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By NORMA LOVE, Associated Press Writers Norma Love, Associated Press Writers   – Sun Feb 28, 4:06 am ET

CONCORD, N.H. – Frustration turned to resignation Saturday for hundreds of thousands of people in the Northeast struggling to survive another day waiting for utility crews to restore electricity after powerful storms socked the region with heavy snow, rain and hurricane-force winds.

The region was left to deal with the fallout of gusting winds that created near-blizzard conditions this week in what was the third strong storm this month for some areas. Parts of New York got more than 2 feet of snow while some areas of coastal New England were drenched with flooding rains.

One man was killed by a falling snow-laden tree branch in Central Park in New York City, and two people in Candia, N.H., died in a house fire caused by improperly using a propane heater to stay warm, fire officials said.

The highest wind reported from the storm was 91 mph off the coast of Portsmouth, N.H. — well above hurricane force of 74 mph. Gusts also hit 60 mph or more from the mountains of West Virginia to New York’s Long Island and Massachusetts.

Frustration was beginning to show on Charlotte Letteney’s face Saturday at Concord High School, one of 24 shelters in New Hampshire. Letteney, 64, of Allenstown, arrived Friday night with her 66-year-old husband, who is a paraplegic, two granddaughters, her grandson-in-law and 6-month-old great-grandson.

The family left their mobile home when the temperature dropped to 46 degrees and Letteney’s hands had gone numb, leaving behind four parrots in covered cages and a couple of days’ worth of food for their dog, Bosco. They have no car — a city van brought them to the shelter — and no way to get home to feed the animals or to let the dog out.

“He’ll go out in the kitchen, and I’ll have to sterilize my floor,” Letteney said.

The Letteneys are among more than 1 million customers across the Northeast who lost power because of the storm, and as of Saturday afternoon more than half of them were still without electricity. New Hampshire’s electrical grid was the hardest hit, with more than a quarter-million customers still without power. New York had more than 160,000 outages and Maine about 67,000.

Some residents were warned they’ll be without electricity for up to a week, as uprooted trees and fallen utility poles hindered utility crews.

Bow, N.H., Assistant Fire Chief Dick Pistey compared the situation two years ago during a powerful ice storm when ice quickly coated trees, bringing down tree limbs and power lines, leaving millions without power — some for two weeks.

“It’s deja vu all over again,” Pistey said.

In Londonderry, N.H., Irene Stanley, 68, was sitting in a rocking chair next to a wood stove to keep warm, her royal blue beta fish in its container nearby. Stanley, who managed without power for nearly two weeks during the ice storm two years ago, said her mission for the day was to buy batteries to keep her radio operating.

In York, Maine, 70-year-old lobsterman Pat White, was able to use his generator to help cook a pancake breakfast Saturday to feed his neighbors who were without power — a father, his daughter and her baby. White and his wife, Enid, were planning what to serve them for dinner.

“We’ve got to use up some of the stuff in the refrigerator,” he said.

Nick Vermette, 49, a safety specialist for Central Maine Power, the state’s largest utility, was supervising crews restoring power in Portland on Saturday. He said the 17-hour days are exhausting.

“By the time you drive home take a shower, try to get to sleep, get up and come back, you’re averaging four to five hours sleep,” he said.By the time you drive home take a shower, try to get to sleep, get up and come back, you’re averaging four to five hours sleep,” he said.

TOKYO – The tsunami from Chile’s deadly earthquake hit Japan’s main islands and the shores of Russia on Sunday, but the smaller-than-expected waves prompted the lifting of a Pacific-wide alert. Hawaii and other Pacific islands were also spared.

In Japan, where hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from shorelines, the biggest wave following the magnitude-8.8 quake off Chile hit the northern island of Hokkaido. There were no immediate reports of damage from the four-foot (1.2-meter) wave, though some piers were briefly flooded.

As it crossed the Pacific, the tsunami dealt populated areas — including the U.S. state of Hawaii — only a glancing blow.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii issued a warning for 53 nations and territories, but lifted it Sunday, though some countries were keeping their own watches in place as a precaution.

The tsunami raised fears the Pacific could fall victim to the type of devastating waves that killed 230,000 people in the Indian Ocean in 2004 the morning after Christmas. During that disaster, there was little-to-no warning and much confusion about the impending waves.

