Deadly storm spreads snow, twister risk to Atlantic coast

By NBC News staff and wire reports

A major storm that unleashed heavy snow and deadly winds on the nation’s midsection on Christmas Day was moving across the East Coast Wednesday, bringing more wintry conditions and the risk of new tornadoes.
Snow was expected across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, with northern Ohio, northern Pennsylvania and southern New York set to bear the brunt, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton.
Further south, driving rain and thunderstorms were expected throughout the southeast Atlantic, with the tornado threat highest in the eastern Carolinas, according to the national Storm Prediction Center.
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Egyptian Senate Convenes

(Voice of America)Egypt's upper house of parliament has convened for its first session since President Mohamed Morsi signed a decree putting the controversial new Islamist-backed constitution into effect.

The Shura Council met on Wednesday to swear in 90 new members appointed by Morsi. The council is also expected to begin setting the framework for elections in the lower of house of parliament within the next two months.

Morsi signed the decree late Tuesday, after the election commission said almost 64 percent of voters had backed the constitution in this month's polling.

However, liberal and secularist-led opposition groups have vowed to continue protests against the measure.

They say their interests were not represented when the draft constitution was formulated.  Also, some opponents say the document ignores the rights of women.


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Russian Parliament Sends Adoption Ban to Putin

(NYTimes) MOSCOW – The upper chamber of Parliament on Wednesday unanimously approved a bill to ban adoptions of Russian children by United States citizens, sending the measure to President Vladimir V. Putin, who has voiced support but not yet said if he will sign it.

 Enactment of the adoption ban, which was developed in retaliation for an American law punishing Russians accused of violating human rights, would be the most severe blow yet to relations between Russia and the United States in a year marked by a series of setbacks.

Since Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in May, Russian officials have used a juggernaut of legislation and executive decisions to curtail United States influence and involvement in Russia, undoing major partnerships that began after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In September, the Kremlin ordered the United States Agency for International Development to cease operations here, shutting a wide portfolio of public health, civil society and other initiatives. And officials announced plans to terminate a joint effort to dismantle nuclear, chemical and other nonconventional weapons known as the Nunn-Lugar agreement.

Russia also passed a law requiring nonprofit groups that get financing from abroad to register as “foreign agents,” sharply curtailing the ability of the United States to work with good-government groups, and another law broadening the definition of treason to include “providing financial, technical, advisory or other assistance to a foreign state or international organization.”

The adoption ban, however, is the first step that takes direct aim at the American public and would effectively undo a bilateral agreement on international adoptions ratified just this year, which took effect on Nov. 1. The agreement called for heightened oversight in response to several high-profile cases of abuse and deaths of adopted Russian children in the United States.

About 1,000 Russian children were adopted by parents from the United States in 2011, more than any other country, and more than 45,000 such children have been adopted by American parents since 1999.

Pavel Astakhov, Russia’s child rights commissioner, told news agencies on Wednesday that the ban if enacted could prevent the departure of 46 children who are ready to be adopted by parents from the United States. Some of those adoptions have already received court approval, he said. And some lawmakers said that they believed the bilateral agreement on adoptions with the United States would be void as of Jan. 1, even though Mr. Putin, at his annual news conference last week, said that changes to the agreement require one-year notice by either side.

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The Obama family’s Hawaiian vacation home

Today, President Obama is ending his holiday vacation short and heading back to the capital, to work with other political leaders towards a deal for avoiding the fiscal cliff.  But before donning on his presidential leader hat again, the president and his family returned back to his home state of Hawaii for some holiday R&R.

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President Barack Obama is cutting short his Hawaiian holiday to leave for Washington on Wednesday to address the unfinished "fiscal cliff" negotiations with Congress, the White House said on Tuesday.

