Five college students in Massachusetts are accused of luring a man to the Assumption University campus in a plot that the police said was inspired by the television show “To Catch a Predator” and a fad on TikTok. The students were part of a larger group that chased the man from a campus building after he was invited there by a student on the dating app Tinder, expecting to meet an adult, according to a criminal complaint issued in Worcester District Court on Dec. 4. The campus police at Assumption University, a small Catholic school in Worcester, said in the complaint that the group accused the man of being a sexual predator, stopped him from leaving a student lounge and recorded the episode as part of a “deliberately staged event.” Two students assaulted the man, the police said. There was no indication that the man was trying to meet underage girls and the woman who invited him to the campus, Kelsy Brainard, 18, said on her Tinder profile that she was 18 years old, the police said. The police did not provide the man’s age. Videos of the episode, which happened on Oct. 1, were shared among students and seen by the police, who said that minutes after the man arrived on campus, he was watching a baseball game on a couch in a student lounge with Ms. Brainard and there was “ample personal space between them.” Suddenly, a large group of students appeared from hidden locations, the complaint said. The students berated the man “as a sexual offender,” grabbed him and blocked him from leaving the room, the police said. He escaped, and as a group of about 25 people chased him, a male, who is not named in the court documents because he is a minor, punched the man in the back of the head. Once the man reached his car, another student slammed a car door on him. It was unclear if the man was injured or sought medical treatment. The group of students had their phones out and were apparently recording the episode, according to the police, who also reviewed campus surveillance camera footage and interviewed students as part of their investigation. “A few minutes later you see the group coming back in, laughing and high-fiving with each other,” the police said. One of the students, Easton Randall, 19, told the police that the students had been inspired by “To Catch a Predator,” and videos popular on social media, the complaint said. It also said the group was trying to replicate a TikTok fad in which people lure a sexual predator to a location and either assault them or call the police. The popular NBC series “To Catch a Predator” ran from 2004 to 2008 and featured undercover sting operations where men were lured through online chat rooms to a house where they thought they were meeting a teenager for sex. The show’s host, Chris Hansen, would confront the men before they were arrested and ambushed by a camera crew. Some criticized the show because of NBC’s relationship with the police and an advocacy group that helped orchestrate the stings. Questions were also raised about the value and ethics of sensationalizing an undercover sting targeting possible sexual predators. One man killed himself as the police and a camera crew entered his home. NBC reached a settlement with the man’s family in 2008 after they filed a $108 million lawsuit against the broadcaster. At Assumption University, the police said in the complaint that the scheme was devised by a “core group” of six students, five of whom have been charged with kidnapping and conspiracy, including Mr. Randall, Isabella Trudeau, 18, and Joaquin Smith, 18. Ms. Brainard was also charged with intimidation and Kevin Carroll, 18, was accused of assault and battery with a deadly weapon. Mr. Carroll told police that he slammed the victim’s head into the car door, according to the criminal complaint, which did not address the student who is a minor. A lawyer for Mr. Carroll did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Sunday. Lawyers were not listed on the court docket for the other four defendants, who could not immediately be reached for comment. The Assumption University president, Greg Weiner, said in a statement that the behavior described by the police was “abhorrent and antithetical to Assumption University’s mission and values.” He said the university’s Department of Public Safety immediately began investigating. “This situation is particularly sobering because the victim is an active-duty military service member,” the statement said. “His service reminds us of the sacrifices made by those who defend our freedoms, including the opportunity to pursue a college education.” The students are scheduled to appear in court on Jan. 16.