Officials said the opposite occurred after the Chile quake: They overstated their predictions of the size of the waves and the threat.

“We expected the waves to be bigger in Hawaii, maybe about 50 percent bigger than they actually were,” said Gerard Fryer, a geophysicist for the warning center. “We’ll be looking at that.”

Japan, fearing the tsunami could gain force as it moved closer, put all of its eastern coastline on tsunami alert and ordered hundreds of thousands of residents in low-lying areas to seek higher ground as waves generated by the Chilean earthquake raced across the Pacific at hundreds of miles (kilometers) per hour.

Japan is particularly sensitive to the tsunami threat.

In July 1993 a tsunami triggered by a major earthquake off Japan’s northern coast killed more than 200 people on the small island of Okushiri. A stronger quake near Chile in 1960 created a tsunami that killed about 140 people in Japan.

Towns along northern coasts issued evacuation orders to 400,000 residents, Japanese public broadcaster NHK said. NHK switched to emergency mode, broadcasting a map with the areas in most danger and repeatedly urging caution.

As the wave continued its expansion across the ocean, Japan’s Meteorological Agency said waves of up to 10 feet (three meters) could hit the northern prefectures of Aomori, Iwate and Miyagi, but the first waves were much smaller.

People packed their families into cars, but there were no reports of panic or traffic jams. Fishermen secured their boats, and police patrolled beaches, using sirens and loudspeakers to warn people to leave the area.

Elsewhere, the tsunami passed gently.

By the time the tsunami hit Hawaii — a full 16 hours after the quake — officials had already spent the morning blasting emergency sirens, blaring warnings from airplanes and ordering residents to higher ground.

The islands were back to paradise by the afternoon, but residents endured a severe disruption and scare earlier in the day: Picturesque beaches were desolate, million-dollar homes were evacuated, shops in Waikiki were shut down, and residents lined up at supermarkets to stock up on food and at gas stations.

Waves hit California, but barely registered amid stormy weather. A surfing contest outside San Diego went on as planned.

In Tonga, where up to 50,000 people fled inland hours ahead of the tsunami, the National Disaster Office had reports of a wave up to 6.5 feet (two meters) high hitting a small northern island, deputy director Mali’u Takai said. There were no initial indications of damage.

Nine people died in Tonga last September when the Samoa tsunami slammed the small northern island of Niuatoputapu, wiping out half of the main settlement.

In Samoa, where 183 people died in the tsunami five months ago, thousands remained Sunday morning in the hills above the coasts on the main island of Upolu, but police said there were no reports of waves or sea surges hitting the South Pacific nation.

At least 20,000 people abandoned their homes in southeastern Philippine villages and took shelter in government buildings or fled to nearby mountains overnight due to the tsunami scare. Provincial officials scrambled to alert villagers and prepare contingency plans, according to the National Disaster Coordinating Council.

Philippine navy and coast guard vessels, along with police, were ordered to stand by for possible evacuation but the alert was lifted late Sunday afternoon.

Indonesia’s Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said there was no tsunami risk for the archipelago as it was too far from the quake’s epicenter.

On New Zealand’s Chatham Islands earlier Sunday, officials reported a wave measured at 6.6 feet (two meters).

Oceanographer Ken Gledhill said it was typical tsunami behavior when the sea water dropped three feet (a meter) off North Island’s east coast at Gisborne and then surged back.

Several hundred people in the North Island coastal cities of Gisborne and Napier were evacuated from their homes and from camp grounds, while residents in low-lying areas on South Island’s Banks Peninsula were alerted to be ready to evacuate.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology canceled its tsunami warning Sunday evening.

“The main tsunami waves have now passed all Australian locations,” the bureau said.

No damage was reported in Australia from small waves that were recorded earlier in the day in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Norfolk Island, about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) northeast of Sydney.

New Zealand’s Ministry of Civil Defense and Emergency Management downgraded its tsunami warning to an advisory status, which it planned to keep in place overnight.

___

Associated Press writers Mark Niesse and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Mari Yamaguchi and Malcolm Foster in Tokyo, Ray Lilley in Wellington, New Zealand, Jim Gomez in Manila, Philippines, Debby Wu in Taipei, Taiwan, and Kristen Gelineau in Sydney contributed to this report.

