as quick to add that it might not be enough.
"Absolutely without a shadow of doubt this is a good thing. But one solution will not address every vulnerability. It needs to be a set of solutions," said Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates.
($1=.6256 Pound)
Source: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5bs24z-us-security-airline-scanners/
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, is suspected of trying to ignite an explosive called PETN using a chemical-filled syringe as Northwest Flight 253 approached Detroit on Christmas morning.
He had passed through security checks in Lagos and Amsterdam, where standard metal detector archways failed to spot his weapon.
Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport has at least 15 full-body "millimeter wave" scanners that see underneath passengers' clothes to detect suspicious packages or weapons.
The problem: their use has been only voluntary because of concerns that the scans reveal passengers "naked" to the operators and anyone else passing by the machine's screen.
The costs are also substantial. Whereas a traditional archway metal detector runs up to $15,000, more intensive whole-body scanners cost about 10 times as much.
"I don't anticipate myself that there'll be a rush to buy new equipment because airport operators are strapped for cash at the moment and the equipment itself, whilst good, is not a solution to the problem," said Kevin Murphy, product manager of physical security for Qinetiq Group, a British-based defense and security technology group.
"Some passengers are reassured that there's new technology there and are prepared to give up some measure of their privacy for it, and others have been outraged by it."
Airport operators need effective security plans, behavioral modeling and hiring processes just as much as they need advanced hardware, he told Reuters. Qinetiq is focusing its efforts on "standoff screening" that scans passengers even before they reach security checkpoints.
SEEING UNDER CLOTHES
Both "millimeter wave" and "backscatter X-ray" scanners try to do roughly the same thing -- see under clothes and identify unusual objects by their different densities relative to the human body.
Industry experts say public fears about radiation from the X-ray machines are unwarranted. But stronger than the health concerns are the privacy fears, in the United States and especially in Europe.
Germany's interior ministry, which sets the standards for domestic airport security, declined to use body scanners last year after it decided they were an invasion of privacy, although their usefulness and safety are still being tested.
"They were rejected as going too far into the private sphere of travelers," said Verena Meyer, spokeswoman for the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, an independent parliamentary watchdog.
An interior ministry spokeswoman said on Tuesday that certain conditions had to be fulfilled, including masking people's intimate details and making explosives more easily recognizable.
In Britain, Home Secretary Alan Johnson said: "We intend to be at the cutting edge of all this new technology and to ensure that we put it in place as quickly as possible."
But progress until now has been slow. A spokesman for Manchester airport said it was running trials but had made no decision on implementation, while Heathrow operator BAA said it was not using body scanners at all.
The European Parliament has consistently opposed body scanners on privacy and health grounds and has asked for more studies in both these areas.
Nonetheless, "there are no EU rules preventing member states from using them if they want to," a spokesman for the Commission said on Tuesday.
NO GUARANTEES
Speculation about increased demand has boosted shares of scanner makers this week. Some smaller companies such as ICX Technologies and OSI Systems, worth only a few hundred million dollars to begin with, rose 10 percent or more on Monday.
Larger players like Smiths Group and L-3 Communications have also benefited, with their machinery already in trials in airports around the world.
Schiphol's chief operating officer and director of security said on Monday they intend to make millimeter wave scanners mandatory once they get EU approval. Schiphol officials rejected X-ray machines as too unsafe for the public for regular use.
They stressed repeatedly that no matter what technology they chose, they could not be certain last week's outcome would have been any different.
"There is no 100 percent guarantee we would have caught him," Schiphol Group COO Ad Rutten said of Abdulmutallab.
The industry was quick to praise Schiphol's decision but just as quick to add that it might not be enough.
"Absolutely without a shadow of doubt this is a good thing. But one solution will not address every vulnerability. It needs to be a set of solutions," said Jane's Aviation analyst Chris Yates.
