Heat Wave

As a heat wave sweeps eastward through much of the United States, residents of the affected cities are bracing for the worst. A few words of advice: Protect your young, your elderly and your residents of bad shopping areas. It's true. People who live in areas without "inviting" businesses are more at risk of dying. A 2006 study published in the American Sociological Review looked at the 1995 heat wave in Chicago and found that mortality rates were higher in areas where businesses were not well tended and leaned toward the bar-and-liquor-store variety.

A pre-spring heat wave has crawled over to the East Coast, acting like a weight on a scale and leaving the West with cooler temperatures than normal. The Baltimore Sun reported near-record highs for the date Wednesday, kicking the day off at 61 degrees and reaching 73 degrees by noon -- 10 degrees shy of the city's record high of 83, set in 2007. Seattle, on the other hand, saw snow flurries Tuesday and Wednesday morning, with the National Weather Service predicting that city's high Wednesday at only 44 degrees . “When the East Coast is experiencing a heat wave, the West Coast gets colder,” Rich Thompson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's Los Angeles office, said in an interview.

Balancing a giant jug of icy watermelon juice over one shoulder, Rafael Soria trod though the Santa Monica beach sand like a man on a mission. Out on the shore, his thirsty wife and three children awaited. "We came all the way from Palmdale as soon as we could," said the 36-year-old in shorts and a tank top. "It's just way too hot today." Across Southern California, people flocked to the coastline to seek relief from the summer's first heat wave. Crowds hauling boogie boards, fishing poles, kites, hula-hoops and coolers stuffed with hot dogs and chips drove toward the sea breeze Saturday as the fourth straight day of high temperatures persisted, particularly in the valley and inland areas.

The year Michelle Williams spent preparing to play Marilyn Monroe for her Oscar-nominated turn in Simon Curtis' "My Week With Marilyn" has taken on a mythos that seems appropriate given all the outsized legends that have surrounded the Hollywood icon for the last six decades. But all that research and rehearsal either went out the window or had to be hastily enriched while shooting three of the film's key scenes. "Sometimes you have to fight the circumstances or re-create them in your head," the 31-year-old actress says over tea at the Beverly Hills Hotel's Bar Nineteen12.

Heat Wave The Life and Career of Ethel Waters Donald Bogle Harper: 624 pp., $26.99 From the 1920s through the early '40s, Ethel Waters was probably the most famous black woman in America: a bestselling recording artist, a popular nightclub performer, the star of five Broadway shows and several Hollywood movies. After a grim period of little work as she aged and gained weight, Waters triumphed again as an African American matriarch in the 1949 film "Pinky" and in the lyrical 1950 stage adaptation of Carson McCullers' novel "The Member of the Wedding.

When we have the best weather anywhere, why is everyone driving with their windows up? DON MANNING Los Angeles

Tatiana Dyment found her 70-year-old mother sitting in the bathtub, her head leaning sideways and cold water from the showerhead still streaming down her back. "She could have been dead for two to three days, doctors suppose," said the psychologist, who had rushed back to Moscow from vacation in Croatia after she couldn't reach her mother by phone. "The windows in her apartment on the sixth floor were wide open and every piece of furniture in the apartment smelled of burning" from the thick white smoke hanging in the air outside.

Of course, New Yorkers get that the city can be unbearable when summer peaks. The defiant-chic pretend not to notice, and they stroll Fifth Avenue with ice cream cones and pack outdoor cafes on the waterfront till all hours of the night. But not this week. Ice cream melted faster than it could be eaten. And a faint fog surrounded St. Patrick's Cathedral as blasts of cold air from inside collided with hot air on the street. On Friday, the temperature reached 103 degrees in Central Park, and with the humidity, weather experts say, it felt like 115. New Yorkers were not the only oppressed.

Crews battled a brush fire Tuesday that scorched parched hillsides and threatened homes in Kern County as inland areas of Southern California sizzled through triple-digit temperatures. The blaze had burned 1,100 acres by Tuesday night as aircraft made repeated assaults on flames that raced across ridge tops and into steep canyons near the communities of Lebec and Frazier Park, officials said. As heat baked the region for the second consecutive day, people sought relief at beaches, where large waves and strong rip currents kept lifeguards busy making rescues.

