Based on what is predicted for the rest of the season, Bastardi also says that this winter could end up being the coldest for the nation as a whole since the 1980s. While cold weather is of course a part of winter, the persistent nature of colder-than-normal conditions and a lack of brief warm spells people can typically look forward to during midwinter have been unusual this season. Temperatures since December 1, 2010 have averaged below normal from Boston and New York City to Chicago, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Atlanta and even Miami.

Temperatures are expected to continue averaging below normal in many of these places, from the northern and central Plains into the East, through at least the middle of February. The biggest snowstorms in February will target areas mainly north of a line running from the Mason-Dixon Line to the Ohio River and I-40 across the Plains, according to Bastardi.

He adds that late-season winter storms in the Plains and East are common during La Ninas, when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific are below normal. Bastardi says the current La Nina could continue into next year. Bastardi says La Ninas also tend to "conjure up a more intense severe weather season," which typically ramps up in April into May from the southern Plains to the Great Lakes, mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

"I'd like to make sure that we once and for all kill all US funding for that beast," she said last month. "Because I don't think that it advances US interests, I don't think that that's a pro-democracy group, it's a rogue's gallery, pariah states, they belong there because they don't want to be sanctioned."

Supporters of continued US support of and participation on the HRC say that it's essential that Washington have leverage on the panel, renowned for including countries that have their own records of human-rights violations. The UN is also included in a broad-reaching budget-slashing bill by Ways and Means Committee member Kevin Brady (Republican for Texas).

The Cut Unsustainable and Top-Heavy Spending Act of 2011, introduced January 7, calls for a 10 percent reduction in voluntary contributions to the United Nations -- monies the US is not required to give by law -- for fiscal year 2011. Total US contributions to the UN system were more than $6.347 billion in FY 2009, an all-time high. Brady said his bill targets $3.5 billion in voluntary funds, slashing that in line with the recommendation of the president's deficit-reduction commission. "There are constituencies for every spending item in the federal budget, but I believe there can be no sacred cows if Congress is to prove itself to be serious about reducing our deficit," Brady told The Hill, adding he thinks the proposals should attract bipartisan support.

The flooding is considered the worst natural disaster Brazil has ever experienced. According to figures compiled by the newspaper O Globo, a third of all victims were under age. The youngest fatality was a five-day-old baby buried in a mudslide in Nova Friburgo, the worst affected town with 324 dead. The number of missing has been declining as forensic experts identify more bodies, but rescue workers fear the full extent of the disaster is not yet known, with some remote communities still only reachable by helicopter.

Emergency workers say their priority is to make sure no new deaths occur. They are warning of the risks of contaminated water. Three people are known to have contracted leptospirosis, an infectious bacterial disease, which is caused by exposure to water contaminated with rats' urine. In Teresopolis, doctors have been administering thousands of tetanus vaccines. In Sao Jose do Vale, workers were erecting more than a hundred tents sent from the UK to house those whose homes were swept away or flooded.

Lesson plans have been drawn up for pupils as young as four, in a scheme funded with a 35,000 pounds grant from an education quango, the Training and Development Agency for Schools. The initiative will be officially launched next month at the start of "LGBT History Month" - an initiative to encourage teaching about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual issues. The lesson plans, spread across the curriculum, will be offered to all schools, which can choose whether or not to make use of them. But critics last night called the initiative a poor use of public money which could distract from the teaching of "core" subjects.

Among the suggestions are:

Maths - teaching statistics through census findings about the number of homosexuals in the population, and using gay characters in scenarios for maths problems;

Design and technology - encouraging pupils to make symbols linked to the gay rights movement;

Science - studying animal species where the male takes a leading role in raising young, such as emperor penguins and sea horses, and staging class discussions on different family structures, including same-sex parents;

Geography - examining the transformation of San Francisco's Castro district in the 1960s from a working-class Irish area to the world's first "gay neighbourhood", and considering why homosexuals move from the countryside to cities;

Languages - using gay characters in role play scenarios, and teaching "LGBT vocabulary".

The lesson plans, written by teachers and backed by the Department for Education, will be available for schools to download from the Schools Out website. A Department for Education spokesman added: "These are optional teaching materials. Ultimately, it is for heads and teachers to choose the most appropriate teaching resources to help promote equality and tolerance."

In a remark which may have been aimed at Italy's beleaguered prime minister, Pope Benedict XVI told an audience of police officers that public officials must "rediscover their spiritual and moral roots". The pope's remarks echoed comments on Thursday by his secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who urged public figures to be "committed to a more robust morality, a sense of justice and lawfulness".

