A major winter storm that already cut electric power to about 350,000 homes and businesses from Texas to the Ohio Valley was set to leave Pennsylvania and New England glazed in ice and smothered in snow Friday, forecasters said.A foot of snow was expected to accumulate in northern New York and northern New England, but it was the ice that threatened to wreak havoc on travel and electric service in the Northeast before the storm heads out to sea late Friday and Saturday, said Rick Otto, meteorologist for the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.“Snow is a lot easier to plow than ice,” he said.Even after the storm pushes off to sea late Friday and Saturday, ice and snow were expected to linger through the weekend because of subfreezing temperatures, Otto said.About 350,000 homes and businesses lost power from Texas to Ohio on Thursday as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines, part of a winter storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the Midwest and brought rare measurable snowfall and hundreds of power outages to parts of Texas.The highest totals of power outages blamed on icy or downed power lines were concentrated in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio, but the path of the storm stretched further from the South and Northeast on Thursday. Several schools and universities across the region closed on Friday as a result of poor weather conditions. Along the warmer side of the storm, strong thunderstorms capable of damaging wind gusts and tornadoes were possible Thursday in parts of Mississippi and Alabama, the Storm Prediction Center said.In western Alabama, a tornado that hit a rural area Thursday afternoon killed one person, a female he found under rubble, and critically injured three others. A home was heavily damaged.Tornadoes in the winter are unusual but possible, and scientists have said the atmospheric conditions needed to cause a tornado have intensified as the planet warms.Heavy snow the storm brought to Midwestern states isn't unusual, except the bigger-than-normal path of intense snow in some places, said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. With a warmer climate, people are forgetting what a Midwestern winter had long been like, he said."The only amazing winters I've been able to experience is through my parents' photographs of the 1970s," Gensini, who is 35, said. "This (storm) is par for the course, not only for the past, but winters current."More than 20 inches of snow was reported in the southern Rockies, while more than a foot of snow fell in areas of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.The flight-tracking service FlightAware.com showed more than 9,000 flights in the U.S. scheduled for Thursday or Friday had been canceled, on top of more than 2,000 cancellations Wednesday as the storm began."Unfortunately, we are looking at enough ice accumulations that we will be looking at significant travel impacts," Orrison said.At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, an American Airlines hub, an estimated 700 customers stayed Wednesday night in its terminals, according to an airport statement. Airport personnel provided pillows, blankets, diapers and infant formula to the marooned travelers. Airport officials said in the same statement that on Thursday night "we are ready to provide assistance in anticipation of customers who may need to stay in the terminals."The Ohio Valley was especially affected Thursday, with 211 flight cancellations at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport on Thursday. An airport spokeswoman told the Cincinnati Enquirer that all flights were canceled Thursday except for Delta Air Lines and American Airlines flights before noon.Nearly all Thursday afternoon and evening flights were canceled at the Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport, and Friday flights could be as well, spokeswoman Natalie Chaudoin told the Louisville Courier-Journal. UPS suspended some operations Thursday at its Worldport hub at the airport, a rare move.Almost 300,000 homes and businesses were still without power as night fell Thursday, most of them in Tennessee and Ohio, according to the website poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports. As night fell Thursday, almost 150,000 Tennessee customers were without power, including about 135,000 in the Memphis area alone — or one-third of the customers of Memphis Light, Gas & Water.Power restoration could take days, said Gale Carson, the utility's spokeswoman. "It's not going to be a quick process," she said.Six people were taken to a hospital after a 16-vehicle crash on a Memphis highway. Two were in critical condition when taken to an emergency room after the crash on Austin Peay Highway, the Memphis Fire Department said on Twitter. Four others suffered non-critical injuries.Trees sagged under the weight of ice in Memphis, resulting in fallen tree limbs and branches. Parked cars