Massive storm system surges toward Mid-Atlantic

Massive storm system that spawned tornadoes and hail in Midwest surges toward Mid-Atlantic

Associated Press -

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A massive storm system surged Thursday toward the Mid-Atlantic after causing widespread power outages and flash flooding, but largely failed to live up to its fierce billing through the Upper Midwest.

The Washington, D.C., area braced for the storms, and the National Weather Service issued severe thunderstorm watches and warnings for much of the region. Forecasters warned that the storms could produce damaging winds and large hail, and said the threat would run from early afternoon to early evening Thursday. A flash flood watch was in effect. Morning thunderstorms caused relatively minor damage. In Maryland and Delaware, officials reported trees down, roads closed, and tens of thousands of power outages after a line of heavy thunderstorms moved through.

In Washington, the Office of Personnel Management said federal agencies in the area would open but that workers would be allowed to take unscheduled leave or work from home. In Delaware, thousands were without power and a 19-year-old woman who works at Plumpton Park Zoo in Rising Sun, Md., was struck by lightning and sent to the hospital.

In southern West Virginia, the Roane County 911 center has been evacuated and roads in the Spencer area are closed because of flash flooding.

Still, overall, the storms appear to have caused less wind damage than was feared through early Thursday, said Bill Bunting of the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. Whether they were as bad as anticipated "depends on where you live," he said.

He said thunderstorms took longer than expected to merge into a large line that could cause widespread damage. The merger also happened farther east than expected, which limited the potential for widespread damage in Illinois and Indiana, though those states still had pockets of severe weather.

Even before merging, the individual storms remained powerful, Bunting said.

Besides reports of damaging winds and preliminary tornado sightings, the weather service has received reports of hail at least an inch in diameter in locations stretching from southeast Minnesota to Virginia, he said.

In Ohio, storms with swift, straight-line winds soaked parts of the state, knocking down trees and barns and leaving many without power Thursday as commuters dodged fallen branches on roads and faced backups at intersections where traffic lights were out.

Straight-line winds topping 70 mph were reported and more than two dozen tornado warnings were issued as two rounds of storms pummeled the state, but no twisters have been confirmed, said Phillip Johnson, who was part of the team monitoring developments for the Ohio Emergency Management Agency.

Play was suspended at the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club outside Philadelphia less than two hours after the start of the first round and resumed about three hours later.

A flash flood watch for the entire state of Pennsylvania was issued through Thursday night. Rush-hour commuters tried to get to work in the morning amid torrential downpours and dark skies that made it look like nighttime.

In New Jersey, officials opened the soaked state's Emergency Operations Center on Thursday morning to monitor the storm's progress. The National Weather Service issued a flood watch for most of the state. Forecasters predicted 1 to 2 inches of rain will fall on swollen rivers and streams. As thunderstorms rumbled across the southern and central parts of the state, thousands of residents were left without power.

In northern New York, rain sent rivers and streams over their banks, leading to evacuations and road closures.

Overnight, thunderstorms that punched through northern Illinois caused significant wind damage, mainly in rural areas west and south of Chicago. The city was largely spared. The weather service said intense winds estimated to have reached 70-80 mph in some areas snapped large trees at their trunks or uprooted them entirely.

By early Thursday, though, the derecho that had been forecast hadn't developed.

"With each hour that goes by, it's less likely," said Greg Carbin of the storm prediction center.

A derecho is a storm of strong straight-line winds spanning at least 240 miles. The systems are distinctive and take on a comma or bow shape, and usually have a large area of very cold cloud tops not typically seen in an ordinary thunderstorm.

While the Midwest dodged a derecho, several tornadoes, large hail and flooding did some damage Wednesday.

In the small town of Belmond, Iowa, about 90 miles north of Des Moines, Duwayne Abel, owner of Cattleman's Steaks & Provisions restaurant, said a tornado demolished part of the building. No one was in the restaurant at the time.

"I was, oh, eight miles west of town and I looked toward town and I could see a funnel cloud, having no idea it was exactly where our restaurant was," Abel said. His wife and an employee were able to get out of the restaurant and sought shelter in a basement.

Last year, a derecho caused at least $1 billion in damage from Chicago to Washington, killing 13 people and leaving more than 4 million people without power, according to the weather service. Winds reached nearly 100 mph in some places. In addition to the people killed in the storm, 34 more died from the heat wave that followed in areas without power.

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This Is How Ed Snowden Got His Secrets

This Is How Ed Snowden Got His Secrets.

Investigators have figured out that Edward Snowden took classified documents from theNational Security Agency with a thumb drive — which means they "know how many documents he downloaded and what server he took them from," an official told the Los Angeles Times' Ken Dilanian. But they still don't know how Snowden got the secret court order compellingVerizon to give three months of metadata on all phone calls. On MSNBC last night, Glenn Greenwald said Snowden spent months figuring out which documents were most important for the American public to know, and which ones he could leak without hurting people. It's likely he also spent some time thinking about how to keep investigators at bay while he fled to Hong Kong and talked to journalists.