If immigration agents arrive on the doorstep of a New York City public school, principals have been told what to do. Ask the officers to wait outside, and call a school district lawyer. The school system has enrolled about 40,000 recent immigrant students since 2022. Now, as President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to take office with promises to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the district has shared with school staff a protocol to try to shield students who have a tenuous legal status. In a December letter to principals, Emma Vadehra, the district’s chief operating officer, wrote, “We hope using this protocol will never be necessary.” Still, New York and some other school districts across the country are readying educators and immigrant families for a potential wave of deportations. Later this month, the district will host a legal information session for parents. Its social workers have explained to families that under current law, undocumented immigrant children have the right to a public education, and federal immigration agents generally cannot arrest students or family members at schools. They have also noted that American public schools do not typically track the immigration status of students. But like other education leaders, Dr. Clark acknowledged that there was only so much reassurance he could offer. A longstanding policy prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from making arrests at schools and other sensitive locations, such as hospitals and churches. But right-leaning policy advocates in Mr. Trump’s orbit, including the writers of Project 2025, a blueprint created for the new administration, have pushed to rescind the policy, arguing that to speed deportations, agents should be able to exercise judgment on where they operate. That has left many educators worried that federal agents could arrive at their doors. “We’re going to follow the law whether we agree with it or not,” Dr. Clark said. “If they have proper documentation to execute their lawful duties, we will work with them.” The Trump transition team did not respond to a list of detailed questions about migrant schoolchildren and deportation. But in a written statement, Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said the president was given a mandate to deport criminals and terrorists. In communities across the country, local officials have debated how much to cooperate with the incoming Trump administration on deportations. New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, a Democrat, has repeatedly voiced frustration with the number of migrants living in the city, and has recently taken a more conciliatory approach to Mr. Trump. Mr. Adams runs the New York City school system. Nevertheless, district officials have told principals and school security staff to immediately call a school district lawyer if ICE agents show up and demand access to a school — in part because it can be difficult for nonexperts to distinguish a judicial warrant from other types of paperwork. In the absence of a judicial warrant, the district “does not consent to nonlocal law enforcement accessing school facilities in any circumstances,” reads the official policy. For educators concerned about their students being deported, the city has directed them to online information sessions hosted by Project Rousseau, a nonprofit that provides legal services to immigrants. In one of those meetings, Bethany Thorne of Project Rousseau said teachers should tell families anxious about deportation to keep their children attending school, and to not skip a single court date, even if they do not have a lawyer. Missing court “is a surefire way to get yourself removed,” she said. In Chicago, which has enrolled as many as 17,000 recent immigrant students, issues related to the influx have become a factor in the contract negotiations between the teachers’ union and the public school system. The district is struggling to maintain staffing amid a budget deficit. But because of the many needs of recent immigrant students, schools need more investments for both smaller class sizes and more bilingual teaching assistants and social workers, argued Rebecca Martinez, campaign director for the Chicago Teachers Union. Among the migrant students are those “who have never been to school, or are in seventh grade and last went to school in second grade,” she said. “All that exists in one classroom, and that’s the pressure educators are facing.” The school district declined an interview request, but issued a written statement emphasizing its commitment to serving all children in Chicago, regardless of their immigration status or home language. In addition, the district said it planned to review with principals relevant laws and policies, such as the need for federal agents to display a warrant or demonstrate that there is an “imminent threat to public safety” before entering a school. In Denver, another hub for recent immigrants, Tricia Noyola, chief executive of the charter school network Rocky Mountain Prep, said that many families had been fearful since Election Day, but also “resolute” in their desire to stay in the country and keep their children in school. While Mr. Trump often talks about recent immigrants as threats, she said, she and her team have noticed how vulnerable they are — with some parents falling prey to scams in which they are given fake paychecks for construction work or asked to put down a deposit for an apartment that does not materialize. The superintendent in Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, said he hoped schools there would remain “protected ground,” according to The Los Angeles Times. Officials said they would provide information cards to parents outlining their rights, and would hold mandatory training sessions for employees on the limits of federal agents’ access to schools. Dr. Clark, the superintendent in Mount Diablo, noted that rumors about deportation have detracted from his district’s efforts to educate recent immigrant children. To make it easier for migrant students, mostly from Guatemala, to work part time, the district has opened a half-day high school program. Encouraging attendance is a priority, but is more difficult when families fear the authorities. “It’s disappointing that we’re having to have these discussions,” Dr. Clark said. “This talk taking place is a distraction.”

