AmtrakConnect free WiFi added to 12 East Coast routes, snack car will still cost ya

Remember when we noted the existence of AmtrakConnect WiFi on the Adirondack train (number 69) about two weeks ago? Although it wasn't official at the time, it is now -- and it turns out that was just a sliver of what to expect. Amtrak recently announced that the free service is currently available on twelve of its East Coast routes, which should please many a railway commuter accustomed to WiFi deprivation. Eight of those routes (Northeast Regional, Keystone and Empire services, Carolinian, Downeaster, Ethan Allen Express, New Haven - Springfield Shuttle and Vermonter) feature full wireless connectivity from head to caboose, while the others (Adirondack, Maple Leaf, Palmetto and Pennsylvanian) have designated cars that allow for internet access. Factor in its Acela and Northwest Regional lines, and Amtrak says 60 percent of its fleet is now WiFi-capable with more additions due in California before the year's out. Better yet, "4G speeds" are also in the cards for the future, but we won't hold our breath waiting for an equally swift rollout. Full press release after the break.

Continue reading AmtrakConnect free WiFi added to 12 East Coast routes, snack car will still cost ya

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Russia: Court victory for girls switched at birth

In this Sept. 11, 2011 photo, 12 year old Anna, left, and Irina, right, pose in the city of Kopeisk in Russia's Ural Mountains. Two Russian families on Monday won a US$100,000-compensation each from a maternity home that accidentally switched their 12-year old daughters at birth, but they remained at loss about how to fix their shattered lives.(AP Photo/ Komsomolskaya Pravda) RUSSIA OUT

In this Sept. 11, 2011 photo, 12 year old Anna, left, and Irina, right, pose in the city of Kopeisk in Russia's Ural Mountains. Two Russian families on Monday won a US$100,000-compensation each from a maternity home that accidentally switched their 12-year old daughters at birth, but they remained at loss about how to fix their shattered lives.(AP Photo/ Komsomolskaya Pravda) RUSSIA OUT

MOSCOW (AP) ? Two Russian families on Monday won a $100,000-compensation each from a maternity home that accidentally switched their 12-year old daughters at birth, and said they could use the money to house the girls next to each other.

The story has captivated Russia ever since the families learned recently about the switch after the former husband of Yuliya Belyayeva refused to support their daughter, Irina, because she didn't look like him.

A DNA test revealed that neither of them were Irina's parent. An official investigation tracked down Irina's biological father, Naimat Iskanderov, who had been raising Belyayeva's own child, Anna.

Yulia laughed with joy after the judge delivered the verdict in a courtroom in Kopeisk in Russia's Ural Mountains, but Iskanderov remained stone-faced.

In the footage broadcast on Russia's NTV television, Belyayeva caressed her biological daughter, Anna, while Irina, whom she raised, sat stern-faced on a sofa, here eyes down. "She feels jealous," Belyayeva said.

It was not clear whether Belyayeva had married again after separating from her husband. Iskanderov parted with his wife when Anna was five but later married again, according to the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.

Anna strongly resembled her biological mother, Belyayeva, while dark-haired and dark-eyed Irina looked like her ethnic Tajik father, Iskanderov.

Despite the verdict, Belyayeva said she will still struggle to overcome the feeling of shock over the inadvertent swap.

"The money just can't ease the pain," Yuliya Belyayeva said. "All the money in the world isn't worth a child's look at mother ... There are moments when I think it would have been better if I hadn't known anything about that."

Russian television reports said the girls don't want to leave the parents who raised them, so the families are thinking of using the compensation money, which is huge by Russian standards, to get houses close to each other or even share a home.

"I would like us to share a house so that we don't worry about her daughter coming to me and the other way round," Irina's biological father, Naimat Iskanderov said.

Belyayeva said she would prefer separate houses nearby, so that "we see our children growing up and take part in their education."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2011-10-31-EU-Russia-Switched-at-Birth/id-3fbfcd7ace26424a8a8ec000b9d1b51d

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How higher education is leading us astray

Despite a skyrocketing price tag, higher education is not benefiting our young people any more than when it was affordable

When the financial crisis of 2008 hit, we saw how state-managed capitalism works. Favored companies are allowed to make as much money as they can. But they are protected from going broke.

Skip to next paragraph Bill Bonner

Bill has written two New York Times best-selling books, Financial Reckoning Day and Empire of Debt. With political journalist Lila Rajiva, he wrote his third New York Times best-selling book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, which offers concrete advice on how to avoid the public spectacle of modern finance. Since 1999, Bill has been a daily contributor and the driving force behind The Daily Reckoning (dailyreckoning.com).

