National

      HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - The body of the man who killed 26 people at a Connecticut elementary school has been claimed for burial.

     WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is under observation at a New York hospital after being treated for a blood clot stemming from the concussion she sustained earlier this month.
 
     Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines says doctors discovered the clot Sunday while performing a follow-up exam. He would not elaborate on the location of the clot.
 
     But he says Clinton is being treated with anti-coagulants and will remain at New York-Presbyterian Hospital through at least Tuesday.
 
     Clinton fell and suffered a concussion in mid-December as she recovered from a stomach virus that left her severely dehydrated. She was forced to cancel a trip to North Africa and the Middle East as well as testimony before Congress about the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
 

 

     A sister of Schwarzkopf, Ruth Barenbaum of Middlebury, Vt., tells The Associated Press that Schwarzkopf died Thursday in Tampa, Fla., from complications from pneumonia.

 

     A much-decorated combat soldier in Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was known popularly as "Stormin' Norman" for a notoriously explosive temper.

 

     He lived in retirement in Tampa, where he had served in his last military assignment as commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command. That is the headquarters responsible for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly 20 countries from the eastern Mediterranean and Africa to Pakistan.

  WASHINGTON (AP) - With the "fiscal cliff" clock winding down, President Barack Obama will meet with congressional leaders at the White House on Friday.

 

     The last-minute gathering will apparently attempt to reach a compromise to avoid a year-end across-the-board tax increases and deep spending cuts. Word of the meeting came after the president returned early from a family vacation in Hawaii.

 

     An aide to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the Kentucky lawmaker "is eager to hear from the president." A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner issued a statement that said the Ohio Republican would attend. Boehner also says the House will reconvene in a rare Sunday session.

 

     While there is no guarantee of a compromise, Republicans and Democrats said privately elements of any agreement would likely include an extension of middle class tax cuts with increased rates at upper incomes as well as cancellation of the scheduled spending cuts. 

 

 WASHINGTON (AP) - One of the nation's top warriors is being remembered for leading troops at war and for civic contributions after his retirement.

 

     Retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf has died of complications of pneumonia. He was 78.

 

     He was given the popular "Stormin' Norman" nickname, but preferred the one given him by his troops: "The Bear." Schwarzkopf is best known for leading international forces in Iraq in 1991 against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait.  

 

     Schwarzkopf was named commander in chief of U.S. Central Command at Tampa's MacDill Air Force Base in 1988. There he oversaw the headquarters for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly two dozen countries stretching across the Middle East to Afghanistan and the rest of central Asia, plus Pakistan.

 

     He lived out a quiet retirement in Tampa and managed to keep a low profile in the public debate over the second Gulf War against Iraq. He said at one point that he doubted victory would be as easy as the White House and the Pentagon predicted.

 

 

     Post-Christmas travelers braced for flight delays and a raft of weather warnings for drivers, a day after rare winter twisters damaged buildings in Louisiana and Alabama. 

 

     Snow and ice covered roads in southern Illinois and southern Indiana early Wednesday. Officials urged residents to stay home if they can. State police reported numerous slide-off accidents in the Evansville, Ind., area and white-out conditions on Interstate 64 in Indiana with wind gusts around 30 mph.

 

     The storm system headed from the Gulf Coast to New England has been blamed for three deaths and several injuries, though no one was killed outright in the tornadoes. The storms also left more than 100,000 without power for a time across the South, darkening Christmas celebrations.

 

     Severe thunderstorms were forecast for the Carolinas while a line of blizzard and winter storm warnings stretched from Arkansas up the Ohio River to New York and on to Maine. 

 

     Thirty-four tornadoes were reported in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama during the outbreak Tuesday, the National Weather Service said. 

 

     Rick Cauley's family was hosting relatives for Christmas when tornado sirens went off in Mobile. Not taking any chances, he and his wife, Ashley, hustled everyone down the block to take shelter at the athletic field house at Mobile's Murphy High School in Mobile.