A federal judge on Monday sentenced a Pittsburgh man to five years in prison and his wife to three years of probation over their involvement in detonating an explosive that injured police officers at a 2023 campus protest over transgender rights at the University of Pittsburgh. The man, Brian DiPippa, 37, “ignited and dropped two homemade smoke bomb containers in and around a line of people waiting to enter a building for a scheduled event featuring guest speakers,” the Justice Department said in a news release on Monday. Afterward, Mr. DiPippa’s wife, Krystal DiPippa, 42, “concealed” him as he “ignited and threw a large explosive firework” into a group of university police officers who had gathered to form a barrier to prevent protesters from entering the rear of the building. The firework caused a loud explosion and injuries to several officers, the department said. The couple had “conspired to injure law enforcement officers and cause chaos at a college campus protest” Eric G. Olshan, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, said in the news release. A campus police sergeant told the court that she was knocked down when a device exploded as she tried to bat it away, resulting in leg burns, hearing loss and back injuries that required surgery, The Associated Press reported. “They attacked brave men and women who were trying to maintain order and protect the attendees,” Mr. Olshan said, adding that Monday’s sentencing “should serve as a deterrent for anyone who would consider engaging in such outrageous and dangerous conduct in the future.” Michael J. DeRiso, a lawyer for Mr. DiPippa, said on Tuesday that it was “unfortunate that the government has chosen to define my client by one act.” “Unfortunately, my client made a really piss-poor decision by throwing a firework into a crowd,” he said, adding that Mr. DiPippa “certainly had no desire to hurt or maim.” Michael Ovens, a lawyer for Ms. DiPippa, declined to comment on the case. The couple, who are from Pittsburgh, each pleaded guilty in September to one count of obstruction of law enforcement during civil disorder, according to the Justice Department, and Mr. DiPippa also pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. At Monday’s sentencing in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, the couple were also ordered to pay $1,400 in restitution to the university as well as $47,284 to the injured officer, the Justice Department said. More than 150 people were at the protest, which was held on April 18, 2023, outside of a transgender-rights debate between Michael Knowles, a host at The Daily Wire, a right-leaning site, and Brad Polumbo, a libertarian journalist, at the O’Hara Student Center, The University Times, a university publication, reported. Jared Stonesifer, a spokesperson for the University of Pittsburgh, said in a statement on Tuesday that it “supports the right to peaceful demonstrations but will not tolerate threats or acts of violence that put others in harm’s way.” He added that the decision “cannot undo the physical and emotional injuries that our officers sustained.”

Four fraternity members at San Diego State University are facing felony charges after a pledge was set on fire during a skit at a party last year, leaving him hospitalized for weeks with third-degree burns, prosecutors said Monday. The fire happened on Feb. 17, 2024, when the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity held a large party at its house, despite being on probation, court documents show. While under probation, the fraternity was required to “demonstrate exemplary compliance with university policies,” according to the college’s guidelines. Instead, prosecutors said, the fraternity members planned a skit during which a pledge would be set on fire. After drinking alcohol in the presence of the fraternity president, Caden Cooper, 22, the three younger men — Christopher Serrano, 20, and Lars Larsen, 19, both pledges, and Lucas Cowling, 20 — then performed the skit, prosecutors said. Mr. Larsen was set on fire and wounded, prosecutors said, forcing him to spend weeks in the hospital for treatment of third-degree burns covering 16 percent of his body, mostly on his legs. The charges against Mr. Cooper, Mr. Cowling and Mr. Serrano include recklessly causing a fire with great bodily injury; conspiracy to commit an act injurious to the public; and violating the social host ordinance. If convicted of all the charges, they would face a sentence of probation up to seven years, two months in prison. Mr. Larsen himself was charged. The San Diego County district attorney’s office said that he, as well as Mr. Cooper and Mr. Cowling, also tried to lie to investigators in the case, deleted evidence on social media, and told other fraternity members to destroy evidence and not speak to anyone about what happened at the party. All four men have pleaded not guilty. Lawyers representing Mr. Cooper and Mr. Cowling did not immediately respond to messages requesting comment on Tuesday. Contact information for lawyers for Mr. Serrano and Mr. Larsen was not immediately available. The four students were released on Monday, but the court ordered them not to participate in any fraternity parties, not to participate in any recruitment events for the fraternity, and to obey all laws, including those related to alcohol consumption. The university said Tuesday that it would begin its own administrative investigation into the conduct of the students and the fraternity, now that the police investigation was complete. After it confirmed the details, the dean of students office immediately put the Phi Kappa Psi chapter on interim suspension, which remains in effect, college officials confirmed on Tuesday. Additional action was taken, but the office said it could not reveal specifics because of student privacy laws. “The university prioritizes the health and safety of our campus community,” college officials said in a statement, “and has high expectations for how all members of the university community, including students, behave in the interest of individual and community safety and well-being.” At least half a dozen fraternities at San Diego State University have been put on probation in the last two years, officials said.