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Certain firms are deemed ?too big to fail,? by virtue of the key role they play in the economy, or at least by the role they play in a politician?s plans for re-election or future employment. But state-managed capitalism is very different from the real thing. It is capitalism in a degenerate form.

Real capitalism progresses in fits and starts, described by Josef Schumpeter as ?creative destruction.? It is like a jungle?not like a zoo. It cannot be managed. You cannot take out the predators or feed selected species without upsetting the balance of nature. Take out the destruction, and you block the creative process too.

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, most real wealth has come from real capitalism. Not from ?playing the market.? Not from getting a good job. Not by trying to cadge favors from the government.

So, what is real capitalism? It is what we?ve seen in the computer/Internet industry over the last 20 years. This was a new industry. It had not yet been tamed by the government. Regulations were few. There were no large, entrenched companies to block start-ups. There were no lobbyists to curry favor from the politicians. There were no subsidies?and no barriers. It was young, dynamic, chaotic?and very prone to blow-ups.

The whole industry blew up in January 2000. Mistakes were not bailed out. They were corrected. Money moved from weak hands to strong ones. Many companies failed. The companies that survived, and prospered?went on to glory. Amazon. Google. Microsoft. Apple.

And who was behind these new companies? College drop-outs, computer nerds, products of teenage mothers and broken marriages. They did not enter the ranks of existing technology companies, work their way up to senior management and then create new product lines. It is almost as if they succeeded not because of advanced American capitalism, but in spite of it. They created an entirely new industry?with new companies nobody had ever heard of. And then, they destroyed some of the biggest businesses in America.

Typically, in a correction, asset prices fall and unemployment goes up. Misallocated resources ? including labor ? needs to be re-priced and put back to work. But when markets are not allowed to work the bid and ask spread in the labor market can stay out of whack for years. Joblessness becomes a structural problem, not a cyclical problem. People do not find new jobs. Old businesses are not swept away and new businesses do not start up.

A zoo economy keeps the old animals alive as long as possible.

Let?s look at education. Now, there?s an industry ? we can all agree ? that adds value. You could look at it as a charitable activity. Or as a profit-making business. Either way, education has to be a plus for the individual and for the society, right?

Wrong on both points. Education is only a benefit when freely floating prices are allowed to determine what it is worth. First, let us look at the whole industry. Since the 1960s spending on education, in raw terms, in per capita terms, in terms adjusted for inflation, has soared. From the 1930s, when the first careful records were compiled, to the 1990s, real spending on education multiplied 5 times per student. It more than doubled from the ?60s.

Did this increase in spending do any good? Not on the available evidence. Test scores ? measuring achievement ? have not budged in 40 years. In other words, the additional investment over the last 40 years has been wasted. We might as well have thrown the money down a well.

But while tests of achievement have not moved?the tests of potential achievement have improved. For whatever reason, IQ tests and SAT tests show young people are getting smarter?or better able to take the tests. This may seem like good news. But not when it is set alongside the performance tests. What we see is that the investment in education over the last 4 decades has actually had a negative return. The raw material was better able to learn. But the investment in the teaching industry produced less in the way of actual learning.

Today, the US stands out for its educational spending, as it does for the bombs it makes and the drugs it distributes ? it is on the top of the heap, by a wide margin. Spending per school aged child in the US is about $8,000 per year. In Japan, it is half that. France is in-between with about $6,000 spent per child per year.

Which country has the best scores? The one that spends the least ? Japan. On math tests, Americans score 474 (out of 600). The French do a little better at 495. And the Japanese get a score of 523.

Science, the same thing. US students get an average score of 489. Japanese students are at 531.

There is nothing very surprising about these figures. Nearly thirty years ago, American researchers found that there was no connection between spending and educational results. They just looked at different school districts in the US. Spending was not correlated with results, they concluded.

And yet, studies continue to show that people with more education do better in life. We doubt these studies have much validity, at least as interpreted. It is surely true that people with a lot of education have lower unemployment levels and higher incomes, statistically, than those with little formal schooling. But we have no way of knowing whether any individual student would have been better staying in school?or dropping out like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

But we will take a guess: the typical young person would be better off getting out in to the real world and learning as much as possible from working, than he would by staying in school. After all, that?s how almost all the world?s great geniuses, inventors, scholars, and entrepreneurs learned. It has only been in the last 100 years that public education has been ubiquitous?and only in the last half a century that ordinary people felt they should go to college. But as more people went to college, the less dynamic?less creative?and less productive the US economy became.

