Charges in Hadiya Pendleton slaying could come soon: McCarthy

Charges could come this evening against two people being questioned in the shooting death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said today.
"We will bring this all to closure, probably sometime this evening we're anticipating hopefully that we'll have charges," McCarthy said at a news conference with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez to announce a push for stiffer jail terms for people convicted of gun crimes.
McCarthy declined to provide more specifics, saying the investigation is ongoing.

"We're still doing lineups. We're still crossing some t's and dotting some i's that we need to do before we can get charges approved for these individuals," he said.

Chicago police picked up the two men, 18 and 20, were picked up over the weekend, hours after first lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral for the teenager whose death has become a symbol of escalating violence in Chicago.

The men were pulled over near East 67th Street and South Chicago Avenue late Saturday night or early Sunday morning after detectives canvassed the area of the park where she was shot and killed Jan. 29 and tracked down witnesses, the sources said.

Hadiya was fatally shot in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park, about a mile north of President Barack Obama's Kenwood neighborhood home on the South Side, a little more than a week after the honor student performed with the King College Prep band in Washington during inauguration festivities. Two other teens were wounded.

The shooting in the 4400 block of South Oakenwald Avenue happened after classes were dismissed for the day during finals week at King. Hadiya, a sophomore at King, was at the park with a group of teens, primarily other students from the school, when a male gunman climbed over a fence, ran to the group and started firing, police have said. The shooter escaped in what has been described as a white Nissan vehicle, possibly driven by a getaway driver.

One of the sources said at least one of the men brought into custody was riding in a Nissan Sentra, one of the two vehicles police pulled over when bringing the pair into custody. The source didn't know that Nissan's color.

Police have insisted the teens in Hadiya's group who had gathered in the park were not involved in gangs. But police have been looking into whether the gunman may have mistaken them for rival gang members.

While police and neighbors have generally described Harsh Park and its immediate surroundings as safe, there has been an internal gang conflict brewing in the area between factions of the Gangster Disciples, police said. The two men being questioned Sunday are alleged members of the Gangster Disciples, sources said.

One of the two men has a previous weapons conviction, according to court records.

In addition to Hadiya's homicide, there have been at least three other shootings within blocks of Harsh Park so far this year, according to police records.

No charges have been filed against the men, who are being held at Area Central police headquarters on the South Side.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel personally called Hadiya's parents, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton and Nathaniel Pendleton, to inform them of the development, according to a source. Nathaniel Pendleton told the Tribune on Sunday night that he didn't want to say too much about the men being questioned because charges have not been filed.
“Right now, we're just happy that Chicago police have some leads and things are moving,” he said.

Shatira Wilks, a cousin of Hadiya's and a family spokesperson, said the development is a “good response” and better news than the family had Saturday.

Arrests and charges “will bring a small level of closure to the family, although (the shooter) still will be allowed to eat, drink, mingle,” Wilks said. “The thing about that is, Hadiya is no longer (able) to do so.”

On how Hadiya's family is doing, Wilks said, “Everyone keeps asking that. I don't know if you'll ever get an answer that we're feeling good or we're feeling fine.”

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Average movie ticket price hits record high

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Movie-going got more expensive last year with ticket prices hitting record highs in 2012, the National Association of Theatre Owners said Monday.

The average ticket price hit $ 7.96, a three-cent bump from last year, but still the biggest annual number when not adjusted for inflation.

For the fourth quarter of 2012, 3D releases, such as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “Rise of the Guardians,” pushed ticket prices to $ 8.05. That was a 3.4 percent bump from the $ 7.78 cents audiences shelled out on average over the three months ending in September.

It was not, however, a record. In the second quarter of 2012, ticket prices hit unprecedented levels, averaging $ 8.12.

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Well: Price for a New Hip? Good Luck Getting a Reliable Estimate

Jaime Rosenthal, a senior at Washington University in St. Louis, called more than 100 hospitals in every state last summer, seeking prices for a hip replacement for a 62-year-old grandmother who was uninsured but had the means to pay herself.

The quotes she received might surprise even hardened health care economists: only about half of the hospitals, including top-ranked orthopedic centers and community hospitals, could provide any sort of price estimate, despite repeated calls. Those that could gave quotes that varied by a factor of more than 10, from $11,100 to $125,798.