Berlusconi reportedly told his weekly cabinet meeting the cardinal's comments were too vague and generic to have been intended for him.

Berlusconi is formally under investigation on suspicion of paying a juvenile prostitute and then abusing his authority to cover up the fact. The Vatican's stance could be crucial to Berlusconi's chances of survival. He has done the Roman Catholic church a number of favours, providing it with tax breaks and closely following the Vatican's teachings on ethical issues such as euthanasia and in-vitro fertilisation.

"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.

Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."

Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world. But Turkle's book is far from the only work of its kind. An intellectual backlash in America is calling for a rejection of some of the values and methods of modern communications. "It is a huge backlash. The different kinds of communication that people are using have become something that scares people," said Professor William Kist, an education expert at Kent State University, Ohio.

Three former Anglican bishops have been appointed to lead the Ordinariate. Ordinariates allow Anglicans opposed to developments including women bishops, gay clergy and same-sex blessings to convert to Rome while maintaining some of their traditions. The Bishop of Brentwood, the Right Reverend Thomas MacMahon, said the Anglicans were unhappy about the church's general move away from the traditions it once shared with Catholics, but described the decision as "a very big move".

"They relinquish their present post, a very big thing, leaving some of their people which brings heartache, into a fairly unknown future, as this ordinariate has only just been brought up. It calls for huge faith and huge trust because the future isn't that certain," he said. Three vicars in Chelmsford, Hockley and Benfleet are among those men being trained to become Catholic deacons. A seventh retired Anglican vicar is also converting.

The Vatican will allow them to maintain a distinct religious identity and spiritual heritage within the Ordinariate.

The results highlight the mixed outcome of the two largest bets the bank's former chief executive, Kenneth Lewis, made at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 - the purchases of Countrywide Financial Inc and Merrill Lynch & Co. Bank of America is still coping with Countrywide's loan woes nearly three years after buying the largest US subprime mortgage lender. In the fourth quarter, the bank recognized a $2 billion (1 billion pounds) writedown in the value of its mortgage business, and a $4.1 billion provision for future mortgage repurchase claims.

"Countrywide is still hurting them and it will continue to. It's like a tooth being pulled - it's only going to feel good when it's done," said Matt McCormick, portfolio manager at Bahl & Gaynor Investment Counsel Inc in Cincinnati. BofA Chief Executive Brian Moynihan, speaking on CNBC, said the US housing market would continue to bump along the bottom, and the banking industry would be dealing with related problems for years to come.

Almost four in ten of all the foreign-born people in the country live in London, the Office for National Statistics said. They make up 34 per cent of the capital's population. Around one in six of the population of the capital have arrived in Britain since 2000.

Cynthia Ebinger, a geologist from the University of Rochester in New York, could hardly believe what the caller from the deserts of Ethiopia was saying. It was an employee at a mineralogy company - and he reported that the famous Erta Ale volcano in northeastern Ethiopia was erupting. Ebinger, who has studied the volcano for years, was taken aback. The volcano's crater had always been filled with a bubbling soup of silver-black lava, but it had been decades since its last eruption.

The call came last November. And Ebinger immediately flew to Ethiopia with some fellow researchers. "The volcano was bubbling over; flaming-red lava was shooting up into the sky," Ebinger told Spiegel Online. The earth is in upheaval in northeastern Africa, and the region is changing quickly. The desert floor is quaking and splitting open, volcanoes are boiling over, and seawaters are encroaching upon the land. Africa, researchers are certain, is splitting apart at a rate rarely seen in geology.

For now, no one can really say when the sea will finally flood the desert. But when it does, it could go quickly. "The hills could sink in a matter of days," Tim Wright, a fellow at the University of Leeds' School of Earth and Environment, said at a recent conference hosted by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco.

In the last five years, the geologic transformation of northeastern Africa has "accelerated dramatically," says Wright. Indeed, the process is going much faster than many had anticipated. In recent years, geologists had measured just a few millimeters of movement each year. "But now the earth is opening up by the meter," says Loraine Field, a scholar at the University of Bristol who also attended the conference.

Earth tremors cause deep fissures to form in the desert floor and the ground in East Africa is shattering like broken glass. Researchers in the Gulf of Tadjoura, which juts into Djibouti from the Gulf of Aden, have recently registered a barrage of seismic shocks. "The quakes are happening on the mid-ocean ridge," Ebinger reports.

The paper quoted a senior administration official as saying US President Barack Obama's warning had persuaded China - the North's main diplomatic and economic backer - to take a harder line towards Pyongyang, and opened the door to a resumption of inter-Korean talks, possibly next month.