Our colleague, Gary Gibson puts it this way:

College is not necessary for most people. It never was. In fact, the preoccupation with college has left America bereft of its former ability to create wealth.

An unhealthy cultural myth has flourished that says everyone must go to college and get an advanced degree, even if it?s something for which there is virtually zero market demand. Meanwhile, below-market interest rates and government-backed loans have lured a couple generations of Americans down the road to higher education.

Further, the kind of education colleges provide ? indeed, all of American schooling from kindergarten onward ? doesn?t produce innovators, entrepreneurs and job creators.

In a recent article for The New York Times titled ?Will Dropouts Save America?? Michael Ellsberg writes:

• ?American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don?t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren?t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs.

• ?No business in America ? and therefore, no job creation ? happens without someone buying something.?

Wealth is only created when value is added (You didn?t think it was when money was printed, did you?) The Austrian school of thought reminds us that value is subjective. People, ultimately, buy what?s worth buying to them with the money they?ve earned.

We cannot put too fine a point on this. It doesn?t matter what the seller thinks the item is worth. It doesn?t matter how much time, energy and material went into making the product or service. You can waste a lot of time, energy and material producing something no one will want to buy. The buyer determines the ultimate value?and whether he will part with his money for it.

There can be misallocations of resources. And when the central bank and government get involved, these allocations can grow very large and go on for a very long time before violently correcting.

So it is that, increasingly over the past couple of generations, there has been a gross misallocation of time and resources into higher education, aided and abetted by the central bank and the federal government.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/0qA8FFKz8pY/How-higher-education-is-leading-us-astray

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J.H. Snider: The Case of the Missing White House Petitions

On September 22, 2011 the White House launched its We The People petition website, which, in its words, "provides you with a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country." On October 26, 2011, the White House released -- in a blizzard of PR far exceeding the website's launch -- its first response to one of the petitions.

The responded to petition called on the president to take action to reduce the burden of student loan debt. But the response wasn't just on a piece of paper in an obscure corner of the WhiteHouse.gov website. The day the response was released, the White House's primary message to the American people, carried on every major U.S. media outlet, was that the president was going to address at least some of the concerns expressed in the petition.

Whereas before October 26, it took a lot of detective work to find the We The People petition website on WhiteHouse.gov, it was now emblazoned on the top right of the Home Page. Macon Phillips, the champion of the We The People website within the White House, had the featured White House blog post on the top left. Roberto Rodriquez, one of the White House's top education advisors, wrote the petition response on WhiteHouse.gov. David Plouffe, senior advisor to the president, sent an email to the tens of thousands of people on the White House email list, gushed about the president's newly announced policy that it's "a great example of We The People at work" and included a link to the We The People website. Melody Barnes, director of the White House's Demestic Policy Council, held a press briefing with Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, noting that the president's newly announced policy was at least partially in response to the petition's "message heard loud and clear." Not least, of course, was the Commander-in-Chief unveiling his new policy in a speech delivered in Denver at the University of Colorado.

Macon Phillips's blog entry had lots of impressive stats on the use of the White House petition website:

• 1,130,634 Total Signatures
• 756,734 Total New Users
• 12,513 Total Petitions Created
• 1,382 Average Signatures/Hour
• 925 Average New Users/Hour
• 23 Average Signatures/Minute
• 15 Average New Users/Minute

Wow!

But two vital statistics weren't there. The first was the ratio of those who start a petition versus those who eventually succeed in getting their petition posted to WhiteHouse.gov. That percentage appears to be well under 4 percent. On October 20, 30 days after the launch of the We The People Website and the last day before the first petitions started to be removed from the White House website, there were 208 posted petitions. On October 26, 2011, the number of posted petitions was 161 (by October 28 it had dropped to 125, of which only 76 had reached the 150 signature threshold in the last 30 days). Although most of the 161 double count those in the 208 tally, this suggests that well under 4 percent of the submitted petitions have reached the 150 signature threshold necessary to be publicly posted on the White House website.

Why is this? One important factor is that it is far harder than most people suppose to get to the 150 signatures. Surprisingly, given the way the White House set up the registration, getting 150 print signatures is vastly easier than getting 150 electronic ones. My guess is that petition creators, in order to yield 150 actual signatures, need about 600 people willing to both click on the URL to sign the petition and then click on the register button.