Ms. Rosenthal’s grandmother was fictitious, created for a summer research project on health care costs. But the findings, which form the basis of a paper released on Monday by JAMA Internal Medicine, are likely to fan the debate on the unsustainable growth of American health care costs and an opaque medical system in which prices are often hidden from consumers.

“Transparency is all the rage these days in government and business, but there has been little push for pricing transparency in health care, and there’s virtually no information,” said Dr. Peter Cram, an associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Iowa, who wrote the paper with Ms. Rosenthal. He added: “I can get the price for a car, for a can of oil, for a gallon of milk. But health care? That’s not so easy.”

President Obama’s Affordable Care Act focused primarily on providing insurance to Americans who did not have it. But the high price of care remains an elephant in the room. Although many experts have said that Americans must become more discerning consumers to help rein in costs, the study illustrates how hard that can be.

“We’ve been trying to help patients get good value, but it is really hard to get price commitments from hospitals — we see this all the time,” said Jeff Rice, the chief executive of Healthcare Blue Book, a company that collects data on medical procedures, doctors visits and tests. “And even if they say $20,000, it often turns out $40,000 or 60,000.”

There are many caveats to the study. Most patients — or insurers — never pay the full sticker price of surgery, because insurance companies bargain with hospitals and doctors for discounted rates. When Ms. Rosenthal balked at initial high estimates, some hospitals produced lower rates for a person without insurance.

But in other ways the telephone quotations underestimated prices, because they did not include the fees for outpatient rehabilitation, for example.

In an accompanying commentary, Andrew Steinmetz and Ezekiel J. Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania acknowledged that there was “no justification” for the inability to provide estimates or for the wide range of prices. But they said that more rigorous data on quality — like infection rates and unexpected deaths — were required to know when high prices were worth it.

“Without quality data to accompany price data, physicians, consumers and other health care decision makers have no idea if a lower price represents shoddy quality of if it constitutes good value,” they wrote.

But, broadly, researchers emphasized that studies had found little consistent correlation between higher prices and better quality in American health care. Dr. Cram said there was no data that “Mercedes” hip implants were better than cheaper options, for example.

Jamie Court, the president of the California-based Consumer Watchdog, said: “If one hospital can put in a hip for $12,000, then every hospital should be able to do it. When there’s 100 percent variation in sticker price, then there is no real price. It’s about profit.”

Dr. Cram said the study did contain some good news: some of the country’s top-ranked hospitals came up with “bargain basement prices” in response to repeated calls. “If you’re a good consumer and shop around, you can get a good price — you don’t have to pay $120,000 for a Honda,” he said.

But that shopping can be arduous in a market not set up to respond to consumers. To get a total price, Ms. Rosenthal often had to call the hospital to get its estimate for on-site care, and a separate quote from doctors. And many were simply perplexed when she asked for a price upfront, Ms. Rosenthal said, adding, “The people who answered didn’t know what to do with the question.”

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Maker's Mark lowering proof to meet demand

Maker's Mark announced it is reducing the amount of alcohol in the spirit to keep pace with rapidly increasing consumer demand.

In an email to its fans, representatives of the brand said the entire bourbon category is "exploding" and demand for Maker's Mark is growing even faster. Some customers have even reported empty shelves in their local stores, it said.

After looking at "all possible solutions," the total alcohol by volume of Maker's Mark is being reduced by 3 percent. Representatives said the change will allow it to maintain the same taste while making sure there's "enough Maker's Mark to go around." It's working to expand its distillery and production capacity, too.

Maker's Mark, made by Deerfield-based Beam Inc., said it's done extensive testing to ensure the same taste. It says bourbon drinkers couldn't tell the difference. It also underscored the fact that nothing else in the production process has changed.

"In other words, we've made sure we didn't screw up your whisky," the note said.

Rob Samuels, chief operating officer and grandson of Maker's Mark Founder Bill Samuels, Sr., said this is a permanent decision that won’t be reversed when demand for bourbon slows down. Samuels said that bourbon has gone from the slowest growing spirits category to the fastest over the last 18 months, driven by growth overseas and demand from younger drinkers. An average bottle of Maker’s Mark takes six and half years to produce from start to finish, and since the company doesn’t buy or trade whiskey, it’s been impossible to keep up. 

The first bottle of Maker's Mark, with its signature red wax closure, was produced in 1958.

Beam is the country's second-largest spirits company by volume. It also makes Jim Beam, Sauza tequila and Pinnacle vodka. It's still dwarfed by industry-leading Diageo, the London-based maker of Smirnoff, Tanqueray, Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker.