(Reuters) - As the clock ticks toward a January 1 deadline, efforts to avert a sharp rise in taxes and deep spending cuts have stalled, worrying world financial markets.
Obama and congressional lawmakers left Washington on Friday for the Christmas holidays with talks to avert the fiscal disaster in limbo.
When Obama arrives back in Washington early on Thursday, the focus will shift to the U.S. Senate after Republicans in the House of Representatives failed to pass their own budget measures last week.
Obama is expected to turn to a trusted Democratic ally, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, to help craft a quick deal.
White House aides began discussing details of the year-end budget measure with Senate Democratic counterparts early this week, a senior administration official said on Monday
The president will also need at least tacit approval from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to insure Republicans will permit passage of what is likely to be a stripped down bill that prevents taxes from rising on all Americans.
The measure may not, however, contain difficult spending cuts both parties had sought to speed deficit reduction. It is unclear how the president will seek to address the draconian across-the-board government spending reductions set to go into effect early in the year without a deal.
McConnell, who is up for re-election in 2014, has been a cautious participant in the process. His spokesman has said it was now up to Democrats in the Senate to make the next move.
Once clear of the Senate, the fiscal cliff legislation must also win enough bipartisan support to pass the House of Representatives, which failed last week to approve Speaker John Boehner's proposal to extend tax breaks for all Americans earning less than $1 million a year.
Conservative Republicans balked at any tax increases at all and withdrew support for the measure, which never came to a vote. Some Republican votes will be needed to pass any Senate bill. 

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Tornado in space

Image description: NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope revealed an object that looks like a giant tornado in space. The structure actually results from shock waves where a powerful protostellar jet hits neighboring gas and dust.

Find more images from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Photo by NASA / JPL-Caltech / J. Bally (University of Colorado)

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Promise Neighborhoods and the Importance of Community

Thanks to the Chavez Middle School band and the Thomas Elementary school children's choir. Thank you for that beautiful music.

It's a bittersweet day today. We need to listen carefully to the voices of children at this moment. We need to savor their innocence, and applaud their unquenchable appetite for self-expression and renewal.

Today--let me start with a piece of great news. Today, we're announcing the winners of a new round of Promise Neighborhood grants.

As most of you know, Promise Neighborhoods are cradle-to-career initiatives that call on all parts of the community to provide comprehensive wraparound supports to surround great schools, such as high-quality early learning, rich after-school activities, mental health services, and crime prevention.

I'm so pleased to announce that the DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative, or DCPNI, has won a $25 million implementation award. DCPNI is one of seven partnerships around the nation that won implementation awards today. Ten additional communities have won planning grants.

We had many, many more strong applicants than we had dollars available—I wish we could have funded the important work going on in many other communities. And I hope that other applicants, who didn't win grants this time, continue to press ahead with this comprehensive, collaborative, and critical work.

I congratulate DCPNI and its partners for not only uniting the Kenilworth Parkside community around a common vision, but for doing so with a rigorous, research-based approach to bettering the lives of all young people in the community. And I applaud the community for taking a broad and comprehensive view of supporting their children.

The hub of DCPNI efforts will be two elementary schools, one middle school, and one high school. But you have put together a tremendous coalition of more than 30 partners, including the city government, the DC public schools, hospitals and health centers, family support organizations, and the DC Housing Authority police.

I'm thrilled to see DC Mayor Gray, DC police chief Cathy Lanier, and DC's school chancellor, Kaya Henderson, are all here today.

The hunger for this kind of work in the nation is huge. More than 200 applicants applied for this round of Promise Neighborhood grants.

So many communities are eager today to provide equal access and support to disadvantaged children. So many communities are desperate to replace the cradle-to-prison pipeline with a cradle-to-career pipeline--that's what we all are fighting for.

The winners of implementation grants today range from big-city Los Angeles to small-town Indianola, Mississippi. In Corning, California, the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians won a planning grant.

Promise Neighborhood grants are so important because they engage the entire community—they ask everyone to work together. They ask everyone to take responsibility for helping children.

Children in many communities across the country deserve a stronger opportunity structure than we as adults have provided them. This is an amazing chance to rebuild the social compact with our young people.

The concept at the heart of this program—community-based and comprehensive—is equally relevant to a much more painful conversation America began, once again, last week in the wake of the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Losing six dedicated educators and 20 first-grade students in a matter of minutes to a disturbed young man with access to weapons designed for war is forcing us all to confront some very difficult questions.

I don't pretend to have all the answers. But since last Friday, I think the world has changed. Much like with 9/11, many Americans will forever remember where they were when they heard the awful news of the shootings.

On Wednesday, I went up to Newtown to talk privately with teachers and school staff from Sandy Hook Elementary School and to attend the wake for their heroic principal, Dawn Hochsprung. And I can tell you that the sense of loss and grief there is overpowering.

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