JERUSALEM – Two parts of an ancient biblical manuscript separated across centuries and continents were reunited for the first time in a joint display Friday, thanks to an accidental discovery that is helping illuminate a dark period in the history of the Hebrew Bible.

The 1,300-year-old fragments, which are among only a handful of Hebrew biblical manuscripts known to have survived the era in which they were written, existed separately and with their relationship unknown, until a news photograph of one’s public unveiling in 2007 caught the attention of the scholars who would eventually link them.

Together, they make up the text of the Song of the Sea, sung by jubilant Israelites after fleeing slavery in Egypt and witnessing the destruction of the pharaoh’s armies in the Red Sea.

“The enemy said: ‘I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. My lust shall be satisfied upon them, I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them,’” reads the song, which appears in the Book of Exodus. “Thou didst blow thy wind, the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters.”

An exhibit at Israel’s national museum dedicated to the Song of the Sea is now bringing together the two long-separated pieces.

One page of the song, known as the Ashkar manuscript, was previously housed in a rare books library at Duke University in North Carolina and was first displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2007.

That’s when a photograph of the manuscript in a local newspaper caught the eye of two Israeli paleographers, Mordechay Mishor and Edna Engel, who noticed it resembled a different page of Hebrew writing known as the London manuscript, presently part of the private collection of Stephan Loewentheil of New York.

“The uniformity of the letters, the structure of the text, and the techniques used by the scribe … it made it very clear to me,” Engel said.

The relationship would not be so clear to a casual observer. The Ashkar manuscript has been so blackened by exposure to the elements that the text is all but invisible, while the London manuscript is legible and far better preserved. But after close study of ultraviolet images, the experts were able to confirm that the texts were not only written by the same scribe, but were also part of the same scroll.

Scholars believe the scroll was written around the seventh century somewhere in the Middle East, possibly in Egypt. It is not known how the two parts were separated or what happened to the rest of the manuscript.

The museum arranged to have the London manuscript brought to Jerusalem. The new exhibit chronicles how the Song of the Sea was written through various ancient manuscripts, from the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls to the manuscript known as the Aleppo Codex, written nearly a millennium later.

The reunification of the two pieces adds an important link in the chain, showing how the writing of the Hebrew Bible evolved through the so-called “silent” period — between the third and 10th centuries — from which nearly no Biblical texts survived. While in the Dead Sea Scrolls the song is arranged like prose, for example, in the newly reunited manuscript it is written like a poem, the same way it appears in the Hebrew Bible today.

The manuscripts are “filling the gap,” said Israel Museum curator Adolfo Roitman. “We can see we are dealing with a tradition that is still alive.”

The museum exhibit displays the manuscripts along with other depictions of the Song of the Sea from the museum’s permanent collection, including artistic renderings of the biblical passages in frescoes and Renaissance paintings and recordings of the song as it is chanted by Jews in different communities worldwide.

LOS ANGELES – Marie Osmond’s 18-year-old son Michael Blosil has died, the entertainer said Saturday.

Osmond said in a statement through her publicist that her family is devastated by the “tragic loss.” She did not provide details on the death.

Entertainment Tonight reported on its Web site that Blosil jumped to his death Friday night from a downtown Los Angeles apartment building.

Officers responded to an apparent suicide jump in the area, but the victim was not identified Saturday, Los Angeles Police Officer Gregory Baek said.

“My family and I are devastated and in deep shock by the tragic loss of our dear Michael and ask that everyone respect our privacy during this difficult time,” Osmond said in the statement.

Blosil reportedly left a note which referred to a lifelong battle with depression.

In 2007, Osmond said Michael was treated at a rehabilitation facility, but she didn’t disclose the nature of his problem.

Donny Osmond, Blosil’s uncle, told Entertainment Tonight: “Please pray for my sister and her family.”

Michael is one of Osmond’s five adopted children. She also has three other children from two marriages. She divorced Brian Blosil in 2007 after two decades of marriage. She and her first husband Stephen Craig divorced in 1985.

