Eastern United States

Robbers with machetes hacked a U.S. tourist to death and seriously wounded his wife aboard the couple's sailboat in northeastern Guatemala, the woman said Sunday. In a telephone interview from her hospital bed, Nancy Dryden, 67, said her husband, Daniel Perry Dryden, 66, was killed by four men who boarded their boat late Saturday while it was anchored in Lake Izabal.

The cherry blossoms are blooming in Brooklyn by the thousands; daffodils are budding in the Bronx; and in Central Park, toddlers have yet to see a single snowflake this winter, the first time in more than a century that the city's most celebrated sledding slopes have been snow-free so long into the season. Throughout the region, winter seems in full retreat. Temperatures have been running 6 degrees above normal for at least a month, federal weather experts said.

The remnants of a huge winter storm plowed toward the East Coast after dumping as much as 2 feet of snow in the Upper Midwest, grounding hundreds of airline flights and closing major highways on the Plains. There was a blizzard warning in southern Wisconsin and storm warnings stretching from southeast Nebraska to northern Michigan and from northern Virginia to the southern East Coast. A snow warning was in effect for New York City today.

JetBlue Airways Corp. canceled a third of its flights Monday in and out of New York, taking new steps to confront bad weather and avert the type of storm-related service meltdown that rocked the carrier nearly two weeks ago when 1,200 flights were canceled. The storm that blanketed eastern cities with snow and freezing rain Sunday and early Monday was not as severe as the ice storm that struck Feb. 14 and left JetBlue in shambles for days.

The moon will turn shades of amber and crimson tonight as it passes behind Earth's shadow in the first total lunar eclipse in three years. The eclipse will be at least partly visible from Asia to the Americas, although those in Europe, Africa and the Middle East will have the best view. Earth's shadow will begin moving across the moon at 12:18 p.m. PST, with the total eclipse occurring at 2:44 p.m. PST and lasting more than an hour.

Winter returned to the northeastern United States on Friday after a period of spring-like weather, with snowstorms forcing airlines to cancel hundreds of flights. Snow and rain halted ground transportation at New York's LaGuardia Airport and Philadelphia International, with many airports from Washington to Boston experiencing delays.

A cascading computer failure in the nation's air traffic control system caused severe flight delays and some cancellations Friday along the Eastern Seaboard. A computer system in Atlanta that processes pilots' flight plans and sends them to air traffic controllers failed late Thursday or early Friday, said Diane Spitaliere, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

If you're not autumning in New England, this photo book may be the next best thing. In "A New England Autumn," all the roads are back roads. Ferenc Máté's photos take you across six states, capturing boatyards and church-steepled hillsides. Accompanying the photos are some of the most ruminative works of Frost, Longfellow, Thoreau and others.

With water supplies rapidly shrinking during a drought of historic proportions, Gov. Sonny Perdue declared a state of emergency for the northern third of Georgia and asked President Bush to declare it a major disaster area. Georgia officials warn that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-acre reservoir that supplies more than 3 million residents with water, is less than three months from depletion. Smaller reservoirs are dropping even lower.

To try to ease what he called an "epidemic of aviation delays," President Bush on Thursday announced a series of new measures -- including a temporary Thanksgiving "express lane" for commercial airplanes in military airspace -- to head off what many feared could be the worst holiday travel season ever.