Dakotas

A spring snowstorm plunged temperatures into the teens, brought drifting snow up to six feet deep and created blizzard conditions in Wyoming and Montana as the Dakotas braced for the oncoming storm. The storm brought a foot of new snow to the Alta and Snowbird ski resorts in Utah, and winds gusting to 75 m.p.h. knocked down trees and some power lines. The gusting winds and cold temperatures made for dangerous conditions in Montana and Wyoming, meteorologist Bill Barlow said.

First it was Texas Gov. Rick Perry who came to California with his cowboy swagger and boasts about lassoing away businesses. Then the South Dakota governor swept through to recruit dairy farmers. Soon after, the Iowa governor made an appearance. Now they're coming in pairs. Joining forces, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell are heading to California on Thursday to try their luck at wooing California businesses. On a two-day tour with stops in Costa Mesa, Palo Alto and San Francisco, the old friends plan to tout the wonders of doing business in their states.

An unusually heavy Rocky Mountain snowmelt coupled with spring rains have swelled the Missouri River and its dams to dangerously high levels, prompting thousands of North and South Dakota residents to evacuate and prepare for flooding. The rising river flowing through the Dakotas has strained infrastructure designed to protect communities in the Missouri River basin, said Michael Fowle, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Aberdeen, S.D. "It's the perfect storm, but in the worst sense," Fowle said.

LEAD, S.D. - The scientists don hard hats, jumpsuits and steel-toed boots to pile into a metal cage for a rumbling 11-minute descent into an abandoned South Dakota gold mine. They step over old mine-cart rails, through rough-walled tunnels and into a bright white room. There, they cast off their dusty garb and enter a lab hidden nearly a mile beneath the Earth. Inside, Patrick Phelps peers at valves connected to half a million dollars' worth of some of the purest xenon in the world.

Nearly three feet of snow shut down schools and most travel in northern Arizona and the governor declared an emergency in two counties as a massive storm spread ice and snow from the Southwest into the western Dakotas. Workers using tracked and four-wheel-drive vehicles rescued at least nine people stranded in hard-hit central Arizona.

A blast of Canadian air that sent temperatures plummeting to near zero from the Dakotas to the Great Lakes and spread snow across the Midwest made the official start of spring seem more like the start of winter. "It's a winter nightmare in March," said state Trooper Baric Buck in Illinois, where Chicago-area police reported at least 150 accidents on icy, snowy roads.

A relentless winter storm pounded the West for a fourth consecutive day Thursday, from the Rockies to the Dakotas and in areas already buried under as much as five feet of snow. New snow up to a foot deep was a possibility for Arizona's White Mountains, where 42 inches already had fallen. The slow-moving storm has dumped between two and five feet of snow in the mountains of central Arizona, the National Weather Service said.

A new blast of arctic air sent temperatures plunging as low as 39 degrees below zero in the North on Wednesday while snow moving ahead of the frigid front spread south to Georgia. In northern Arizona, five National Guard helicopters began flying rescue missions to bring food, fuel and medicine to hundreds of Arizona families stranded by mud and up to two feet of snow on three Indian reservations. Guard spokesman Maj.

A brutal cold wave stretching from the Dakotas to southern Texas paralyzed the Midwest Saturday with temperatures as low as 25 below, shattering records in at least 23 cities across nine states. Meanwhile, snow tapered off in the Northeast as residents dug out from a storm that dumped up to 10 inches of snow on New England before moving into the Atlantic, the National Weather Service said.

A "nasty" storm virtually shut down the upper Midwest today, as up to 28 inches of wind-driven snow closed airports and highways and idled schools, businesses and government offices from the Dakotas into Michigan. Ice and snow ripped down power lines, blacking out thousands of customers across the region, and the roof of the Silverdome at Pontiac, Mich., collapsed for the second time in 10 years. Snow driven by wind gusting to 60 m.p.h.

WASHINGTON - Democrats' efforts to maintain a majority in the U.S. Senate after next year's midterm election were thrown into further doubt Tuesday when Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota became the fifth senior member of the party to announce his retirement. Johnson, who chairs the Senate Banking Committee, said he would not seek a fourth term. He suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2006 and, despite extensive rehabilitation, relies on a wheelchair to travel the halls in Congress. "I feel great, but I must be honest: I appreciate my right arm and right leg aren't what they used to be, and my speech is not entirely there," Johnson said at the University of South Dakota.