Given all the unannounced and unexplained downtime for the White House petition website, the ratio may exceed 1,000:150 for those unlucky petition creators who send out their publicity when the White House website is down. On October 27, 2011, the website was down during business hours for at least one hour. Another day I clocked more than two hours of outages. (Outages may also help explain why in the last 30 days not a single petition that reached the 150 threshold also reached the 25,000 signature threshold, a stark contrast to the first 30 days. The White House provides no acknowledgment, explanation, or statistics for this extraordinary level of outages. Nor have they responded to written complaints. If they did, they might be forced to extend the 30 day deadline for getting signed petitions by at least 10 percent.)

The first difficulty is that to sign in you need to give the White House your email address. A lot of people, both liberals and conservatives, don't trust the government enough to do this. It doesn't matter that in the fine print the White House promises not to use their email addresses for any other purpose than to verify their identity. For all they know, the White House could change its policy tomorrow, just like it suddenly increased its threshold from 5,000 to 25,000 signatures, and just like Facebook and other reputable websites routinely change their privacy policies without public notice, except for the fine print.

Then there are all the steps to be able to sign a petition. In addition to entering your email address, you must enter in your name and zip code, followed by a daunting captcha code (to make sure you aren't a robot). The captcha code probably isn't too much of a deterrent to the young who have become experts at deciphering such obscure text, but a lot of folks, especially older people, may give up after trying three or four times to prove they are not a robot. Due to poor testing of the White House software, on some browsers the lower part of the registration screen, including most of the captcha, is cutoff and there is no way to complete the registration. This has been a bug since the website was launched and amazingly still hasn't been fixed.

After completing the registration form, you must wait several minutes to receive an email to verify your email address. If you're not at your home computer and don't have access to your email, tough luck. After you hit the email link, you're ready to sign, assuming you clicked on the We The People website from the computer with your email address. If not, you've got to sign in again and enter a password (an incomprehensible one such as bk^-!,x;HI.,%$) sent with your email verification link.

A bizarre part of this interface is that it violates the White House's own policy for registering on Federal government websites. White House policy dictates that Federal agencies who fail to give website visitors the option to log on with outside credentials, such as their Gmail or PayPal username and password, may lose funding. Third party credentialing protects citizen privacy, saves citizens time, and saves the government money. Reporter Aliya Sternstein, writing for NextGov, provides this concise description:

So-called federated identity management allows agency and corporate sites to trust credentials that are issued by an outside entity. Currently, dot-gov visitors must remember multiple names and codes to interact with agencies, and each federal site must pay to maintain its own independent ID validation system. Sites are continuously asking for more personal information than is necessary simply to send citizens and customers alerts or let them save webpage settings, privacy groups complain. By accepting credentials issued by trusted third parties, agencies are expected to cut down on the cost of system upkeep and save taxpayers some grief, federal officials say.

To be fair, there are special difficulties associated with assuring that individuals don't vote more than once. A trusted third-party clearinghouse of third-party verifiers would be necessary to assure only one registration per individual. But merely verifying a user's email address doesn't require such a clearinghouse.

Some would argue that making it hard for citizens to sign the We The People website makes a petition signature more valuable in the sense that a handwritten letter is more effective with a member of Congress than an emailed one because the handwritten one requires more effort. However, the We The People registration method only makes it hard to register, not sign. Once one is registered, it is a breeze to sign. If one were so inclined, one could sign dozens in a few seconds. This helps explain why getting to 150 signatures is often far harder than getting to 5,000. It also helps explain the high signature totals for the numerous and overlapping marijuana petitions. Once one has bothered to register to sign one marijuana petition, it requires practically no effort to sign others.

My wife, for example, nearly killed herself getting the first 150 signatures on her petition, while the next 150 were practically effortless. One middle-aged man wrote back to her, one of the many people she personally contacted: "I tried four times to enroll in the system, and I could never get an e-mail confirmation so I couldn't do anything. The computer never told me I had erred in the process. I don't get it. I'm sorry but I tried. Good luck with the vote." Another person wrote: "The White House certainly makes it difficult to sign a petition: now I only need to confirm by clicking for a website that is not currently available!"

Most people appear to sheepishly blame themselves, not the White House, for the technical problems. Others, assuming White House technical staff couldn't be that incompetent, blame "hackers."

The other significant omission of the White House stats was the number of petitions that had reached the 150 threshold for public disclosure but failed to reach the threshold for a White House response within the 30 day period allowed to get signatures. By October 26, this drop off was 47 petitions. Even more significant is that these petitions were nowhere archived on the White House website.

Since WhiteHouse.gov petitions are a type of public speech similar to that at a public hearing held by a government body such as a school board, state legislature, or Congress, a record should be publicly accessible because this enhances democratic deliberation and accountability. The most striking feature of this online record-keeping omission, however, is that it violates the White House's own Open Government Directive.