It's a tough time to take a risk with one of its oldest and most popular brands. Beam has promised that 25 percent of sales will come from new products, a difficult goal to attain but a critical one for investor confidence.The move met some backlash on social media sites, where some said they would boycott the bourbon if the company went ahead with its plans.

Many also complained that they'd rather see an increase in its price than a decrease in the alcohol. But observers say that by raising the price, Beam would have hurt itself by positioning Maker's Mark to compete against its own higher end brands like Basil Hayden's.

sbomkamp@tribune.com | Twitter: @SamWillTravel

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Father of woman killed on Tri-State: 'She was my baby'

Danielle M. Pisterzi (Family handout photo)

by Carlos Sadovi and Adam Sege




Tribune reporters

3:16 p.m. CST, February 10, 2013

Danielle M. Pisterzi hoped to graduate from Northern Illinois University this year with an accounting degree, but first she needed to complete an internship at a firm.

Her family believes Pisterzi, 21, was returning to her home on the Northwest Side late Saturday night from her job when she collided with an SUV near Willow Road on the Tri-State Tollway.

Pisterzi had been working long hours in her internship at Warady and David LLP in Deerfield, because the firm was busy with the tax season, her father Frank Pisterzi said. "She was my baby," he said.

Danielle Pisterzi was driving a 2004 Hyundai when she struck an Audi SUV carrying four people around 10:45 p.m., state police said. people inside, police said. Pisterzi was taken to Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 11:52 p.m.

Police told the woman's family that her car also struck a wall before the car flipped on its roof. No one else was taken to the hospital, police said.

After having spent semesters in Dekalb, Pisterzi was back home living with her family in the 5700 block of North Nina Avenue where she grew up, her father said.

Pisterzi said his daughter knew what she meant to her family. "I was pretty fortunate, I told her everyday that I loved her," her father said.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Twitter: @ChicagoBreaking

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All eyes on Frank Ocean as Grammy Awards kick off

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Everybody’s thinkin’ about Frank Ocean.

Ocean is a cause celebre and the man with the momentum as Sunday’s Grammy Awards kicked off with pre-telecast wins by Rihanna and Mumford & Sons. One of six top nominees with six nominations apiece, the 25-year-old R&B singer turned cultural talking point will have the music world’s attention.

It remains to be seen if it will be the “Thinkin Bout You” singer’s night, but there’s no question he’s dominated the discussion so far. Already a budding star with a gift for building buzz as well as crafting songs, Ocean was swept up by something more profound when he told fans his first love was a man last fall as he prepared to release his major-label debut, “channel ORANGE.”

It was a bold move and one that could have submarined his career before it really even got started. Instead, everyone from Beyonce to the often-homophobic R&B and rap communities showed public support. It was a remarkable moment.

“It speaks to the advancements of our culture,” renowned producer Rick Rubin said. “It feels like the culture’s moving forward and he’s a representative of the new acceptance in the world for different ideas, which just broadens (our experience), makes the world a better place.”

A recent altercation in a parking lot with Chris Brown only focused more attention on Ocean. Ocean says Brown was the aggressor; both are competing against each other in one of the Grammy categories.

Ocean is up for the major awards best new artist, album of the year and record of the year when the show airs live on CBS at 8 p.m. EST from the Staples Center, sharing top-nominee billing with fun., Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, Mumford & Sons, Jay-Z and Kanye West.

The Grammy pre-telecast awards show got under way Sunday afternoon at the Nokia Theatre with 70 trophies up for grabs, including rock, pop, rap and country categories. Rihanna‘s “We Found Love,” featuring Calvin Harris, won the day’s first award, short form music video. Mumford & Sons took their first Grammy, winning along with Old Crow Medicine Show and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros for their long form video documentary “Big Easy Express.”

Celebrities also began rolling down the red carpet in the early afternoon, but it remained to be seen if any would try to skirt CBS’s mandate that stars dress appropriately with butts, breasts and other sensitive areas covered adequately.

“”I think it’s just, you know, we should always stay classy and dress according to the event that’s being held,” Ashanti said on the red carpet. “So I don’t think people should be limited so much and told what you can and cannot do. But, you know, you do have to have a certain class and prestige about yourself.”

Ocean might be riding a wave toward some of the night’s biggest honors, but R&B and hip-hop performers have had a spotty history at the Grammys recently when it comes to major awards.

