New England faces another storm

New England faces another storm

BOSTON

A Valentine’s Day storm brought snow and dangerously high winds to New England for the fourth time in less than a month, the latest blow to a region that has already seen more than 6 feet of snow in some areas.

A blizzard warning was in effect for coastal areas from Connecticut to Maine through Monday morning, promising 8 to 14 inches in southern New England up to 2 feet in Maine. A bone-chilling blast of cold will follow, with lows of minus-10 degrees forecast in some areas tonight.

National Weather Service meteorologist William Babcock said road conditions will be dangerous as steady, widespread winds whip the relatively dry snow around.

“On Sunday, the best thing people can do is stay home, stay indoors,” he said.

Study: Oklahoma’s small quakes raise risk of big ones

SAN JOSE, California

Small earthquakes shaking Oklahoma and southern Kansas daily and linked to energy drilling are dramatically increasing the chance of bigger and dangerous quakes, federal research indicates.

This once stable region is now just as likely to see serious damaging and potentially harmful earthquakes as the highest risk places east of the Rockies such as New Madrid, Mo., and Charleston, S.C., which had major quakes in the past two centuries.

Still it’s a low risk, about a 1 in 2,500 years’ chance of happening, according to geophysicist William Ellsworth of the U.S. Geological Survey.

“To some degree, we’ve dodged a bullet in Oklahoma,” Ellsworth said after a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Autopsy: David Carr died of lung cancer

NEW YORK

New York Times media columnist David Carr died of complications from metastatic lung cancer, according to autopsy results released Saturday.

Julie Bolcer, a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner’s office, said the autopsy shows heart disease also contributed to his death.

Carr, 58, collapsed at the newspaper’s headquarters and died Thursday.

He wrote the newspaper’s Media Equation column and penned a memoir about his fight with drug addiction. He was lauded as “the finest media reporter of his generation” by Times’ Executive Editor Dean Baquet.

Aggressive HIV strain identified

A strain of HIV that progresses to full-blown AIDS within three years if left untreated has become “epidemic” among newly infected patients in Cuba who reported having unprotected sex with multiple partners, according to a study published by international researchers working with patients and doctors on the Caribbean island nation.

The strain of human immunodeficiency virus — a combination of three subtypes of the virus — progresses so fast, researchers at Belgium’s Catholic University of Leuven said they worry that patients infected with the mutated virus may not seek antiretroviral therapy until it’s too late.

The finding, published in the medical journal EBioMedicine, raises concerns among U.S. AIDS researchers who worry that mutated HIV viruses are more difficult to diagnose, might eventually become resistant to therapy and could challenge efforts to develop a vaccine.

Combined dispatches