Snow, icy roads and frigid temperatures brought on by a storm moving through the Mid-Atlantic region on Monday disrupted a return to routine for millions of people after the two-week Christmas holiday period. In addition to closing offices and schools, the storm also interrupted travel across parts of the country with delayed and canceled trains and airplanes. Travel conditions were particularly bad in Washington, where Ronald Reagan National Airport closed all runways Monday evening, an unwelcome development during an extraordinarily busy week for the nation’s capital. Earlier Monday, Congress certified President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory in one of its first acts of business in the new year, and on Thursday, President Jimmy Carter’s funeral will be held at Washington National Cathedral. The storm caused more than 9,000 flights, at airports from Texas to New York, to be delayed or canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking service. Airports in the Greater Washington, D.C., metro area were most affected, with more than 80 percent of the departures at National Airport canceled. The airport said that it closed runways to allow airport crews to focus on snow removal before temperatures dropped further. Emily McGee, an airport spokeswoman, said that while terminals would remain open with limited services, the runways would likely remain closed until Tuesday morning. At National’s baggage claim area, weary travelers stood in line to make lost luggage claims with their airlines. Others sat on their bags, on the floor and on the luggage carousel, checking their phones or making calls or trying to get a few minutes of sleep. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Philadelphia International Airport and Kennedy International Airport in New York relied on ground stops during the day to manage air traffic and prevent airports from being overwhelmed, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. More than 400 delayed departures were announced at Chicago O’Hare International Airport and the number of delayed flights crept up at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.Among the carriers hardest hit were American Airlines, with more than 1,000 flights delayed, or 30 percent of its daily routes, and Southwest Airlines, which delayed more than 990 flights, or 27 percent of its daily schedule, according to FlightAware. Southwest also canceled more than 500 flights.Southwest, Delta Air Lines and other airlines issued travel waivers allowing customers to rebook their travel with no change fees through more than a dozen cities hit by winter weather. The advisory didn’t help Nick Grimaldi, who was scheduled to fly from Jamaica to his home in Virginia Beach, Va., on Monday with his family after a holiday trip. Their 2 p.m. flight departing from Montego Bay and bound for Baltimore-Washington International Airport was repeatedly delayed, and ultimately canceled. Their connecting flight to Norfolk, Va., where their car is parked, was canceled. His children will miss at least another day of school. Mr. Grimaldi said that he was frustrated that Southwest hadn’t canceled their flight to Baltimore earlier, when flights on other airlines were still available. Now, he said, he’ll spend all night trying to arrange flights to get back home tomorrow. Editors’ Picks Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? How to Manage Your Blood Sugar With Exercise “Today has been a roller coaster. We felt like it was all under control leaving the resort,” said Mr. Grimaldi, 47, in an direct message over social media. “Southwest has to work on its process and allow customers to get out of their flights once it’s not going as planned, especially when the snowstorm was always coming." Train service was also significantly disrupted. Citing severe winter weather and equipment issues, Amtrak canceled dozens of trains in the Northeast and Midwest. Destinations affected included Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago and Raleigh, N.C. One air traveler in Washington wasn’t too perturbed, even after her flight plans from National Airport were rescheduled multiple times over two days. Aleena Shahan, who lives in Richmond, Va., planned to fly to Cincinnati on Delta Sunday evening for business, but her original flight, and then three more on Monday, were canceled. She’s staying with family and has been rescheduled again for another flight Tuesday morning. ”They’ve been pretty good with rebooking us,” she said of Delta. Travel was expected to remain snarled throughout Monday evening. Washington and Baltimore could get more light snow as the storm moves on, the National Weather Service said, and parts of New England could see snow in the days to come. Another winter storm is anticipated to affect Texas later this week.