Osmond earned fame at age 13 with the hit song “Paper Roses,” and starred with her brother, Donny, on television’s “Donny and Marie Show” during the 1970s.

They perform a musical variety show regularly at the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. The hotel said Saturday’s performance was canceled

HealthDay Reporter by Amanda Gardner
healthday Reporter – Fri Feb 26, 11:50 pm ET

FRIDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) — It’s not a particular brain region that makes someone smart or not smart.

Nor is it the strength and speed of the connections throughout the brain or such features as total brain volume.

Instead, new research shows, it’s the connections between very specific areas of the brain that determine intelligence and often, by extension, how well someone does in life.

“General intelligence actually relies on a specific network inside the brain, and this is the connections between the gray matter, or cell bodies, and the white matter, or connecting fibers between neurons,” said Jan Glascher, lead author of a paper appearing in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “General intelligence relies on the connection between the frontal and the parietal [situated behind the frontal] parts of the brain.”

The results weren’t entirely unexpected, said Keith Young, vice chairman of research in psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Temple, but “it is confirmation of the idea that good communication between various parts of brain are very important for this generalized intelligence.”

General intelligence is an abstract notion developed in 1904 that has always been somewhat controversial.

“People noticed a long time ago that, in general, people who are good test-takers did well in a lot of different subjects,” explained Young. “If you’re good in mathematics, you’re also usually good in English. Researchers came up with this idea that this represented a kind of overall intelligence.”

“General intelligence is this notion that smart people tend to be smart across all different kinds of domains,” added Glascher, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of humanities and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Hoping to learn more, the authors located 241 patients who had some sort of brain lesion. They then diagrammed the location of their lesions and had them take IQ tests.

“We took patients who had damaged parts of their brain, tested them on intelligence to see where they were good and where they were bad, then we correlated those scores across all the patients with the location of the brain lesions,” Glascher explained. “That way, you can highlight the areas that are associated with reduced performance on these tests which, by the reverse inference, means these areas are really important for general intelligence.”

“These studies infer results based on the absence of brain tissue,” added Paul Sanberg, distinguished professor of neurosurgery and director of the University of South Florida Center for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa. “It allows them to systemize and pinpoint areas important to intelligence.”

Young said the findings echo what’s come before. “The map they came up with was what we expected and involves areas of the cortex we thought would be involved — the parietal and frontal cortex. They’re important for language and mathematics,” he said.

In an earlier study, the same team of investigators found that this brain network was also important for working memory, “the ability to hold a certain number of items [in your mind],” Glascher said. “In the past, people have associated general intelligence very strongly with enhanced working memory capacity so there’s a close theoretical connection with that.”

More information

Learn more about the workings of the brain at Harvard University’s Whole Brain Atlas.

WHISTLER, British Columbia (AP)—Steve Holcomb never flinched.

Not when tasked with ending a 62-year drought for the United States in sliding’s marquee race.

Not when trying to navigate the world’s most treacherous track.
Steven Holcomb, Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler and Curtis Tomasevicz of the United States compete in USA 1 on Saturday.
(Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)

And not when Germany’s Andre Lange valiantly tried to hang on to his Olympic title.

Holcomb handled it all Saturday, driving USA-1 to the gold medal in four-man bobsledding, the first American pilot to do so since Francis Tyler at St. Moritz in 1948. By winning, he cemented the status of his famed “Night Train” sled and push team of Justin Olsen, Steve Mesler and Curt Tomasevicz as sliding’s best.
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“This will take a while for it to sink in,” Holcomb said. “You work so hard and when you finally get there it’s like, `Well, now what? I don’t know what to do.’ We’ve worked so hard and gone through so much in the last four years. To end on a high note like this is huge. It’s overwhelming.”

World champions, 2009. Olympic champions, 2010.

“You can’t do any better,” said U.S. coach Brian Shimer, a bronze medalist in 2002, the year the Americans also got a silver in four-man with Todd Hays joining Shimer on that podium.

With that, Shimer started to cry, unable to hold back any longer.

Holcomb absolutely tamed the track, his four runs completed in 3 minutes, 24.46 seconds. Lange was 0.38 seconds back for the silver, his quest to win five gold medals in five Olympic tries thwarted, and Canada’s Lyndon Rush drove his sled to the bronze.