RELATED: Here's What China Thinks of Ed Snowden and the NSA

The phone log database wasn't used just to tracked terrorism, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein revealed at a Senate hearing this week — the one with NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander, not the briefings behind closed doors. Feinstein said the database was only searched if the information is "actually related to Al Qaeda or to Iran," and that "the vast majority of the records in the database are never accessed and are deleted after a period of five years." Previously, Feinstein revealed that the Verizon court order wasn't a one-time thing, but a routine quarterly authorization. Though Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence committee, has called Snowden a "traitor" for his leaks, she's proven to be an excellent source of intelligence information herself.

RELATED: Why Edward Snowden Leaked the Secret NSA Information

At Wednesday's hearing, Alexander, responding to a question about contractors' ability to obtain classified intelligence material, said it was because Snowden was good at his job: "Some of these folks have tremendous skills to operate networks," he said. "I have grave concerns about that—the access that he had." Rep. Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, accused Snowden of exaggerating the reach of his knowledge. "He was lying," Rogers said after a closed-door House session with Alexander on Thursday. "He clearly has over-inflated his position, he has over-inflated his access and he's even over-inflated what the actually technology of the programs would allow one to do. It's impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do." Rogers also added that it was impossible to know right now just how much access Snowden really had, but that "we will know the answer to that shortly."

RELATED: China and Hong Kong Hold Edward Snowden's Fate

But Snowden did have skills, and the FBI was looking into him several days before the first report was published by The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, Reuters reports. Snowden had taken leave without pay, telling his bosses he was getting treatment for epilepsy. Snowden didn't return, and first Booz Allen and then the U.S. government started looking for him. According to Reuters' source, Snowden was a "geek" known for being gifted: "This guy's really good with his fingers on the keyboard. He's really good." Most NSA workers are banned from using thumb drives, the L.A. Times reports, but "There are people who need to use thumb drive and they have special permission. But when you use one, people always look at you funny." Snowden was apparently undeterred by funny looks.

Rubio: ‘I’m done’ if immigration bill includes gay couple amendment

By Chris Moody, Yahoo! News | The Ticket – 4 hrs ago

Rep. Mike Rogers Jumps on the 'Traitor' Train

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., is the latest lawmaker to make a linguistic blunder when it comes to National Security Agencyleaker Edward Snowden. Speaking to reporters Thursday, Rogers made clear for the first time that he thinks Snowden ought to be tried for treason.

"This is a) incredibly damaging, and b) there should be no notion in anyone's mind that this person is [sic] a traitor to the United States of America," said Rogers. "He should be punished to the fullest extent."

Rogers's rhetorical flourish masks a common misconception: Almost nobody gets tried for treason these days, because the legal threshold for it is incredibly high.

As Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald explains:

To make matters worse for those who label Snowden a traitor, treason generally only applies when a suspect colludes with a country against whom the United States has declared war. But Washington hasn’t officially declared war on anyone since World War II. Even during the Cold War, prosecutors did not use the charge against people like CIA agent Aldrich Ames, who sold secrets to the Soviets, because the U.S. was not technically at war with the USSR. In reality, treason has been invoked rarely in history—just 30 times since the founding.

What may be more likely is that Snowden could be tried under the Espionage Act, which President Obama has used to its maximum potential in going after suspected whistle-blowers. Enacted in 1917 by President Wilson, the Espionage Act gave the executive branch tremendous powers to punish government critics. Obama has invoked the Espionage Act six times during his administration to pursue whistle-blowers, even though few of those recent cases actually involved trafficking information to a foreign recipient.

It remains to be seen whether Snowden provided classified information to Hong Kong, where he's said to be hiding. If he did, it would make it that much more likely that Obama would try to apply the Espionage Act. But there are a lot of steps to take before we get there.

Expert: Dying woman should have got Irish abortion

FILE - A Saturday, Nov. 17, 2012 photo from files showing abortion rights protesters hold candles and pictures in a vigil for Savita Halappanavar outside Ireland's government headquarters in Dublin. Ireland's prime minister says anti-abortion activists in the predominantly Catholic country have inundated his office with threatening packages and letters branding him a murderer, some written in blood. Enda Kenny made the declaration Wednesday, June 12, 2013, as his government prepared to publish a bill that would legalize abortions in exceptional cases where doctors deem the woman's life is in danger from continued pregnancy. Anti-abortion activists insist the proposed law would lead eventually to widespread abortion. (AP Photo/Shawn Pogatchnik, File)

DUBLIN (AP) — A miscarrying woman who died in an Irish hospital should have had her blood poisoning detected much sooner and been offered an abortion to improve her odds of survival, an experts' report concluded Thursday in a case that is forcing Irelandto modernize its abortion laws.

The 108-page report into the October death of Savita Halappanavar documented what the lead investigator described as "a cascade of mistakes" overshadowed by officials' refusal to remove the fetus until its heart stopped beating.