In the 1930s, a terrible drought plunged farming communities across the United States into catastrophe. As millions of Americans abandoned their homes, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created something remarkable: the Resettlement Administration, which sought to move entire communities to newly built towns such as Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio. Almost a century after the Dust Bowl, America is on the cusp of another displacement crisis, this one caused primarily by climate change. At the end of 2022, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center, an international nonprofit, counted 543,000 Americans who fled their homes to escape a disaster and had not yet returned. As the country’s 20th-century infrastructure becomes increasingly incompatible with the 21st-century climate, this number will grow. When it does, the fates of entire regions, and particularly coastal areas, will fracture along economic fault lines. With the Resettlement Administration long gone, no federal agency bears responsibility for helping the most threatened and remote communities relocate if they wish to do so. Policymakers have essentially abandoned those Americans who need to move to safety in the wake of losing their land to rising seas and worsening storms. This failure is especially striking because since the middle of the 20th century, the United States has almost always offered some form of compensation (however paltry) when its citizens’ land is taken. But most rural communities on the front lines of climate change are not granted the same consideration. While climate change is not eminent domain, the distinction hardly matters from the perspective of a displaced community. Wealthy, dense cities such as New York, London and Venice have spent billions on elaborate infrastructure that will shield many residents (but by no means all) from extreme weather. But rural towns and villages generally lack the resources to build enormous sea walls or levees to hold back storms and the rising tide. Many of these communities will have no choice but to relocate. They could either do so on their own terms (if the government would help them), or wait until disaster renders their homes unlivable and their options much more dire.The village of Shaktoolik, Alaska, where I’ve conducted research since 2022, is one such place. Its 250 residents, almost all of whom are Inupiaq, live on a blush of land barely more than a sandbar on the storm-prone Bering Sea. There is no road along which residents could evacuate, nor a harbor where boats could safely dock during a storm. Instead, a short gravel airstrip is the primary connection between this community and the rest of North America. A 2009 government report described Shaktoolik as “imminently threatened” by coastal erosion and flooding. In 2022, a typhoon barreled out of a record-hot Pacific Ocean and destroyed the gravel levee that was the village’s only defense against being swept out to sea. The disaster confirmed what many elders and engineers had said for years: The people of Shaktoolik must relocate to higher ground, and quickly. When displacement is unplanned, it can shatter communities, with residents scattering to distant cities, unable or unwilling to return. For Native communities in particular, giving up a homeland endangers language, culture, sovereignty and traditional hunting, fishing and harvesting. Planned relocation, by contrast, allows communities to remain intact as they move collectively to safety. For Shaktoolik, that safe place would likely be the low-lying hills 12 miles away, set back from the eroding coastline but still within the tribe’s homeland. Editors’ Picks Is ‘Reef Safe’ Sunscreen Really Better? Help! How Do I Make Sense of All These Trends? How to Manage Your Blood Sugar With Exercise Because there is no one agency that coordinates relocations, communities must patch together funding from as many as 12 separate entities in Washington, often by applying to dozens of competitive grant programs run by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and others. When evaluating proposals, federal officials often require that applicants undertake a cost-benefit analysis that places poor communities at a disadvantage. Villages can tally up their modest housing stock and limited infrastructure, but the cultural and spiritual value of remaining intact is excluded from the final balance sheet. In the last 25 years, just two American communities, both of them Indigenous, have cleared these hurdles. The first, Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, took 20 years to complete the process. The second, Newtok in Alaska, is in the final steps of its relocation, after more than 30 years of planning and fund-raising. While Shaktoolik’s leaders have applied for relocation funding from various federal agencies, the community hasn’t yet raised enough. Some of its proposals have been funded; many have been denied. In December, the Biden administration recommended changes to the bureaucratic morass hindering community relocation. But it stopped short of instituting these recommendations, or taking the critical step of designating a single agency to lead on climate relocation. Under the second Trump administration, leadership on community relocation will be a tough sell for Republican lawmakers looking to pay for tax cuts. But conservatives who are enthralled with the notion of efficiency should remember that it generally costs less in the long run to act than to wait until the damage is done. A study commissioned by Louisiana, for example, projected that coastal protection efforts would spare the state $11 billion to $15 billion annually in climate-induced damage. To date, the general response to climate-vulnerable communities has been the policy equivalent of a shrug. But by failing to ensure that rural Americans can relocate, their futures become collateral damage in the political gridlock that haunts the climate crisis, while most government officials are safe behind sea walls and sophisticated flood defense systems. Americans deserve better. What was clear to policymakers during the Dust Bowl should not be a matter of controversy or inaction today. Those communities that wish to relocate must be able to move to terra firma while remaining whole.