Public access to petitions is covered under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The Open Government Directive mandates that Federal agencies should post public documents online unless there is a compelling reason, such as cost, not to. The White House is thus violating its own mandate and setting a terrible example for the agencies. Given that the agencies have already been blithely ignoring the White House's Directive for FOIA requests regarding agency accountability, the White House's violation of its own policy appears to be yet one more nail in that coffin.

A truism of democratic politics is that public officials want to maximize the public perception that they are open while in fact doing as much as possible to control the flow of information that might prove politically damaging (e.g., see my journal article, Deterring Fake Public Participation). Call this the "embrace and strangle" strategy: publicly embrace participatory democracy while quietly strangling the unwelcome aspects that make it meaningful. The evidence suggests some of this is going on in the White House, if only among competing factions.

Given that We The People does in fact enhance the values of democratic deliberation and accountability, it may be unfair to emphasize the ways it fails to reach its potential. Given the constraints of the real world, the best should not be the enemy of the better. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the ways in which We The People may not be immune to the classic political incentives for information control. Regardless, We The People is praiseworthy as a significant new tool for bringing democracy into the Internet Age.

Addendum

This is my third Huffington Post commentary on the new White House Petition website. The other two are: What Is the Democratic Function of the White House's We The People Petition Website?, October 20, 2011, and The White House's New We the People Petition Website, October 11, 2011.

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Follow J.H. Snider on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sniderjh

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jh-snider/we-the-people-petition-website_b_1062883.html

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Snow smacks Northeast; power out for millions

SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn. ?? One of the darkest Halloweens ever loomed for about 3 million households left without power on Sunday by a rare October snowstorm in the Northeast that bedeviled transportation and was blamed for at least 11 deaths.

Jack-o'-lanterns peeked through record-breaking snow, the heaviest of which was 31.4 inches measured in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, according to the National Weather Service.

"It's too scary -- the windows are rattling too loud," a terrified Sophia Band, 6, said, her father recalled, as she jumped into her parents' bed in Conway, Massachusetts overnight during the crushing storm.

From Maryland to Maine, officials said it would take days to restore electricity, even though the snow ended Sunday.

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The storm smashed record snowfall totals for October and worsened as it moved north. Communities in western Massachusetts were among the hardest hit. Snowfall totals topped 27 inches in Plainfield, and nearby Windsor had gotten 26 inches by early Sunday.

States of emergency were declared in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York.

Halloween put on ice
Roads, rails and airline flights were knocked out, and passengers on a JetBlue flight were stuck on a plane in Hartford, Conn., for more than seven hours. And while children across the region were thrilled to see snow so early, it also complicated many of their Halloween plans.

Story: Snow cancels NY, Philly flights, makes road travel treacherous

Sharon Martovich of Southbury, Conn., said she hoped the power will come back on in time for her husband's Halloween tradition of playing "Young Frankenstein" on a giant screen in front of their house. But no matter what, she said, they will make sure the eight or so children who live in the neighborhood don't miss out on trick-or-treating.

"Either way we will get the giant flashlights and we will go," she said.

The Massachusetts towns of Worcester, Auburn and Leicester were urging people to postpone trick or treating until later this week, citing concerns over safety due to downed trees, darkened streets and piles of snow, the Worcester Telegram and Gazette reported.

Some 48 passengers on an Amtrak train bound for Boston were stranded for 13 hours overnight when a rockslide blocked the tracks near central Massachusetts, company spokeswoman Vernae Graham said. They were bussed to their final destinations before noon on Sunday.

Other Amtrak service was suspended between Providence and Boston; New Haven, Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts; and Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

New Jersey Transit and Metro-North Railroad suspended service on several lines into New York City on Sunday.

The JetBlue passengers stranded Saturday at Hartford's Bradley International Airport were on a flight from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Newark, N.J., that had been diverted. Passenger Andrew Carter, a football reporter for the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, said the plane ran out of snacks and bottled water, and the toilets backed up.

Story: At least 4 jets strand Conn. passengers for hours

JetBlue spokeswoman Victoria Lucia said power outages at the airport has made it difficult to get passengers off the plane, and added that the passengers would be reimbursed. In 2007, passengers in JetBlue planes were stranded for nearly 11 hours at New York's Kennedy Airport following snow and ice storms.

There were other flight delays in the region over the weekend, and commuter trains in Connecticut and New York were delayed or suspended because of downed trees and signal problems. Amtrak suspended service on several Northeast routes, and one train from Chicago to Boston got stuck overnight in Palmer, Mass. The 48 passengers had food and heat, a spokeswoman said, and they were taken by bus Sunday to their destinations.

