Snowstorm wreaks havoc across Midwest
Slick roads cause fatal pileup in Iowa; tornadoes hit in Arkansas, Alabama.
DES MOINES, IOWA — The first widespread snowstorm of the season crawled across the Midwest on Thursday, with whiteout conditions stranding holiday travelers and sending drivers sliding over slick roads — including into a fatal 25vehicle pileup in Iowa.
The storm, which dumped a foot of snow in parts of Iowa and Wisconsin, was part of a system that began in the Rockies earlier in the week before trekking into the Midwest. It was expected to move across the Great Lakes overnight and into Canada..
The storm led airlines to cancel about 1,000 flights ahead of the Christmas holiday — relatively few compared with past big storms.
On the southern edge of the system, tornadoes destroyed several homes in Arkansas and peeled the roofs from buildings, toppled trucks and blew down oak trees and limbs in Alabama.
In Iowa, drivers were blinded by blowing snow and didn’t see vehi-
— After two centuries of boom and bust, America’s population growth may finally be leveling off.
The U.S. population is now increasing a bit faster than in 2011, thanks to an improving economy, but not enough to lift growth above its lowest levels since the Great Depression.
The nation is getting older and is less likely than before to be married, with women waiting longer to have children, if at all. Immigration is on an upswing after years of sharp declines during the recession but may never return to the peak level it reached in the early 2000s.
New 2012 estimates released Thursday by the Census Bureau offer the latest snapshot of the U.S. population, showing signs of revival and change in pockets of the U.S.
“After decades of wars, a depression, immigration surges, baby booms, boomlets and busts, we are entering a new era of modest growth,” said William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings Institution who analyzed the numbers.