The heat wave baking the country's midsection entered its third day Wednesday with high temperatures taking a deadly toll from Milwaukee to Memphis. The hot, humid air, which the National Weather Service warned could create triple-digit heat index readings in many places, also began to spread into the Northeast, where temperatures across southern New England climbed into the 90s on Wednesday and appeared to be headed for potentially historic numbers on Thursday, meteorologists said.

Six climate change-related events taking place between 2000 and 2009 cost the U.S. about $14 billion in health costs, researchers reported Monday in the journal Health Affairs. Most of those costs -- 95% -- were attributable to the value of lost lives, they wrote. About $740 million originated in "760,000 encounters with the health care system. " The coauthors, affiliated with the Natural Resources Defense Council, UC Berkeley's Boalt Law School in Berkeley and UC San Francisco wrote that their article was "a first attempt to synthesize health data from the literature on events related to climate change and to develop a uniform method of quantifying their health costs.

The heat wave that has scorched Southern California for several days is expected to ebb starting Monday as temperatures cool and humidity falls. The region will have cooled as much as 15 degrees by midweek after reaching highs of 93 in downtown Los Angeles, 97 at Getty Center and 108 in Chatsworth on Saturday, forecasters said. But the heat remained at full strength Sunday, prompting the weekend's second excessive heat warning from the National Weather Service. Many took refuge at beaches, pools and air-conditioned shopping malls.

Oklahomans are accustomed to cruel climate. Frigid winters and searing summers are often made more unbearable by scouring winds. But even by Oklahoma standards, it's been a year of whipsaw weather. February was so cold -- with the wind chill it felt like 16 below -- that Tim Gillard installed a door in the long hallway of his home in the small farming town of Marshall, walling off three rooms to more affordably heat the rest of the house. Now, in this summer's unrelenting heat, his family huddles in the air conditioning behind that same door.

Of course, New Yorkers get that the city can be unbearable when summer peaks. The defiant-chic pretend not to notice, and they stroll Fifth Avenue with ice cream cones and pack outdoor cafes on the waterfront till all hours of the night. But not this week. Ice cream melted faster than it could be eaten. And a faint fog surrounded St. Patrick's Cathedral as blasts of cold air from inside collided with hot air on the street. On Friday, the temperature reached 103 degrees in Central Park, and with the humidity, weather experts say, it felt like 115. New Yorkers were not the only oppressed.

Nearly half the country's population sweltered under essentially triple-digit temperatures, as brutal heat and humidity afflicted a vast swath of the nation from New England to Texas. At least 15 states were under heat warnings Tuesday. The heat advisories — issued when the combination of temperature and humidity makes the perceived temperature more than 100 degrees — covered areas where 150 million people live, representing nearly half the nation's 310 million people, said Eli Jacks of the National Weather Service.

As a heat wave sweeps eastward through much of the United States, residents of the affected cities are bracing for the worst. A few words of advice: Protect your young, your elderly and your residents of bad shopping areas. It's true. People who live in areas without "inviting" businesses are more at risk of dying. A 2006 study published in the American Sociological Review looked at the 1995 heat wave in Chicago and found that mortality rates were higher in areas where businesses were not well tended and leaned toward the bar-and-liquor-store variety.

A heat wave that has some portions of Southern California experiencing triple-digit temperatures will hit its peak on Sunday, officials said. Caused by a high-pressure system over the Four Corners — where Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah meet — the rising temperatures have made for a toasty holiday weekend. The Antelope Valley and parts of the Inland Empire were expected to reach well over 100 degrees on Sunday, said Bonnie Bartling, a weather specialist with the National Weather Service.

The heat wave baking the country's midsection entered its third day Wednesday with high temperatures taking a deadly toll from Milwaukee to Memphis. The hot, humid air, which the National Weather Service warned could create triple-digit heat index readings in many places, also began to spread into the Northeast, where temperatures across southern New England climbed into the 90s on Wednesday and appeared to be headed for potentially historic numbers on Thursday, meteorologists said.