had a layer of ice on them and authorities in several communities around the city warned of some cars sliding off slick roadways.Meantime, almost 70,000 were without power in Ohio, with large percentages of the population in southeastern Ohio in the dark. In Texas, the return of subfreezing weather brought heightened anxiety nearly a year after February 2021's catastrophic freeze that buckled the state's power grid for days, leading to hundreds of deaths in one of the worst blackouts in U.S. history.Facing a new test of Texas' grid, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to get through the storm. Texas had about 70,000 outages by Thursday morning, nowhere close to the 4 million outages reported in 2021. About half had their power restored by evening.Abbott and local officials said Thursday's outages were due to high winds or icy and downed transmission lines, not grid failures.In Dallas, where snow rarely accumulates, the overnight mix of snow and freezing rain had hardened Thursday afternoon into an icy slick that made roads perilous.South Bend, Indiana, reported a record snowfall for the date on Wednesday with 11.2 inches, eclipsing the previous record of 8 inches set on the date in 1908, said Hannah Carpenter, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's office in Syracuse, Indiana.Once the storm pushes through, she said temperatures will see a big drop, with Friday's highs mostly in the upper teens followed by lows in the single digits in northern Indiana, along with bone-chilling wind chills. "It's definitely not going to be melting real quick here," Carpenter said Thursday morning. The frigid temperatures settled into areas after the snowy weather, with Kansas residents awakening to dangerous wind chills of around 15 below zero. In New Mexico, schools and nonessential government services were closed in some areas Thursday because of icy and snow-packed roads.The disruptive storm began Tuesday and moved across the central U.S. on Wednesday's Groundhog Day, the same day the famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. The storm came on the heels of a nor'easter last weekend that brought blizzard conditions to many parts of the East Coast. ___Bleed reported from Little Rock, Arkansas. Associated Press writers Adrian Sainz in Memphis, Tennessee; Paul J. Weber in Austin; Jake Bleiberg in Dallas; Paul Davenport in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Seth Borenstein in Kensington, Maryland; Rick Callahan in Indianapolis and Jay Reeves in Alabaster, Alabama, contributed to this report.

The U.S. remains among nations with the highest rate of new COVID-19 cases, driven mostly by a surge in the South, where many states are lagging in getting people vaccinated against the coronavirus."This is starting to look really ominous in the South. ... If you look at rates of transmission in Florida and Louisiana, they're actually probably the highest in the world," Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN on Friday.Infection rates began to plummet in the U.S. in the spring as vaccines became widely available, while the seven-day moving average of daily confirmed cases climbed in other nations, including India and Brazil, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.In the month of August, the U.S. has so far reported more than 1.5 million new cases of COVID-19, more than three times the numbers for Iran and India — which now hold second and third place, JHU data shows. And the seven-day average has topped more than 135,000 cases, well ahead of other nations.On a state-by-state comparison, Louisiana has the highest rate of new cases per capita, followed by Florida."That's how badly things have gotten out of hand. There is a screaming level of transmission across the southern states right now. And now we're starting to see this happening among younger age groups," Hotez said.Florida on Friday broke its own record high in COVID-19 cases over the past week, reporting 151,415 new cases — the most infections recorded during a seven-day period since the pandemic upended lives across the globe.The surge has been fueled by the more transmissible delta variant, overwhelming hospitals across the country.In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards said hospitalizations hit a pandemic record high of at least 2,907 patients, up by six people from a day earlier."They're not just the highest that they've ever been. They're almost a third higher than at any other point in this pandemic. Our hospitals are struggling. Staff remains the limiting factor on capacity. Our staff at our hospitals, nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists and physician's assistants, you name it, they're maxed out," the governor said Friday.Edwards said state hospital leaders are worried about the surges."I will tell you that I've never heard them express more concern, more alarm, or anxiety than they did this week, because we are rapidly