 

     It turns out, that wasn't the place to head.

 

     "As luck would have it, that's where the tornado hit," Cauley said. "The pressure dropped and the ears started popping and it got crazy for a second." They were all fine, though the school was damaged, as were a church and several homes, but officials say no one was seriously injured.

 

     Camera footage captured the approach of the large funnel cloud.

 

     Mobile was the biggest city hit by numerous twisters. Along with brutal, straight-line winds, the storms knocked down countless trees, blew the roofs off homes and left many Christmas celebrations in the dark. Torrential rains drenched the region and several places saw flash flooding.

 

     More than 325 flights around the U.S. were canceled as of Wednesday morning, according to the flight tracker FlightAware.com. The cancelations were mostly spread around airports that had been or soon would be in the path of the storm. 

 

     Holiday travelers in the nation's much colder midsection battled treacherous driving conditions from freezing rain and blizzard conditions from the same fast-moving storms. In Arkansas, highway department officials said the state was fortunate the snowstorm hit on Christmas Day when many travelers were already at their destinations.

 

     Texas, meanwhile, dealt with high winds and slickened highways.

 

     On Tuesday, winds toppled a tree onto a pickup truck in the Houston area, killing the driver, and a 53-year-old north Louisiana man was killed when a tree fell on his house. Icy roads already were blamed for a 21-vehicle pileup in Oklahoma, and the Highway Patrol there says a 28-year-old woman was killed in a crash on a snowy U.S. Highway near Fairview.

 

     Trees fell on homes and across roadways in several communities in southern Mississippi and Louisiana. Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant declared a state of emergency, saying eight counties reported damages and some injuries.

 

     It included McNeill, where a likely tornado damaged a dozen homes and sent eight people to the hospital, none with life-threatening injuries, said Pearl River County emergency management agency director Danny Manley.

 

     The snowstorm that caused numerous accidents pushed out of Oklahoma late Tuesday, carrying with it blizzard warnings for parts of northeast Arkansas, where 10 inches of snow was forecast. Freezing rain clung to trees and utility lines in Arkansas and winds gusts up to 30 mph whipped them around, causing about 71,000 customers to lose electricity for a time.

 

     Christmas lights also were knocked out with more than 100,000 customers without power for at least a time in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

 

     Blizzard conditions were possible for parts of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky up to Cleveland with predictions of several inches to a foot of snow. By the end of the week, that snow was expected to move into the Northeast with again up to a foot predicted

 

     Jason Gerth said the Mobile tornado passed by in a few moments and from his porch, he saw about a half-dozen green flashes in the distance as transformers blew. His home was spared.

 

     "It missed us by 100 feet and we have no damage," Gerth said.

 

     In Louisiana, quarter-sized hail was reported early Tuesday in the western part of the state and a WDSU viewer sent a photo to the TV station of what appeared to be a waterspout around the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway in New Orleans. There were no reports of crashes or damage.

 

     Some mountainous areas of Arkansas' Ozark Mountains could get up to 10 inches of snow, which would make travel "very hazardous or impossible" in the northern tier of the state from near whiteout conditions, the weather service said.

 

     The holiday may conjure visions of snow and ice, but twisters this time of year are not unheard of. Ten storm systems in the last 50 years have spawned at least one Christmastime tornado with winds of 113 mph or more in the South, said Chris Vaccaro, a National Weather Service spokesman in Washington, via email.

 

     The most lethal were the storms of Dec. 24-26, 1982, when 29 tornadoes in Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi killed three people and injured 32.

 

     In Mobile, a large section of the roof on the Trinity Episcopal Church is missing and the front wall of the parish wall is gone, said Scott Rye, a senior warden at the church in the Midtown section of the city.

 

     On Christmas Eve, the church with about 500 members was crowded for services.

 

     "Thank God this didn't happen last night," Rye said.