Airports slowly returned to normal service on Sunday, although there were some residual delays due to wind at Newark International Airport.

'More difficult' than Irene
More than 800,000 power customers were without electricity in Connecticut alone ? shattering the record set just two months ago by Hurricane Irene. Massachusetts had more than 600,000 outages, and so did New Jersey ? including Gov. Chris Christie's house. Parts of Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Maryland and Vermont also were without power.

"It's going to be a more difficult situation than we experienced in Irene," Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said. "We are expecting extensive and long-term power outages."

Thirty-two shelters were open around the state, and Malloy asked volunteer fire departments to allow people in for warmth and showers. At least four hospitals were relying on generators for power.

Around Newtown in western Connecticut, trees were so laden with snow on some back roads that the branches touched the street. Every few minutes, a snap filled the air as one broke and tumbled down. Roads that were plowed became impassible because the trees were falling so fast.

One of the few businesses open in the area was a Big Y grocery store that had a generator. Customers loaded up on supplies, heard news updates over the intercom, charged up their cell phones, and waited for a suddenly hard-to-get cup of coffee ? in a line that was 30 people deep and growing.

'Totally unprepared'
Many of the areas hit by the storm had also been hit by Irene. In New Jersey's Hamilton Township, Tom Jacobsen also recalled heavy spring flooding and a particularly heavy winter before that.

"I'm starting to think we really ticked off Mother Nature somehow, because we've been getting spanked by her for about a year now," he said while grabbing some coffee at a convenience store.

It wasn't just the trees that weren't ready for a wintry wallop.

Kerry McNiven said she was "totally unprepared" for the storm that knocked out her water and power and sent tree limbs crashing into her Simsbury, Conn., home. She was buying disposable plates and cups in a darkened supermarket, a setting that she said resembled "one of those post-apocalyptic TV shows."

"They didn't hype this one as much" as Irene, she said. "I didn't think it was going to be as bad."

In Concord, N.H., Dave Whitcher's company had yet to prep its sanding equipment before the storm dropped nearly 2 feet of snow. His crews were plowing and shoveling parking lots Sunday and would be back Monday to salt sidewalks and walkways.

"It was a bit of a surprise, the amount and how heavy it was. We should've probably come out and got a little earlier start, but we did all right," Whitcher said.

Vaccaro, the weather service spokesman, said the snowstorm "absolutely crushed previous records that in some cases dated back more than 100 years." Saturday was only the fourth snowy October day in New York's Central Park since record-keeping began 135 years ago.

There usually isn't enough cold air in the region to support a nor'easter this time of year, but an area of high pressure over southeastern Canada funneled cold air south into the U.S., Vaccaro said. That cold air combined with moisture coming from the North Carolina coast to produce the unseasonable weather.

Residents urged to avoid travel
A few businesses enjoyed the early snow: Ski resorts in Vermont and Maine opened early. But it was more commonly an aggravation.

Many residents were urged to avoid travel altogether. Speed limits were reduced on bridges between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A few roads closed because of accidents and downed trees and power lines, said Sean Brown, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.

Five people died in Pennsylvania because of the storm, two each in car accidents in suburban Philadelphia. An 84-year-old Temple man was killed Saturday when a snow-laden tree fell on his home while he was napping in his recliner.

Slideshow: Editorial cartoonists poke fun at snow so soon (on this page)

Storm-related traffic accidents also killed people in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. A New Jersey man died Saturday in a house fire sparked by a downed power line, and a man in Springfield, Mass., was electrocuted by downed wires.

The snow was a bone-chilling slush in New York City, and a taste of what's to come for demonstrators camping out at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for the Occupy Wall Street protest.

Nick Lemmin, of Brooklyn, spent his first night at Zuccotti in a sleeping bag in a tent, wearing thermals, a sweatshirt and a scarf.

Lemmin said he thought the early snow was actually "a good test." But it was too much for protester Adash Daniel, who had already been in the park for three weeks.

"I'm not much good to this movement if I'm shivering," Daniel said as he left.

There was much more snow in Concord, where 9-year-old Nate Smith and his brother had fun making a snowman. But Nate wasn't sure he'd be able to go trick-or-treating Monday. Even if he did, his werewolf costume could end up looking a little different than he had imagined.