Only one R&B act has won album of the year this century, and it’s hard to even call him just an R&B act given his legend, artistic scope and material: Ray Charles for his “Genius & Friends,” an all-star collaboration that was honored posthumously.

Also limiting Ocean‘s chances for a clean sweep are his fellow top nominees. Fun. became just the second act to sweep nominations in all four major categories with a debut album, equaling Christopher Cross‘ 1981 feat. Like Cross’ “Sailing,” the New York-based pop-rock band has ridden along on the crest of an inescapable song: “We Are Young,” featuring Janelle Monae.

Cross won five Grammys, sweeping the major awards. Fun. likely will have a much harder time piling up that number of victories because of the buzz surrounding the group’s competitors. It’s not just Ocean who has people talking.

London-based folk-rockers Mumford & Sons had one of the top-selling albums of the year with “Babel” and already has a history with The Recording Academy’s thousands of voters, having been nominated for major awards the year prior. Also, The Black Keys have a winning track record at the Grammys.

And don’t count out West and Jay-Z, who were shut out of the major categories but remain very much in voters’ minds.

Jack White’s “Blunderbuss” competes with fun.’s “Some Nights,” Ocean‘s “channel ORANGE,” Mumford’s “Babel” and The Keys’ “El Camino” for the night’s top award, album of the year.

Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know,” featuring Kimbra, Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” join the fun., Ocean and Black Keys entries in record of the year.

Fun. and Clarkson also are nominated for song of the year along with Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team,” Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” and Miguel’s “Adorn.”

And rounding out the major categories, fun., Ocean, Alabama Shakes, Hunter Hayes and The Lumineers are up for best new artist.

Those major nominees figure prominently on the 3 1/2-hour telecast, broadcast live on CBS.

Swift will kick things off with a show-opening performance. Fun. and Ocean will take the stage. Others scheduled to perform include Justin Timberlake, Carrie Underwood, Clarkson, White and Juanes.

There will be no shortage of mashups the Grammys have become famous for, either. Elton John, Mavis Staples, Mumford, Brittany Howard, T Bone Burnett and Zac Brown are saluting the late Levon Helm, who won the Americana Grammy last year a few months before his death. The Keys will join Dr. John and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band on stage. Sting, Rihanna and Bruno Mars will perform together. Other team-ups include Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley, and Alicia Keys and Maroon 5.

___

AP writer Nekesa Mumbi Moody in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

___

Online:

http://grammy.com

___

Follow AP Music Writer Chris Talbott: http://twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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For Families Struggling with Mental Illness, Carolyn Wolf Is a Guide in the Darkness

When a life starts to unravel, where do you turn for help?

Melissa Klump began to slip in the eighth grade. She couldn’t focus in class, and in a moment of despair she swallowed 60 ibuprofen tablets. She was smart, pretty and ill: depression, attention deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, either bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder.

In her 20s, after a more serious suicide attempt, her parents sent her to a residential psychiatric treatment center, and from there to another. It was the treatment of last resort. When she was discharged from the second center last August after slapping another resident, her mother, Elisa Klump, was beside herself.

“I was banging my head against the wall,” the mother said. “What do I do next?” She frantically called support groups, therapy programs, suicide prevention lines, anybody, running down a list of names in a directory of mental health resources. “Finally,” she said, “somebody told me, ‘The person you need to talk to is Carolyn Wolf.’ ”

That call, she said, changed her life and her daughter’s. “Carolyn has given me hope,” she said. “I didn’t know there were people like her out there.”

Carolyn Reinach Wolf is not a psychiatrist or a mental health professional, but a lawyer who has carved out what she says is a unique niche, working with families like the Klumps.

One in 17 American adults suffers from a severe mental illness, and the systems into which they are plunged — hospitals, insurance companies, courts, social services — can be fragmented and overwhelming for families to manage. The recent shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., have brought attention to the need for intervention to prevent such extreme acts of violence, which are rare. But for the great majority of families watching their loved ones suffer, and often suffering themselves, the struggle can be boundless, with little guidance along the way.

“If you Google ‘mental health lawyer,’ ” said Ms. Wolf, a partner with Abrams & Fensterman, “I’m kinda the only game in town.”

On a recent afternoon, she described in her Midtown office the range of her practice.

