GIANT STORM PACKS ICY PUNCH
A GIANT winter “bomb cyclone” has walloped the US East Coast, with heavy snow and freezing cold making for treacherous travel conditions and bone-chilling misery.
Four people were reported killed in the southeastern states of North and South Carolina, where icy roads sent vehicles skittering.
A cold wave gripping a large section of the US had already been blamed for a dozen earlier deaths.
Thousands of flights were cancelled and schools closed in many localities as snow piled up and blizzard conditions began taking hold in the northeast.
Temperatures were so low in northern New York that Niagara Falls – the giant waterfalls straddling the USCanadian border – froze.
Temperatures were set to plunge and remain sub-freezing all weekend.
Weather forecasters dubbed the event a “bomb cyclone”, their nickname for a phenomenon known as “bombogenesis”, in which a weather system experiences a sharp drop in atmospheric pressure and intensifies rapidly, unleashing hurricane-force winds. A BLUEFIN tuna weighing 405kg has sold for 36.5 million yen ($407,000) in what may be Tsukiji market’s last auction at its current site in downtown Tokyo.
The winning bid for the prized but threatened species at the pre-dawn auction was well below the record 155.4 million yen bid at 2013’s annual new year auction.
It amounts to about 90,000 yen ($1016) a kilogram and was paid by a local wholesaler, it was reported.
The whopping top-priced tuna was one of the biggest ever sold at the auction.