Lange celebrated wildly at the end, as if he had won. In his mind, he had.

“Coming into today,” said Kevin Kuske, one of Lange’s pushers, “we knew silver was all we could win.”

Holcomb was that dominant. And not apologetic, either.

“I’m good friends with Andre, so it’s a thrill,” Holcomb said. “And at the same time, it’s, `I didn’t mean to rain on your parade—but I have my own parade going now.”’

He and his sledmates crossed the finish line, index fingers in the air, then wrapped each other in American flags as a red-white-and-blue crowd roared with delight. Holcomb hoisted his helmet as family and friends craned for photographs, and a party the U.S. program waited 62 years to throw was finally getting under way.

“It’s huge,” said USA-3 driver Mike Kohn, who finished 13th. “This is a great moment.”

On the trackside podium for the flower ceremony—medals came later Saturday — Tomasevicz pulled off Holcomb’s hat, planting a smooch on his pilot’s bald, sweaty head. Sealed with a kiss, it was, and then the four teammates stood together and did what’s known as the “Holcy Dance,” the little shuffle step that Holcomb does to keep his team loose.

“It means an awful lot,” said Darrin Steele, CEO of the U.S. Bobsled and Skeleton Federation. “This has been a long road. But all the components came together. You put a sled and a team together, and you never know how it’s going to go.”

Holcomb was walking around trackside about an hour before the final heat, shaking his finger, mouthing the words “one more.” With a lead of 0.45 seconds over Rush, all Holcomb needed to do was get his sled down the mountain without a huge mishap, knowing his lead was such that no one could catch him.

All he had to do was not wreck before Curve 13, this track’s most dangerous turn, the one Holcomb himself dubbed “50-50” after seeing roughly one out of every two sleds crash there last year.

Holcomb and his sledmates grabbed each other by the hands one last time, took one last look down the hill and prepared to push the “Night Train”—the menacing, flat-black, super-high-tech sled that is coveted by almost every bobsledder in the world—into Olympic lore.

Holcomb’s final message, Olsen said, was: “One more run. Let’s do it.”

A mere 51.52 seconds later, they did.

“They embarrassed the field,” Rush said. “They showed up in our backyard and it’s kind of like the theme of these Olympic Games. The Americans have shown up in Canada and whipped us.”

It’s barely been two weeks since Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili crashed during a luge training run and died just hours before the opening ceremony. The Olympic track has been a lightning rod of criticism since. There were dozens of crashes on the super-fast surface, six during Friday’s four-man heats alone, one bad enough to knock up-and-coming American John Napier—some say he’ll be better than Holcomb—out of the Olympics with a sore neck.

It might be the toughest track in the world, but Holcomb made it look toothless.

“It’s a great thing for the U.S.,” Canada-2 driver Pierre Lueders said. “They’ve been competitive in bobsled for so long, but have been shut out quite a few times. He definitely is a talent, and I can’t wait to see how he’s going to do four years from now.”

It wasn’t long ago that Holcomb had 20-500 vision—“profound visual impairment”—that could have ended his bobsledding career before he managed to scrape up $15,000 to have contact lenses embedded behind his iris to correct a degenerative condition.

“There was a moment when the four of us were standing there and everybody else had gone inside and we were the last off and it was a moment where I just stopped for half a second and took it in,” said Mesler, who will contemplate retirement. “Four of us, empty parking lot and going down the hill. I’ll never forget that.”

The “Night Train” guys were overwhelmed a few weeks ago, when they were surprised with shimmering championship rings for winning the four-man world title.

A new piece of jewelry awaits, for doing something no U.S. 4-man team has done since 1948 when Tyler, Patrick Martin, Edward Rimkus and William D’Amico went to St. Moritz and won gold.

“When they raise the flag and play `The Star-Spangled Banner’ for your son,” said Steve Holcomb, the bobsledder’s father, his voice choking at the thought, “well, that’s pretty cool.”

Four hours later, it happened.

The men of USA-1 jumped atop the medals podium together and bowed their heads to receive their medals. They put their right hands over their hearts as the national anthem blared and the U.S. flag was raised.

Holcomb shared one last hug with Lange, the man he needed to beat.

Bobsledding’s torch was passed.