“We have been known to pull people out of crack dens,” she said. “I have chased people around hotels all over the city with the N.Y.P.D. and my team to get them to a hospital. I had a case years ago where the person was on his way back from Europe, and the family was very concerned that he was symptomatic. I had security people meet him at J.F.K.”

Many lawyers work with mentally ill people or their families, but Ron Honberg, the national director of policy and legal affairs for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he did not know of another lawyer who did what Ms. Wolf does: providing families with a team of psychiatrists, social workers, case managers, life coaches, security guards and others, and then coordinating their services. It can be a lifeline — for people who can afford it, Mr. Honberg said. “Otherwise, families have to do this on their own,” he said. “It’s a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week job, and for some families it never ends.”

Many of Ms. Wolf’s clients declined to be interviewed for this article, but the few who spoke offered an unusual window on the arcane twists and turns of the mental health care system, even for families with money. Their stories illustrate how fraught and sometimes blind such a journey can be.

One rainy morning last month, Lance Sheena, 29, sat with his mother in the spacious family room of her Long Island home. Mr. Sheena was puffy-eyed and sporadically inattentive; the previous night, at the group home where he has been living since late last summer, another resident had been screaming incoherently and was taken away by the police. His mother, Susan Sheena, eased delicately into the family story.

“I don’t talk to a lot of people because they don’t get it,” Ms. Sheena said. “They mean well, but they don’t get it unless they’ve been through a similar experience. And anytime something comes up, like the shooting in Newtown, right away it goes to the mentally ill. And you think, maybe we shouldn’t be so public about this, because people are going to be afraid of us and Lance. It’s a big concern.”

Her son cut her off. “Are you comparing me to the guy that shot those people?”

“No, I’m saying that anytime there’s a shooting, like in Aurora, that’s when these things come out in the news.”

“Did you really just compare me to that guy?”

“No, I didn’t compare you.”

“Then what did you say?”

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The fine line between legitimate businesses and pyramid schemes

Controversy is again casting a shadow over the multilevel marketing industry, as nutritional supplement company Herbalife Inc., which has thousands of distributors in the Chicago region, has been publicly called a pyramid scheme by a prominent investor — an allegation the company vigorously denies.

Meanwhile, a different multilevel marketer, Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing, was shut down in recent weeks after a lawsuit was brought by regulators and several states, including Illinois, alleging the company scammed consumers out of $169 million. The scheme affected an estimated 100,000 Americans, including some in Chicago, where it targeted Spanish-speaking consumers, the Federal Trade Commission alleged.

Most people outside the industry might have only a vague notion about multilevel marketing, also called network marketing and direct selling. It often involves personal sales of cosmetics, wellness products or home decor items — or as critics flippantly call it, "pills, potions and lotions" — usually sold through product parties hosted by friends or relatives.

For sellers, the companies offer the appeal of starting a business on the cheap with little training, working from home and being their own boss, if only for part-time money. Some might recruit friends and family to become sellers, which augments their own commissions and gives them a shot at the six-figure compensation many such marketing companies tout but few distributors attain.

The largest multilevel marketing companies, often known as MLMs, are household names: Avon, Mary Kay, Pampered Chef and Amway. MLMs have annual sales of about $30 billion, with about 16 million people in the United States selling their products, according to the industry group Direct Selling Association, which represents these firms and others.

The recent controversies might raise the question: What's the difference between a legitimate multilevel marketing company and an illegal pyramid scheme, in which only people who get in first — at the top of the pyramid-like structure — make money and everyone else is a dupe?

The harshest critics maintain there is no difference, that there's no such thing as a legitimate MLM and that the industry's secrets stay safe because of a cultlike mentality and a blind eye of regulators.

Jon M. Taylor, who was once a seller for an MLM company, said he has studied the industry for 18 years and analyzed more than 500 MLM companies. He maintains the website MLM-thetruth.com and offers a free e-book there.

"I have not yet found a good MLM — a good MLM is an oxymoron," Taylor said.

He said all MLM companies have the same flaw: They depend on endless chains of recruiting new members.  "There is no more unfair and deceptive practice than multilevel marketing," Taylor said.

Tracy Coenen, a forensic accountant and fraud investigator with Sequence Inc. in Chicago and Milwaukee, is author of the Fraud Files Blog. She is also a critic.

"Multilevel marketing companies are pyramid schemes that the government allows to operate," said Coenen. "The only difference is that Herbalife, or any multilevel marketing company, has a tangible product that they use to make their pyramid appear legitimate."