 

     ---

 

     Associated Press writers Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Ala., Jeff Amy in Atlanta, Ramit Plushnick-Masti in Houston, Chuck Bartels in Little Rock, Ark., Janet McConnaughey in New Orleans and AP Business Writer Daniel Wagner in Washington, contributed to this report.

 

<VIDEO> The ex-con who lured two firefighters to their deaths in a blaze of gunfire in Webster, NY wrote he wanted to burn down the neighborhood and kill people, police said as they found remains believed to be William Spengler's missing sister.

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   WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama says he is "ready and willing" to get a big package done to deal with the "fiscal cliff" and says there's no reason not to protect middle-class Americans from tax increases.

 

     Obama says he spoke Friday with House Speaker John Boehner and met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He says Congress should pass a plan to extend tax breaks for the middle class and extend unemployment benefits.

 

     Obama says no one can get 100 percent of what they want and there are "real consequences" to how they deal with the across-the-board tax increases and steep spending cuts scheduled to kick in Jan. 1. Economists fear the combination could deliver a blow to the U.S. economy.

 

 DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The first widespread snowstorm of the season is crawling across the Midwest. Whiteout conditions have been stranding holiday travelers and sending drivers sliding over slick roads - including into a fatal 25-vehicle pileup in Iowa.

 

     State police say drivers on Interstate 35 got into the chain collision about 60 miles north of Des Moines. Officials say two people were killed and seven injured.

 

     The storm made travel difficult from Kansas to Wisconsin, forcing road closures, including a 120-mile stretch of Interstate 35. Sections of Interstate 80 in Nebraska and Interstate 29 in Missouri that had been closed were reopened Thursday afternoon. Iowa and Wisconsin activated National Guard troops to help rescue stranded drivers.

 

     Airlines delayed and canceled hundreds of flights out of Chicago's O'Hare and Midway international airports. Airlines are waiving fees for customers impacted by the storm who want to change their flights. They're monitoring the storm throughout the night to determine if more cancellations would be necessary on Friday.

 

 SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) - A man charged with firing 54 shots outside a Southern California mall has been linked to a similar shooting at the same mall in 2011.

 

     Marcos Sarinana Gurrola was charged Tuesday with 54 counts of discharging a gun in public and two counts of assault for injuries suffered by a mother and her 4-year-old daughter who were knocked down as they fled Saturday's gunfire, which hit no one.

 

     Prosecutors say police have linked the 42-year-old unemployed security guard to a similar shooting in 2011 at the Fashion Island mall in Newport Beach.

 

     In that incident, someone fired 10 shots into the parking lot but no suspects were identified at the time.

 

     The investigation into Saturday's shooting also led prosecutors to charge Gurrola with 10 counts in the 2011 incident.

 

<VIDEO> Just days after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Dick's Sporting Goods has decided to pull certain semi-automatic rifles off its shelves.

<VIDEO> Sen. Daniel Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat, has died. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Inouye's death on the Senate floor.

     NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) - An official with knowledge of the situation says a gunman at the center of a school shooting in Newtown, Conn., has been killed.

 

     The official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way says the man apparently had two guns. 

 

     A dispatcher at the Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps says a teacher has been shot in the foot and taken to Danbury Hospital, but it's unclear whether there are other injuries.

 

     Ambulance surrounded Sandy Hook Elementary School in western Connecticut and parents were running toward the building as a helicopter flew overhead. 

 

     The superintendent's office says the district has locked down schools.

 

     State police say Newtown police called them at about 9:40 a.m. about the shooting reports.

 

 WASHINGTON (AP) - U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice says she withdrew from consideration for secretary of state because she didn't want to endure confirmation hearings that were "very politicized." 

 

     Rice also says she wouldn't have wanted her nomination to have delayed or distracted President Barack Obama from pursuing his second term agenda. Given that possibility, she says she prefers to stay doing a job she loves at the U.N.

 

     Rice has faced withering criticism from some congressional Republicans who have taken issue with her initial statements about the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya. Some lawmakers had indicated they would hold up her confirmation hearing if Obama had tapped her for the job. 