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple has signed into law the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, including one that bans abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat, which can come as soon as six weeks after conception. A second bill signed by the Republican governor bans abortions solely for the purpose of gender selection and genetic abnormalities. And another requires that any physician who performs abortions must have staff privileges at a nearby hospital. The three new laws -- and a previously approved resolution calling for a November referendum on a constitutional amendment that is designed to protect life at any stage of development -- places the state at the forefront of efforts to limit abortion rights.

Re "N. Dakota's dubious honor," Editorial, March 19 As an obstetrician and gynecologist, I strongly urge North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple to put women and families first and veto the bill banning abortions after a fetus' heartbeat can be detected. I have cared for pregnant women with complex medical conditions. For some of these women, pregnancy termination is the only way to protect their health or save their lives. Roe vs. Wade made it possible to ensure that more women were able to access safe, legal and necessary abortions.

North Dakota lawmakers on Friday approved a state referendum for this fall on a constitutional amendment that, if passed, would effectively block abortion by holding that life begins at conception. In a 57-35 vote, the House followed the Senate's action and approved the referendum that now goes before the voters on the November ballot. Groups backing abortion rights said they will fight the referendum and, if needed, in the courts as well. “It is too intrusive and has too many unintended consequences,” Tammi Kromenaker of the Red River Women's Clinic, the state's sole facility offering abortions, said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times.

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple should not sign any of the legislature's half-dozen bills that seek to subvert a well-established constitutional right to abortion. Late last week, the North Dakota legislature passed a bill that would ban a woman from having an abortion as soon as the heartbeat of the fetus is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. If Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple signs it into law, North Dakota will have the ignominious distinction of being the most restrictive state in the country on abortion.

The North Dakota Senate on Friday passed a bill banning abortions when a fetal heartbeat is detected, which could be as early as six weeks of pregnancy. If signed by the governor, it would be the most restrictive abortion law in the nation. The vote comes about one week after Arkansas legislators overrode a governor's veto to become the first state to ban abortions involving fetuses 12 weeks or older. The North Dakota legislation is among a string of antiabortion bills that the state's lawmakers have been considering this session.

A record cold wave blamed for at least 12 deaths expanded Tuesday, dropping temperatures below zero in Iowa and Wisconsin and freezing parts of the nation from Texas to New England, while a new snowstorm closed schools in Montana and threatened to bring a second blast of arctic air. Cars refused to start and water pipes froze as low temperature records, some of them nearly a century old, were tied or broken in at least 28 cities in nine states from the Dakotas to Missouri.

Thunderstorms assaulted the central part of the nation Thursday with high winds, lightning and torrential rain, while winter returned to the northern Rockies. The storms, which have triggered several tornadoes in the Midwest and South this week, were produced by a Canadian cold front that clashed in the Plains with warm, moist air from the South, weather officials said.

Every time she drives into Whiteclay, Neb., over the border from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Natalie Hand sees the images that turn her stomach. Countless people passed out on the side of the road, drunk. Women willing to sell their bodies for a bottle of beer. They'll all Native Americans, members of her Oglala Lakota tribe. While alcohol is banned on the reservation, booze shacks like those in Whiteclay, run by non-Indians, have long done a demon's business along the border, selling alcohol to Native Americans, even minors, ignoring the fact that the tribe has a collective drinking problem, tribal members say. It's not only capitalism at its most perverse, the members say, it violates a treaty elders signed with the federal government to keep alcohol outside a 10-mile buffer area.

On a narrow road two miles from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, State Line Liquor beckons. Inside, "Native Pride" caps line a wall and sodas fill a cooler. But more often than not, people come for Budweiser and malt liquors with names like Tilt Watermelon and Hurricane. Alcohol has been banned on the South Dakota reservation for generations, so people come to State Line or three other beer and wine stores in Whiteclay for a case, a can or whatever a handful of change will buy. Alcohol sales near dry reservations have long been a problem, but in Whiteclay the tension between dry and wet, between Indian and non-Indian, stands out in sharp relief.