($1=.6256 Pound)
Source: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre5bs24z-us-security-airline-scanners/
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Passengers help foil attack on Detroit-bound plane
By JIM IRWIN, Associated Press Writer Jim Irwin, Associated Press Writer – 6am ET
ROMULUS, Mich. – An attempted terrorist attack on a Christmas Day flight began with a pop and a puff of smoke — sending passengers scrambling to subdue a Nigerian man who claimed to be acting on orders from al-Qaida to blow up the airliner, officials and travelers said.
The commotion began as Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying 278 passengers and 11 crew members from Amsterdam, prepared to land in Detroit just before noon Friday. Travelers said they smelled smoke, saw a glow, and heard what sounded like firecrackers. At least one person climbed over others and jumped on the man, who officials say was trying to ignite an explosive device.
"It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase," said Peter Smith, a passenger from the Netherlands. "First there was a pop, and then (there) was smoke."
Smith said one passenger, sitting opposite the man, climbed over passengers, went across the aisle and tried to restrain the man. The heroic passenger appeared to have been burned.
Afterward, the suspect was taken to a front-row seat with his pants cut off and his legs burned. Multiple law enforcement officials also said the man appeared badly burned on his legs, indicating the explosive was strapped there. The components were apparently mixed in-flight and included a powdery substance, multiple law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said.
The White House said it believed it was an attempted act of terrorism and stricter security measures were quickly imposed on airline travel. The incident was reminiscent of Richard Reid, who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes, but was subdued by other passengers.
Multiple law enforcement officials identified the suspect in Friday's attempted attack as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. He was described as Nigerian.
One law enforcement official said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil, but other law enforcement officials cautioned that such claims could not be verified immediately, and said the man may have been acting independently — inspired but not specifically trained or ordered by terror groups.
All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
The man was being questioned Friday evening. An intelligence official said he was being held and treated in an Ann Arbor, Mich., hospital. The hospital said one passenger from the flight was taken to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, but referred all inquiries to the FBI.
Melinda Dennis, who was seated in the front row of the plane, said the man involved was brought to the front row and seated near her. She said his legs appeared to be badly burned and his pants were cut off. She said he was taken off the plane handcuffed to a stretcher.
One law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mutallab's name had surfaced earlier on at least one U.S. intelligence database, but he was not on a watch list or a no-fly list.
The suspect boarded in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit, Rep. Peter King, the ranking GOP member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN. A spokeswoman for police at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam declined comment about the case or about security procedures at the airport for Flight 253.
Schiphol airport, one of Europe's busiest with a heavy load of transit passengers from Africa and Asia to North America, strictly enforces European security regulations including only allowing small amounts of liquid in hand luggage that must be placed inside clear plastic bags. After the attempted attack, passengers to the U.S. were being frisked at the gate as an added security measure, said airport spokeswoman Mirjam Snoerwang.
A spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Akin Olukunle, said all passengers and their luggage are screened before boarding international flights. He also said the airport in Lagos cleared a U.S. Transportation Security Administration audit in November.
"We had a pass mark," Olukunle said. "We actually are up to standards in all senses."
Delta Air Lines Inc., which acquired Northwest last year, said a passenger caused a disturbance, was subdued, and the crew requested that law enforcement officials meet the flight.
Passenger Syed Jafri, a U.S. citizen who had flown from the United Arab Emirates, said the incident occurred during the plane's descent. Jafri said he was seated three rows behind the passenger and said he saw a glow, and noticed a smoke smell. Then, he said, "a young man behind me jumped on him."
"Next thing you know, there was a lot of panic," he said.
Federal officials said there would be heightened security for both domestic and international flights at airports across the country, but the intensified levels would likely be "layered," differing from location to location depending on alerts, security concerns and other factors.
Passengers can expect to see heightened screening, more bomb-sniffing dog and officer units and behavioral-detection specialists at some airports, but there will also be unspecified less visible precautions as well, officials said.
The FBI and the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence note on Nov. 20 about the threat picture for the holiday season, which was obtained by The Associated Press. At the time, officials said they had no specific information about attack plans by al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
President Barack Obama was notified of the incident and discussed it with security officials, the White House said. Officials said he is monitoring the situation and receiving regular updates from his vacation spot in Hawaii.