 

     Rice spoke in an interview with NBC News.

 

 ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - More than 125 prominent CEOs based in New York are urging Congress to quickly pass a $60 billion aid package for Superstorm Sandy relief.

 

     The CEOS include top executives of Time Warner, NBC Universal, Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, Madison Square Garden and the National Basketball Association.

 

     The plea comes as the governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut urge Congress to act quickly on the aid before lawmakers break for the holiday.

 

     Govs. Chris Christie, Andrew Cuomo and Dannel Malloy say no region or state should have to stand alone after a disaster. They say Congress hasn't acted in seven weeks following Sandy, taking longer to provide aid than in previous disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.

 

 

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WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke (bur-NANG'-kee) says the U.S. economy is already being hurt by the "fiscal cliff" standoff in Washington but the Fed believes the crisis will be resolved without significant long-term damage.

 

     At a news conference in Washington today, Bernanke said the steep tax increases and spending cuts can be avoided with a successful budget deal. The Fed's latest forecasts for stronger economic growth next year and slightly lower unemployment assume that happens.

 

     Still, Bernanke says: "Clearly the fiscal cliff is having effects on the economy." He says the uncertainty surrounding the resolution is already affecting consumer and business confidence. And it has led businesses to cut back on investment.

 

     Bernanke says the most helpful thing that Congress and the Obama administration can do is resolve the issue quickly.

 

  MIAMI (AP) - Anti-virus software founder John McAfee has arrived in Miami after being deported from Guatemala.

 

     Miami International Airport spokesman Greg Chin said the American Airlines commercial jet carrying McAfee landed shortly before 7 p.m. Wednesday. There was no immediate sign of McAfee or information as to where he was headed.

 

     Chin said McAfee would be escorted by federal authorities after he cleared customs and would not appear in public parts of the terminal. 

 

     Frank Medina was a passenger on the plane. He said McAfee was taken off the plane before everyone else. 

 

     McAfee was expelled from Guatemala earlier Wednesday. He had sneaked into the country from Belize, where authorities want to question him in the homicide of a neighbor. 

 

 PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Sheriff's deputies say there has been a shooting in a shopping mall near Portland, Ore.

 

     One witness at the Clackamas Town Center told television station KATU at least two people were shot, and he saw sheets put over them.

 

     Another witness told the station she saw people screaming and parents grabbing their children as they fled the mall.

 

     That witness said the gunman had a rifle and was wearing a camouflage outfit and a mask.

 

     Another witness said ambulances were arriving at the scene.

 

     Entrances to the mall have been blocked off.

 

     No further details were immediately available from the Clackamas County sheriff's office.

 

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  ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - George Zimmerman is suing NBC, claiming he was defamed when the network edited his 911 call to police after the shooting of Trayvon Martin to make it sound like he was racist. 

 

     The former neighborhood watch volunteer filed the lawsuit seeking an undisclosed amount of money on Thursday in Seminole County, outside Orlando.

 

     The lawsuit claims NBC edited his phone call to a dispatcher last February. Zimmerman describes following Martin in the gated community where he lived, just moments before he fatally shot the 17-year-old teen during a confrontation.

 

     NBC spokeswoman Kathy Kelly-Brown didn't immediately return a phone call. Three employees of NBC or an NBC-owned television station lost their jobs because of the changes. 

 

     Zimmerman is charged with second-degree murder but has pleaded not guilty, claiming self-defense. 

 

 WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama and his family have flipped the switch for the 90th annual lighting of the National Christmas Tree.  

 

     Obama was joined at the ceremony by TV star Neil Patrick Harris, who hosted the ceremony. Performers included singers Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, Ledisi, Jason Mraz, James Taylor and the band The Fray. 

 

     This year's giant blue spruce is new and was transplanted in October on the Ellipse, a park that lies between the White House and the National Mall.

 

     The previous tree died from transplant shock after just a year. Before that, a tree that stood for more than 30 years was destroyed by winds in February 2011.

 

 

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