"I might have to put on snow pants," he said.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45093724/ns/weather/

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Contrast of misery, normalcy in flood-wary Bangkok

Tourists carry their partners to avoid floodwaters at the entrance of the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday Oct. 28, 2011. The Chao Phraya river coursing through the capital swelled to record highs Friday, briefly flooding riverside buildings and an ornate royal complex at high tide amid fears that flood defenses could break and swamp the heart of the city. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Tourists carry their partners to avoid floodwaters at the entrance of the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday Oct. 28, 2011. The Chao Phraya river coursing through the capital swelled to record highs Friday, briefly flooding riverside buildings and an ornate royal complex at high tide amid fears that flood defenses could break and swamp the heart of the city. (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

Motorcyclists move past a flooded street near the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday Oct. 28, 2011. The main river coursing through Thailand's capital swelled to record highs Friday, briefly flooding riverside buildings and an ornate royal complex at high tide amid fears that flood defenses could break and swamp the heart of the city. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Reflection of Grand Palace is seen on floodwaters as Thai residents walk through a partially flooded street near Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

Reflection of Grand Palace is seen on floodwaters as Thai residents walk through a partially flooded street near Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

A Thai couple push a cart passing by the empty shelf inside a super market due to the food suppliers distributor center has affected by flooding in Bangkok , Thailand, Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011. Defenses shielding the center of Thailand's capital from the worst floods in nearly 60 years mostly held at critical peak tides Saturday, but areas along the city's outskirts remained submerged along with much of the countryside (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

BANGKOK (AP) ? On one side of Bangkok, you'll find the victims of Thailand's worst flooding in half a century. They float down trash-strewn waterways, paddling washtubs with wicker brooms over submerged neighborhoods.

Just a few miles (kilometers) away, you'll find something else entirely: well-heeled shoppers perusing bustling malls decorated with newly hung Halloween decorations, couples sipping espresso in the air-conditioned comfort of ultrachic cafes.

Although catastrophic flooding has devastated a third of this Southeast Asian nation and submerged some of the capital's northernmost districts, the reality for the majority of this sprawling metropolis of 9 million people is that life goes on.

The desperate images of disaster contrast sharply with scenes of total normality ? from night-owls drinking cocktails in red light districts to tourists enjoying relaxing foot massages in faux-leather chairs downtown.

An exodus of thousands of Bangkok residents to nearby resorts and a government-ordered five-day holiday have left the notoriously congested city unusually easy to maneuver by taxi and three-wheeled tuk-tuk.

"It's better, in a way," Nicole Attwater of Sydney said Sunday, adding that she was happy to brave some flooding to see the Grand Palace, the gold-studded former seat of the Thai monarchy, with far lighter crowds than normal on a sunny morning.

"It's a good time to come, because it's quiet," she said.

Most of Bangkok is dry, with little to indicate that anything is wrong ? except for the ominous walls of sandbags stacked around hotels and homes, and the apocalyptic predictions of everyone from expatriate bloggers to some members of the Thai government.

Yet, the threat of floodwaters sweeping through the city is still very real. Nationwide, 381 people have died over the last three months, and 110,000 more have been displaced ? 10,000 of them in Bangkok, according to government figures. The catastrophe has put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and cost billions of dollars in damage ? a bill that grows larger by the day.

Among items struck from tourists' agendas: shopping for crafts at the popular Chatuchak weekend market and dinner cruises down the city's Chao Phraya river ? all canceled due to the high waters. The river swelled to a record high level early Sunday, spilling into some neighborhoods and sparking fears it would flood the inner city.

Fears over worse-case scenarios and travel warnings issued by foreign governments have slashed visitors by half at sites like the Grand Palace and the giant gold-plated Reclining Buddha inside Bangkok's Wat Pho temple complex.

But the biggest problem by far, said tour guide Keerati Atui, is the media, which he said has given the impression that most of Bangkok is under water.

"Look around," he said, gesturing to lines of tourists streaming into the white-walled palace. "It's dry. Everything here is normal."

River water has lapped at the palace gates and even crept inside, but much of it has welled up through drains in the riverside neighborhood. One picture posted this week on Twitter showed a cameraman filming a television news anchor on a street beside the palace in ankle-high water. On both sides of the pair, the street was bone dry.

Heavy monsoon rains have pummeled a large swath of Asia since July. As floodwaters crept across Thailand, they first drowned neighboring provinces, then districts on the northern outskirts of Bangkok. Last week, advancing water forced the city's Don Muang airport, which is used mainly for domestic flights, to shut down. However, the international Suwarnabhumi airport remains open, and the city's skytrain and subway lines were functioning normally.

Nobody knows how far the water will go, but so far Bangkok's defenses have mostly held.