___
Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes in Baghdad, Iraq, Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria, Arthur Max in Amsterdam, and Larry Margasak and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report.
Found at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091226/ap_on_re_us/us_airliner_attack
ROMULUS, Mich. – An attempted terrorist attack on a Christmas Day flight began with a pop and a puff of smoke — sending passengers scrambling to subdue a Nigerian man who claimed to be acting on orders from al-Qaida to blow up the airliner, officials and travelers said.
The commotion began as Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying 278 passengers and 11 crew members from Amsterdam, prepared to land in Detroit just before noon Friday. Travelers said they smelled smoke, saw a glow, and heard what sounded like firecrackers. At least one person climbed over others and jumped on the man, who officials say was trying to ignite an explosive device.
"It sounded like a firecracker in a pillowcase," said Peter Smith, a passenger from the Netherlands. "First there was a pop, and then (there) was smoke."
Smith said one passenger, sitting opposite the man, climbed over passengers, went across the aisle and tried to restrain the man. The heroic passenger appeared to have been burned.
Afterward, the suspect was taken to a front-row seat with his pants cut off and his legs burned. Multiple law enforcement officials also said the man appeared badly burned on his legs, indicating the explosive was strapped there. The components were apparently mixed in-flight and included a powdery substance, multiple law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said.
The White House said it believed it was an attempted act of terrorism and stricter security measures were quickly imposed on airline travel. The incident was reminiscent of Richard Reid, who tried to destroy a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001 with explosives hidden in his shoes, but was subdued by other passengers.
Multiple law enforcement officials identified the suspect in Friday's attempted attack as Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab. He was described as Nigerian.
One law enforcement official said the man claimed to have been instructed by al-Qaida to detonate the plane over U.S. soil, but other law enforcement officials cautioned that such claims could not be verified immediately, and said the man may have been acting independently — inspired but not specifically trained or ordered by terror groups.
All the officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
The man was being questioned Friday evening. An intelligence official said he was being held and treated in an Ann Arbor, Mich., hospital. The hospital said one passenger from the flight was taken to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, but referred all inquiries to the FBI.
Melinda Dennis, who was seated in the front row of the plane, said the man involved was brought to the front row and seated near her. She said his legs appeared to be badly burned and his pants were cut off. She said he was taken off the plane handcuffed to a stretcher.
One law enforcement official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mutallab's name had surfaced earlier on at least one U.S. intelligence database, but he was not on a watch list or a no-fly list.
The suspect boarded in Nigeria and went through Amsterdam en route to Detroit, Rep. Peter King, the ranking GOP member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told CNN. A spokeswoman for police at the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam declined comment about the case or about security procedures at the airport for Flight 253.
Schiphol airport, one of Europe's busiest with a heavy load of transit passengers from Africa and Asia to North America, strictly enforces European security regulations including only allowing small amounts of liquid in hand luggage that must be placed inside clear plastic bags. After the attempted attack, passengers to the U.S. were being frisked at the gate as an added security measure, said airport spokeswoman Mirjam Snoerwang.
A spokesman for the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria, Akin Olukunle, said all passengers and their luggage are screened before boarding international flights. He also said the airport in Lagos cleared a U.S. Transportation Security Administration audit in November.
"We had a pass mark," Olukunle said. "We actually are up to standards in all senses."
Delta Air Lines Inc., which acquired Northwest last year, said a passenger caused a disturbance, was subdued, and the crew requested that law enforcement officials meet the flight.
Passenger Syed Jafri, a U.S. citizen who had flown from the United Arab Emirates, said the incident occurred during the plane's descent. Jafri said he was seated three rows behind the passenger and said he saw a glow, and noticed a smoke smell. Then, he said, "a young man behind me jumped on him."
"Next thing you know, there was a lot of panic," he said.
Federal officials said there would be heightened security for both domestic and international flights at airports across the country, but the intensified levels would likely be "layered," differing from location to location depending on alerts, security concerns and other factors.
Passengers can expect to see heightened screening, more bomb-sniffing dog and officer units and behavioral-detection specialists at some airports, but there will also be unspecified less visible precautions as well, officials said.