The Direct Selling Association says MLMs are legitimate businesses, and that the group has about 200 members carefully screened by the organization to ensure they are not pyramid schemes and don't use deceptive practices.

The Federal Trade Commission agrees there are legitimate MLMs. The difference between a legitimate business and pyramid scheme comes down to products.

If the company and its distributors make money primarily from the sale of products to end-users (and not boxes of product accumulating in a distributor's garage), it's OK.

By contrast, a pyramid scheme compensates those at the top of the pyramid with participation fees paid by those recruited at the bottom. It eventually collapses when the scheme can't recruit more people.

But identifying a pyramid scheme can be difficult because MLMs typically have product sales, along with recruitment fees and recruitment incentives.

"It gets cloudy when you have a situation where you have fees being paid for both," said Monica Vaca, assistant director of the FTC's division of marketing practices. "It's very nuanced."

While prosecuting an MLM can seem somewhat of a judgment call, cases have a common factor: deceptive promises about how much money distributors will earn, Vaca said.

In the Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing case filed last month, C. Steven Baker, director of the FTC's Midwest region, said, "These defendants were promising people that if they worked hard they could make lots of money. But it was a rigged game, and the vast majority of people lost money."

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Northeast blizzard: 4 dead, hundreds of thousands left without power

New York/Boston—

A record-breaking blizzard packing hurricane-force winds hammered the northeastern United States on Saturday, cutting power to 700,000 homes and businesses, shutting down travel and leaving at least four people dead.

The mammoth storm that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic dumped more than 3 feet of snow across the Northeast, the National Weather Service said. Coastal blizzard and flood warnings were in effect as the storm moved slowly eastward out to sea.

Stratford, Connecticut, Mayor John Harkins said he had never seen such a heavy snowfall, with rates reaching 6 inches an hour.

"Even the plows are getting stuck," Harkins told local WTNH television.

The storm centered its fury on Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, with the most snowfall, 38 inches, in Milford, Connecticut.

Authorities ordered non-essential vehicles to stay off roads to allow snow plow crews to clear them. The ban left normally busy arteries such as Interstate 93 in Massachusetts nearly deserted.

About 2,200 flights were canceled on Saturday, according to FlightAware, which tracks airline delays. Boston's Logan International Airport and Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, were shut down.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick told a Boston radio station he would re-evaluate a vehicle travel ban he introduced on Friday, but would lift it only "when it's safe to do so."

The storm dumped 29.3 inches of snow on Portland, Maine, breaking a 1979 record. Winds gusted to 83 miles an hour at Cuttyhunk, New York, and brought down trees across the region.

The storm contributed to three deaths in Connecticut, Governor Dannel Malloy told a news conference.

An 80-year-old woman was killed by a hit-and-run driver while clearing her driveway, and a 40-year-old man collapsed while shoveling snow. One man, 73, slipped outside his home and was found dead on Saturday, Malloy said.

In Poughkeepsie, New York, a man in his 70s was struck and killed on a snowy roadway, local media reported.

A 30-year-old motorist in Auburn, New Hampshire, also died when his car went off the road, but the man's health might have been a factor in the accident, state authorities said.

Police in New York's Suffolk County, some using snowmobiles, rescued hundreds of motorists stuck overnight on the Long Island Expressway, said police spokesman Rich Glanzer. Some spent the night in their cars.

POWER LINES DOWN

Utility companies reported about 700,000 customers without electricity across nine states as the wet, heavy snow brought down tree branches and power lines.

The Pilgrim Nuclear Power Plant in Plymouth, Massachusetts, lost power and shut down automatically late on Friday, but there was no threat to the public, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

A storm surge combined with a high tide led to isolated coastal flooding. U.S. Route 1A was closed in New Hampshire because of debris and rocks that washed ashore, police said.

As the storm tapered off, streets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were largely quiet except for snowblowers and shoveling. Kevin Tierney, 41, struggled with a snowblower to carve out a parking space in more than 2 feet of snow.

"I had this all planned out, and I don't know who said it, but everybody goes into a boxing match with a plan until they get punched in the mouth," said Tierney, an attorney.

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Maine declared a state of emergency before the storm. The U.S. Postal Service suspended mail delivery in the six New England states.

Although New York was hit by a foot of snow, Fashion Week went on unfazed as crowds arrived to watch the morning's shows by Ruffian and LaCoste.