approaching the breaking point," Edwards added.And in Alabama, there is an alarming uptick of infants as well as teenagers hospitalized with COVID-19, according to Dr. David Kimberlin, the director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama in Birmingham."We're seeing a lot of children who are very, very sick admitted to our hospital. We have almost twice as many right now as we did at the previous worst part of this pandemic, which was probably in January," Kimberlin told CNN on Friday."These children are coming in fighting for breath, fighting for the ability to basically get through this devastating illness, many of them are on ventilators, maybe a quarter or so on ventilators or heart-lung bypass machines," he said.He added that as children return to classrooms, "it's critically important that everyone in schools masks, whether you're vaccinated or not.""I think the most efficient way to do that is to have a mandate, to have a requirement ... that everybody needs to do so. And it saddens me that we seem to be fighting about the way we go about doing it. We all ought to -- and I want to believe that we do -- have our own children's best interest at heart. We got to do this for them."State and local officials spar over mask and vaccine mandatesBut masking children in schools has become increasingly polarizing, especially in states where vaccination rates are lagging and COVID-19 infections, as well as hospitalizations, continue to increase.Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas have issued executive orders that ban mask mandates in their states. DeSantis, however, went a step further and threatened to withhold the salaries of superintendents and school board members who disregard his order.On Friday, the Texas Court of Appeals ruled against Abbott, upholding that mask mandates may remain in Bexar and Dallas counties. Abbott had requested the appeals court to stay rulings from two lower courts that decided mask mandates in those counties can be effective, despite the governor's executive order banning mask mandates.In Arizona, education groups are suing the state for banning public schools from imposing mask and vaccine mandates.The Arizona School Boards Association, the Arizona Education Association and other advocacy groups filed the lawsuit Thursday, arguing that the new laws favor private schools over public districts because they don't apply to public schools."Students in Arizona's public and charter schools will be less safe in their educational environment than students in private schools," the lawsuit states.The lawsuit seeks to overturn the bans on mandates. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey and Attorney General Mark Brnovich did not respond to requests for comment Friday."This legislative session was unprecedented. The legislature enacted substantive laws in budget reconciliation bills without notice to the public and on subjects that are completely unrelated to one another," plaintiffs' attorney Roopali H. Desai said in a written statement provided to CNN.3rd dose for immunocompromised is not a "booster" shot, expert saysMeanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday authorized an additional third dose to be administered to people with compromised immune systems.And on Friday, vaccine advisers to the CDC voted unanimously to recommend the additional dose for some immunocompromised people. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky quickly endorsed the vote, which means people can begin getting third doses right away.On Friday, Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said it's important not to confuse that third dose with a "booster" shot."These are really about finishing a primary series. Think about childhood immunizations. We have vaccines for which we need three of four doses. What we found here is that the immune-compromised often didn't mount an adequate response at all. So we're still trying to build that. That is different than a booster dose where someone did respond and in fact over time that wanes," Osterholm told CNN. "I think it was a great decision."At a meeting of CDC vaccine advisers, Dr. Heather Scobie said a disproportionate number of vaccine breakthroughs are among immunocompromised people. Almost one-third — 32% — of vaccinated breakthrough cases are among that group, she said.While immune-compromised people make up about 2.7% of the adult population — about 7 million people — they're more vulnerable to infection, said Dr. Amanda Cohn, the executive secretary of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.She said vaccine effectiveness is about 59% to 72% in immunocompromised people, compared to 90% to 94% overall."Immunocompromised people are more likely to get severely ill from COVID-19. They are at higher risk for prolonged SARS-CoV-2 infection and shedding and viral evolution during the infection and treatment, particularly amongst hospitalized patients," Cohn said.