Statements from government leaders have alternated from assurances the capital would be spared to dire warnings that nowhere is safe.

Panicked Bangkokians have stripped supermarkets and convenience stores of bottled water and dried noodle supplies in recent weeks as a result, but there is still plenty to drink. Both those items can be still found in street-side shops along the city's temple-dotted riverside, where the mineral water is ice cold and the noodle soup is spicy and sprinkled with fish balls.

"A lot of people are overreacting, they've been hoarding too much stuff," said Kwanpimol Pleegluay, a 48-year-old housewife. "They watch the news and see people in other flooded provinces and think that's going to happen to them here."

Kwanpimol was taking a casual stroll along the Chao Phraya with her husband over the weekend ? to see how high the river swelled. After peering into the water, she took his photo and chose one word to describe the scene: "Beautiful," she said.

On the other side of the Chao Phraya, where the 200-year-old pagoda of the city's famed Temple of the Dawn rises from the banks, 42-year-old monk Phramaha Abhin said he was not worried.

"The Lord Buddha taught us not to be negligent, we must always prepare," said Phramaha, referring to newly laid protective layer of sandbags outside the temple, where he lives. "But he also taught us not to foolishly fear that which hasn't happened yet."

Many people in Bangkok and neighboring provinces see the flooding as something that should be accepted, not something to be angry about.

In Bangkok's heavily flooded Thonburi district, a navy team evacuated a stranded pregnant woman whose water broke Sunday. Aorasa Wisetkoop looked anxious, but remained calm and held tightly onto her belly, while a rescue team lifted her into a boat.

"We had to get her to hospital," rescuer Nitipat Mongolpradit said.

But along with every tragic and urgent incident in the inundation, there were images of Thais splashing in the floodwaters for fun.

When the river began flowing like a waterfall over a wall into Chantana Srisuwan's wooden-shack kitchen, the 58-year-old pulled out a stack of aluminum pans, soaped them up and began washing them. "Why bother being troubled?" she asked.

"If we think we shouldn't get wet, we'll never have peace of mind," she said, as a neighbor complained he could not sleep because his bed was submerged beneath encroaching waves. "If there's no water, great. But if there is, we have to learn to live with it."

___

Associated Press writers Vee Intarakratug, Margie Mason and Ian Mader in Bangkok contributed to this report.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-10-30-AS-Thailand-Floods/id-d27302cfdff44547b87faf65872a3c87

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22 wounded Libyan rebel fighters arrive in Mass.

BOSTON?? Nearly two dozen former Libyan rebel fighters were carried in stretchers or limped and hobbled out of a U.S. Air Force medical evacuation jet in Massachusetts on Saturday at the end of a 13-hour flight for treatment of wounds sustained in the war that ousted slain longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The envoy of Libya's National Transitional Council said the 22 fighters are the first of an estimated 200 combatants who will be flown to the United States for treatment. But Mark Ward, senior adviser on Arab transitions for the U.S. Department of State, later said several European nations have offered to treat some fighters, and the number of those who could come to this country has not been determined.

The fighters were brought to the country following a request to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her trip to the Libyan capital of Tripoli last week, Ward said shortly before their flight landed at Boston's Logan International Airport in the midst of a wintry storm.

"The United States was very proud to help the Libyan people in eight months of struggle against Gadhafi and his regime," Ward said. "We know the struggle will now continue as they rebuild their country and, in particular, we wanted to help with some of the war wounded, some of those brave, young men that fought the regime's forces and brought it to its knees."

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"Libya's new freedom has come at a price in human life and suffering. Just as the United States and the international community stood with the Libyan people during the revolution, we continue to work with them now to address urgent needs," Ward said.

The wounded fighters will be treated at the Spaulding Hospital for Continuing Medical Care North Shore in Salem, Mass., a long-term care facility.

An internationally established fund used by Libya's transitional government says it will pay the fighters' hospital bills.

The fighters were met at the airport by Ward and Ali Aujali, Libya's ambassador to the U.S. The combatants did not speak to reporters. Firefighters stationed at the airport, Massachusetts state troopers and Emergency Medical Services technicians immediately helped them get into ambulances that were waiting on the tarmac in the freezing rain.

Still, Ward said the former rebel fighters had mixed reaction on arrival in the United States.

"We were just on the plane with them ... they look very excited, but also a little bit apprehensive," Ward said. "Many of them have never been on an airplane before, this is a new country, it's very cold for them. ... Tripoli was warm when they left 13 hours ago, so this is going to be quite an experience for them, but also for the wonderful staff at Spaulding Hospital."

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45090648/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/

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