Andrea Daney, a digital marketing senior manager for LaCoste, said she was trying to be discreet as she changed from snow boots to high-heeled crushed blue velvet ankle boots.

"I'm calling it the shoe storm of the century," she said. "You have to make adjustments to your outfit."

The snow delighted New England's ski industry. Greg Kwasnick, a spokesman for Loon Mountain in Lincoln, New Hampshire, said business was slightly slower than normal on Saturday but likely would pick up in coming days.

"Snow is what it's all about," he said.

(Additional reporting by Scott Malone in Boston, Kevin Gray in Miami, Ellen Wulfhorst in New York, Ian Simpson in Washington, Jason McLure in Maine, Dan Burns in Connecticut, Dan Lovering in Cambridge; Editing by Vicki Allen and Gunna Dickson)

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In Nigeria, Polio Vaccine Workers Are Killed by Gunmen

At least nine polio immunization workers were shot to death in northern Nigeria on Friday by gunmen who attacked two clinics, officials said.

The killings, with eerie echoes of attacks that killed nine female polio workers in Pakistan in December, represented another serious setback for the global effort to eradicate polio.

Most of the victims were women and were shot in the back of the head, local reports said.

A four-day vaccination drive had just ended in Kano State, where the killings took place, and the vaccinators were in a “mop-up” phase, looking for children who had been missed, said Sarah Crowe, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Fund, one of the agencies running the eradication campaign.

Dr. Mohammad Ali Pate, Nigeria’s minister of state for health, said in a telephone interview that it was not entirely clear whether the gunmen were specifically targeting polio workers or just attacking the health centers where vaccinators happened to be gathering early in the morning. “Health workers are soft targets,” he said.

No one immediately took responsibility, but suspicion fell on Boko Haram, a militant Islamist group that has attacked police stations, government offices and even a religious leader’s convoy.

Polio, which once paralyzed millions of children, is now down to fewer than 1,000 known cases around the world, and is endemic in only three countries: Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Since September — when a new polio operations center was opened in the capital and Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, appointed a special adviser for polio — the country had been improving, said Dr. Bruce Aylward, chief of polio eradication for the World Health Organization. There have been no new cases since Dec. 3.

While vaccinators have not previously been killed in the country, there is a long history of Nigerian Muslims shunning the vaccine.

Ten years ago, immunization was suspended for 11 months as local governors waited for local scientists to investigate rumors that it caused AIDS or was a Western plot to sterilize Muslim girls. That hiatus let cases spread across Africa. The Nigerian strain of the virus even reached Saudi Arabia when a Nigerian child living in hills outside Mecca was paralyzed.

Heidi Larson, an anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who tracks vaccine issues, said the newest killings “are kind of mimicking what’s going on in Pakistan, and I feel it’s very much prompted by that.”

In a roundabout way, the C.I.A. has been blamed for the Pakistan killings. In its effort to track Osama bin Laden, the agency paid a Pakistani doctor to seek entry to Bin Laden’s compound on the pretext of vaccinating the children — presumably to get DNA samples as evidence that it was the right family. That enraged some Taliban factions in Pakistan, which outlawed vaccination in their areas and threatened vaccinators.

Nigerian police officials said the first shootings were of eight workers early in the morning at a clinic in the Tarauni neighborhood of Kano, the state capital; two or three died. A survivor said the two gunmen then set fire to a curtain, locked the doors and left.

“We summoned our courage and broke the door because we realized they wanted to burn us alive,” the survivor said from her bed at Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital.

About an hour later, six men on three-wheeled motorcycles stormed a clinic in the Haye neighborhood, a few miles away. They killed seven women waiting to collect vaccine.

Ten years ago, Dr. Larson said, she joined a door-to-door vaccination drive in northern Nigeria as a Unicef communications officer, “and even then we were trying to calm rumors that the C.I.A. was involved,” she said. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had convinced poor Muslims in many countries that Americans hated them, and some believed the American-made vaccine was a plot by Western drug companies and intelligence agencies.

Since the vaccine ruse in Pakistan, she said, “Frankly, now, I can’t go to them and say, ‘The C.I.A. isn’t involved.’ ”

Dr. Pate said the attack would not stop the newly reinvigorated eradication drive, adding, “This isn’t going to deter us from getting everyone vaccinated to save the lives of our children.”

Aminu Abubakar contributed reported from Kano, Nigeria.

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