The partisan showdown over redistricting has hardly begun, but already both sides agree on one thing: It largely comes down to the South.The states from North Carolina to Texas are set to be premier battlegrounds for the once-a-decade fight over redrawing political boundaries. That's thanks to a population boom, mostly one-party rule and a new legal landscape that removes federal oversight and delays civil rights challenges. It's a collision of factors likely to tilt the scales in the GOP’s favor with dramatic impact: Experts note the new maps in the South alone could knock Democrats out of power in the U.S. House next year — and perhaps well beyond. “The South is really going to stand out,” said Ryan Weichelt, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire who tracks redistricting. Of the 10 new congressional seats expected this year, six are likely to be in Southern states, with one new one expected in North Carolina, two in Florida and three in Texas. Republicans control the legislatures in those states, leaving them with near total say over what those new districts will look like — a sharp contrast to other parts of the country where state governments are either divided or where nonpartisan commissions are tasked with redrawing congressional and state legislative lines. Finally, this will be the first time in more than 50 years the Justice Department will not automatically review new legislative maps in nine mostly Southern states to ensure they do not discriminate. "It is a very different landscape from the one that it’s been for 50-plus years,” said Deuel Ross, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Republicans are under added pressure to bolster their political standing in the region as its population has grown, largely due to an influx of Democratic-leaning newcomers. That’s weakened the GOP’s grip, highlighted most dramatically in Georgia, where Democrats just won a presidential race and two Senate races. Related video: Georgia Senate votes to curb absentee ballotsThe party is already eyeing targets. In Georgia, they can choose whether to target Democratic Reps. Lucy McBath or Carolyn Boudreaux or both by adding more conservative voters from far north of Atlanta to the two lawmakers' districts.In Florida, they could try to swamp Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy's district with new GOP voters as they carve out a new seat in the Orlando area, one of the two the state is expected to add. And in Texas, which is expected to gain a whopping three congressional seats, the most of any state, the GOP may try to carve out more seats in the center of their state's boom — Democratic-leaning Houston — that could still elect Republicans.Currently, a gain of five seats would hand control of the House to the GOP. That number may rise or fall before November 2020 depending on the outcome of special elections for several vacant seats.To be sure, there will be limits — both legal and practical — on how much power Republicans can win with a new map. While they control the process, the demographic trends in Southern states are working against them. Many of the new residents are college-educated, racially diverse and young — all groups Republicans have struggled to win over. That means the party can only draw so many “safe” districts. And, because these states are seeing explosive growth, efforts to perfectly divvy up major cities like Houston and Atlanta may collapse over time as tens of thousands of new residents continue to move in. “You’ve got all these countervailing things," said Steve Schale, a Florida-based Democratic strategist. "Democrats doing better in suburban areas, states getting more diverse, coupled with Republicans being in control of all the levers of government.”Control in the South has a history of leading to rigging the democratic process — from voting rules to district maps — to disempower Black voters. In Georgia, the state's GOP-controlled legislature is responding to Democrats' recent surge and former President Donald Trump's false claim of voter fraud with a raft of proposals that would make it harder to vote — including one to end Sunday early voting, popular among Black churchgoers.Such restrictions wouldn't have been possible eight years ago, when the Justice Department was required to approve any changes ahead of time in states with a history of voting rights violations. But, in 2013, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down federal requirements that Georgia and eight other states “preclear” voting and redistricting changes. It ruled the federal formula based on the states' previous violations was outdated.Several states — including Texas and North and South Carolina — quickly responded with new voter identification laws. Some civil rights advocates fear the party will take advantage of the lack of oversight in redistricting as well.“If they’re using what was obviously a lie about voter fraud in 2020 to pass new restrictions on voting in Georgia and Texas, then I think the same will apply when the Census data comes out” to kick off the redistricting process, Ross said. Redistricting on the basis of race remains illegal under the Voting Rights Act. But proving a violation can take years in court, allowing multiple elections to go forward with maps that may later be found illegal. For example, in North Carolina — the Republican legislature alone has redistricting power, without input from the state's Democratic governor — the legislature drew maps in 2010 that were eventually found to be racially gerrymandered. But those maps remained in place for two House elections before being redrawn to cost the GOP two seats.“It means a state can engage in midnight gerrymandering and essentially evade court review, run elections with those gerrymandered maps and get away with it until the next election," said Kathay Feng, Common Cause's redistricting director.Jason Torchinsky, general counsel of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, said there's significant limits on what Republican legislatures could accomplish even if they went down the road of racial gerrymandering — which, he noted, could still result in damaging lawsuits and injunctions against maps from federal judges.“This notion that, somehow, the lack of preclearance is going to leave minorities unprotected is false,” Torchinsky said.Some Republicans note the party should be careful not to let its power over the rules and the boundaries replace persuasion. It must still try to win over new arrivals in the South with ideas. “We need to remind these new residents that they're moving to these states, ideally, based on policies Republicans have put in place,” said Hooff Cooksey, a Virginia-based GOP strategist.Virginia looms as a warning to the GOP — a once solidly Republican state that became a solidly Democratic one as the growing, educated population in the Washington, D.C., suburbs turned against the party. A federal court redrew the state's maps in 2016 because it found the legislature — split between both parties — and a Republican governor had improperly used racial criteria in redistricting. Democrats won the statehouse in 2019 and Virginia now uses a nonpartisan commission to draw its legislative maps.