The FBI and the Homeland Security Department issued an intelligence note on Nov. 20 about the threat picture for the holiday season, which was obtained by The Associated Press. At the time, officials said they had no specific information about attack plans by al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
President Barack Obama was notified of the incident and discussed it with security officials, the White House said. Officials said he is monitoring the situation and receiving regular updates from his vacation spot in Hawaii.
___
Associated Press Writers Lara Jakes in Baghdad, Iraq, Jon Gambrell in Lagos, Nigeria, Arthur Max in Amsterdam, and Larry Margasak and Devlin Barrett in Washington contributed to this report.
Found at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091226/ap_on_re_us/us_airliner_attack
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
'Extremely Dangerous' Blizzards Move Into Midwest
Fierce wind, heavy snowfall, icy roads threatening Upper Midwest as 'monster' storm moves east
A fierce winter storm was leaving dangerous ice, heavy snow and vicious winds in its wake as it slogged eastward Wednesday, threatening to wreak havoc on commuters in the Upper Midwest and closing schools across New England.
More than a foot of snow was expected in parts of Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa, where the National Weather Service warned of "extremely dangerous blizzard conditions" and near whiteout driving conditions. Wind gusts of up to 50 mph could build snow drifts between 8 and 15 feet tall.
Parts of New England also girded themselves for bone-chilling wind gusts and snow accumulations of up to a foot by the end of the day.
"It's horrible out there," said Todd Lane, an assistant manager of a Quik Trip convenience store in Des Moines, where several inches of new snow was reported overnight.
Although business was fairly normal overnight, it nearly all came from snow plow drivers — most looking for coffee and energy drinks, he said.
"Outside of the city there's 15-foot drifts and people are stuck in them," Lane said the drivers told him. "It sucks and it just keeps on coming."
Between 4 and 6 inches of snow fell in western and central Michigan, while blizzard warnings also covered parts of Nebraska, Kansas and Minnesota.
"For the most part, we're telling people to stay home," said Roger Vachalek, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Des Moines. He said if motorists get stranded, "you might end up being out there for quite a while."
In the West, pounded by rain and snow earlier this week, bitter wind chills as low as 40 below were sweeping across portions of southern Montana. The biting winds also were moving across Wyoming and South Dakota, according to the National Weather Service.
By the time the storm moves off the Maine coast Thursday night, it may have affected as much as two-thirds of the country, said Jim Lee, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Des Moines.
"It's a monster of a storm," Lee said.
Maine and New Hampshire could see snow accumulations of 6 to 10 inches capped off by rain and sleet in the evening. In northern New York, as much as a foot of snow was expected to accumulate Wednesday and more than 3 feet was expected by the week's end near the Great Lakes.
Hundreds of schools across New York's eastern half were closed or delayed the start of classes Wednesday. Schools also were closed in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
Hundreds of flights were canceled at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on Tuesday; all departures were canceled out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and only a few were scheduled at Des Moines International Airport.
The storm drenched California with rain, blanketed the mountain West with snow and brought 100 mph winds to New Mexico earlier this week. More than 20 inches of snow fell over Flagstaff, Ariz. — more than four times the record of 5 inches set in 1956.
At least five deaths were blamed on the weather, including an Arizona hunter who was killed Monday night when a large pine tree snapped and crushed him as he slept in a tent. The driver of a sport utility vehicle that plunged 90 feet off an icy road into the Texas Panhandle's Palo Duro Canyon also died.
Heavy rain hit some parts of the South with more than 4 inches reported in spots in New Orleans. A possible tornado was reported near Lake Pontchartrain, the National Weather Service said.
Cold temperatures also were threatening California crops, where only about 10 percent to 15 percent of the navel and mandarin orange crops have been harvested, said Bob Blakely, director of industrial relations for the California Citrus Mutual.
"We've got a lot on the line," Blakely said. "Both of them combined you're probably looking at over a billion dollars in fruit hanging out there on the trees."
Source: http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=9287108
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