North Korea on Thursday accepted the South's conditions for talks, marking a major breakthrough in the crisis on the peninsula. Such dialogue could clear the way for the resumption of aid-for-disarmament, or six-party, talks. The New York Times said Obama warned his Chinese counterpart that if Beijing did not step up pressure on North Korea, Washington would redeploy its forces in Asia to protect itself from a potential North Korean strike on US soil.

Obama first made the warning in a phone call to Hu last month, and repeated it over a private dinner at the White House on Tuesday, the US administration official said. Wang Dong of Peking University's School of International Studies said Washington's reported warning to Beijing was a slap in the face for the Chinese leader, who has urged the two Koreas to resolve their differences through dialogue.

"Playing tough like this, it might just backfire, I'm afraid," Wang said. "If this article represents the real thinking by American leaders, the danger of war on the peninsula can never be dismissed."

"When Congress is asked to increase the statutory debt limit, which will likely happen in the next few months, I will vote no, unless, and let me be completely clear here, there is a firm commitment to deal with the larger issue or the vote itself is tied to a plan to put America on a path to financial responsibility," Wolf said.

Republicans voted nearly unanimously last year against raising the debt ceiling. But this time, they have the numbers in the House to actually derail it. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and other Obama administration officials have warned against this temptation, saying it could throw the nation into default, and so far most members of Congress have been cautious in announcing how they'll vote.

But Wolf warned that if the debt is not curbed, America could fall off a fiscal cliff and watch countries like China take its place. "For too long, routinely increasing the amount of money the government can borrow without taking any action to stem the country's growing debt has been standard operating procedure. But the storm warning signs have been posted. And I'm heeding their ominous call," he said. "We can no longer ignore the albatross of debt around our collective necks."

Elsewhere on the Hill Thursday, three Republican lawmakers put forward a plan they claim will cut out $2.5 trillion over the next decade. The Spending Reduction Act - unveiled by Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Garrett of New Jersey and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint - would start by rolling back spending to 2008 levels and repealing unspent stimulus dollars. From there, it would reduce the size of the federal civilian workforce and target other federal programs.

The events cast the crisis into an unpredictable moment, as each side became ever more entrenched in positions with little common ground over indictments expected to name members of Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim militant movement, in the assassination of the prime minister's father, Rafik Hariri.

The 17-minute speech by Prime Minister Saad Hariri was delivered just hours after Turkey and Qatar announced that they had abandoned work on their diplomatic initiative. It focused the long-running confrontation in this flammable country between Mr Hariri's supporters, backed by the United States and France, and Hezbollah and its allies, backed by Iran and Syria, squarely on Mr Hariri himself.

In his address, he said he would seek to form a new government in talks next week, defying demands by Hezbollah and its allies that he step down and raising the prospect that the militant movement may revert to the street - be it through protests, labor strikes or even violent confrontations - to ensure that Mr Hariri is unable to do so.

Beyond their short-term budget gaps, some states have deep structural problems, like insolvent pension funds, that are diverting money from essential public services like education and health care. Some members of Congress fear that it is just a matter of time before a state seeks a bailout, say bankruptcy lawyers who have been consulted by Congressional aides.

Bankruptcy could permit a state to alter its contractual promises to retirees, which are often protected by state constitutions, and it could provide an alternative to a no-strings bailout. Along with retirees, however, investors in a state's bonds could suffer, possibly ending up at the back of the line as unsecured creditors.

"All of a sudden, there's a whole new risk factor," said Paul S Maco, a partner at the firm Vinson & Elkins who was head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of Municipal Securities during the Clinton administration. Discussion of a new bankruptcy option for the states appears to have taken off in November, after Mr Gingrich gave a speech about the country's big challenges, including government debt and an uncompetitive labor market.

Mr Hu met leading US politicians and was quizzed on a number of issues, before departing for Chicago. There he joined Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and other business and political leaders for a dinner in his honour. Mr Daley, who has been in office for 22 years, has visited China four times since 2004 and has promoted Chicago, America's third-largest city, as a global transportation hub with a large and capable manufacturing sector.

Speaking at the dinner, Mr Hu said: "Despite the great distance between Chicago and China, our hearts are linked together by friendship." Mr Daley said Chicago's long-range goal was to be "the most China-friendly city in the US". Chicago is Mr Hu's only stop in the US outside the US capital. On Friday, he will visit a Chinese language and cultural centre based in the city.

In a speech earlier at a Washington DC lunch with senior US officials and business leaders from firms like General Electric, Coca-cola and Boeing, Mr Hu pledged China would "remain committed to the path of peaceful development". He said: "We do not engage in arms races, we are not a military threat to any country. China will never seek to dominate or pursue an expansionist policy."