That took four days. By then, the report found, the woman's ill-diagnosed sepsis from a ruptured uterus already had reached lethal levels.

"If it was my case, I would have terminated the pregnancy," Dr. Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, a London professor of obstetrics and gynecology who led the seven-month probe, said. The five investigators found that a chain of doctors and nurses all failed to take proactive steps to identify and halt the spread of infection throughout her body.

The report found that when Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian dentist living in the western city of Galway, was hospitalized for back pain 17 weeks into her pregnancy, doctors identified she was miscarrying and the fetus could not survive.

But they consistently missed evidence for days pointing to an existing case of sepsis, or blood poisoning, as the cause. Blood test results were left uninspected and successive shifts failed to read earlier medical notes as vital signs worsened.

The report found that doctors placed too much emphasis on measuring the fetus' heartbeat and too little on investigating why Halappanavar's white blood-cell count was jumping, her blood pressure was falling and her heart rate and temperature were rising. All were signs of growing internal infection linked to a rupture in her uterus that a night-shift doctor identified in notes, but a day-shift doctor failed to read.

Arulkumaran said Ireland's doctors and constitutional lawyers must draft regulations that specify when an abortion can be performed on a pregnant woman suffering sepsis, because such cases can surge to lethal levels within hours.

He said some Irish doctors' wait-and-see approach, fearful of violating Ireland's constitutional ban on abortion, presented an unjustifiable courting of danger to the patient.

"When sepsis sets in, it is difficult to say who is going to live and who is going to die. We are just guessing here," he said, describing the death rate from severe sepsis as 40 percent and septic shock as 60 percent. He said if Halappanavar had received an abortion and aggressive doses of antibiotics early into her hospitalization, "the risk would be much less."

She delivered a dead fetus four days into her hospitalization, and fell into a coma and died of massive organ failure four days later.

The findings came hours after Ireland's government published a bill to create new rules on when doctors can perform abortions to save the life of a woman.

Six previous governments had refused to draft such a bill in support of a 1992 Supreme Court judgment that declared such abortions should be legal, given that the constitution — despite its supposed blanket ban on abortion — also guarantees to protect the woman's right to life.

Most controversially, the Supreme Court said abortion should be legal in cases when doctors deem one necessary to stop a woman from killing herself.

Anti-abortion activists argue that permitting a suicide threat as legal grounds would be open to abuse and encourage wider abortion access.

"The suicide ground will lead to abortion on request, and that will be very destructive of unborn children's lives and it's deeply unjust," said Sen. Ronan Mullen, a Catholic conservative.

Previous governments insisted they didn't need to pass any law in support of the court judgment, and instead twice tried to roll back its suicide provision in national referendums that voters rejected in 1992 and 2002. A 2011 European Court of Human Rights ruled that Ireland's inaction was jeopardizing women's health by forcing seriously ill women to travel overseas for abortions.

The legal limbo also has left Irish maternity hospitals and obstetricians to guess when they could perform an abortion to save a woman's life without facing the risk of a murder charge. Scores of such terminations have occurred annually in total secrecy for the past two decades, with the number of deaths connected to delayed treatment unknown. Halappanavar's case became public only because her widower spoke out, denouncing the imposition of Catholic teaching on a Hindu.

When presenting the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, Prime Minister Enda Kenny declared in parliament that he "happens to be a Catholic" but could not govern as a Catholic prime minister. He wants the bill passed by July and is threatening to expel lawmakers from his party who oppose him.

Kenny's statement, during which he described receiving letters written in blood from anti-abortion activists, is being seen as a watershed moment in church-state relations in predominantly Catholic Ireland, where past generations of leaders showed public deference to church authority and handed substantial control of schools, hospitals and social services to Catholic orders.

The bill would permit abortions for women threatening suicide only if three doctors, including two psychiatrists, ruled that the woman's threat was severe. Abortions for non-emergency cases involving a threat to life would require support from two doctors.

Many lawmakers and doctors say Irish women will sidestep these Irish hurdles and keep traveling to neighboring England for abortions, where the practice was legalized in 1967. More than 4,000 Irish women receive abortions there annually.

"Unfortunately I don't think the provisions on suicide will encourage any woman to go through that system in Ireland," lawmaker Thomas Pringle said.

An opinion poll published Thursday in The Irish Times indicated overwhelming public support for the bill, with strong majorities wishing the bill extended abortion rights further.

The poll found 89 percent want abortions to be granted in cases where a woman's life is endangered from medical complications caused by pregnancy.

About 83 percent also wanted abortion legalized in cases where the fetus couldn't survive at birth, 81 percent for cases of pregnancy caused by rape or incest, and 78 percent where a woman's health — not simply her life — was undermined by pregnancy. The bill excludes those three scenarios.

The poll of 1,000 people this week across the Republic of Ireland, a country of 4.6 million, had an error margin of 3 percentage points.

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Online:

Report on Halappanavar death: http://bit.ly/1bAITHT