Eastern United States

Memo to: Los Angeles From: The East Coast Re: All that snow Yes, the headlines looked bad. "Snowstorm Slams East." "Snow Causes More Chaos." And yes, it did. For a weekend. But by Monday, snow country had bounced back, as it tends to do. Folks dumped salt on their steps, scraped off their windshields, laughed as kids pelted each other with snowballs. Many workers, their offices closed, rejoiced in a lazy snow day. In Manhattan, where plows had cleared the streets, Ellen Lopez, 49, shopped through her lunch break to make up for a snowed-in Sunday.

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.

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.

President Bush thanked NATO Secretary-General George Robertson for an "unprecedented display of friendship" Wednesday as the 19-nation alliance dispatched radar surveillance aircraft to patrol the eastern United States, replacing U.S. planes that are headed for the Afghanistan war zone. For Bush and Secretary of State Colin L.

Now a sopping, sprawling tropical depression, the remnants of Hurricane Ivan battered the eastern United States from Georgia to Pennsylvania on Friday with winds and drenching rain, killing at least 11 people. The storm spawned multiple tornadoes Friday evening that spun across northern Virginia and grounded planes at Dulles International Airport outside Washington.

It sounds like a classic California story: Adults concerned about self-esteem and unchecked competition legislate all the rough-and-tumble out of childhood. In this case, there is a movement afoot to ban dodge ball, a staple of the playground for generations. Dodge ball, it seems, is bad. There are liability concerns, critics say, and the game provides a poor cardiovascular workout. The real deal-breaker, though, is that the game can hurt children's feelings, not to mention their teeth.

More than 2 feet of snow fell Wednesday in parts of upstate New York as a powerful northeaster moved up the Atlantic Coast, setting Christmas snowfall records, closing airports and bringing an unexpected holiday spectacle of lightning and thunder. Snow was falling as fast as 5 inches per hour in eastern New York, said Evan Heller, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albany.

A judge sentenced the founder of the Bloods gang on the East Coast to 50 years in prison Monday after prosecutors said he headed one of the nation's most violent criminal organizations. U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald said that Omar Portee, 33, founder of the United Blood Nation, encouraged young people to join a life of violent crime and that he must face a long prison term to encourage respect for the law, deter crime and protect the public.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Atlantic Ocean hurricane season this year will be more turbulent than usual, continuing a trend that began in 1995 and culminated last year when four hurricanes lashed Florida, a team of scientists said in Ft. Collins. The June-through-November season will bring 13 named storms, seven of which will develop into hurricanes, said Colorado State University scientists William Gray and Philip Klotzbach.

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 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.