A large winter storm that is expected to bring strong winds and heavy snow to a dozen states arrived in the Great Plains on Saturday, forcing officials to close the Kansas City airport in Missouri and an 18-mile section of Interstate 70 in Kansas. The Kansas City International Airport was closed for about two hours on Saturday while crews worked to clear runways but flights resumed in the evening, Quinton Lucas, the city’s mayor, said on social media. Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas declared a state of emergency in the state on Saturday afternoon, as officials braced for the storm to worsen. The Kansas City region was under a blizzard warning until 3 a.m. on Sunday, according to the National Weather Service, which predicted that the area would be blanketed by nine to 14 inches of snow and face wind gusts of up to 40 miles per hour. “Travel could be very difficult to impossible,” the service said in an update. The airport’s closure delayed a Kansas City Chiefs team flight to Denver by about three hours but the team was in the air by 5:30 p.m. local time, Brad Gee, a spokesman for the Chiefs, said. The Chiefs were scheduled to play the Broncos on Sunday afternoon. The storm was also wreaking havoc on the state’s highways. In a video filmed near a rolled-over semi on Interstate 135 in Kansas and posted on social media, Trooper Ben Gardner of the Kansas Highway Patrol said that the highway was “very, very slick” and that “it’s not getting any better.” “Get off the roads,” he said. “Don’t be on ’em because it’s not good and it might result in something really bad happening. Stay home.”An icy, 18-mile section of Interstate 70 closed at about 3 p.m. because of crashes and spinoffs, said Kim Stich, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Transportation. Earlier in the day, another three-mile section of the highway closed but then reopened. The storm was forecast to intensify in Kansas and then move east along Interstate 70, bringing heavy snow and blistering cold along a band in the Midwest and then to the Mid-Atlantic.Several states on the storm’s path, including Arkansas, Kentucky and Virginia, declared states of emergency in anticipation of its arrival. Cities including Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis treated roads in advance of the storm and prepared warming centers.Some places may get their heaviest snowfall in a decade or more, forecasters said early on Saturday as widespread winter storm warnings took effect. The Weather Service issued a smattering of winter watches, advisories and warnings for regions, stretching from eastern Colorado to New Jersey. “It’s going to be a very impactful storm affecting a pretty huge area of the country,” said Bob Oravec, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. As the storm moves on, arctic air is predicted to settle in its wake, as some of the most frigid temperatures of the season are expected to linger for days. The governors of Missouri and Indiana put the National Guard in their states on standby, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia declared a state of emergency and urged people to avoid traveling on Sunday. In Kansas, plows would be out throughout Saturday night, according to the state’s Transportation Department.The Prediction Center said that some of the most extreme conditions are likely in places to the north of and running along the Interstate 70 corridor, which passes through St. Louis and Indianapolis. “The focus of the heaviest snow will be to the south of Chicago,” said Rich Bann, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. Moderate lake-effect snow could also hit the Upper Great Lakes and Lake Erie through Sunday morning, forecasters said. The Prediction Center also warned of “significant icing potential” in the mid-South this weekend. Sleet and freezing rain could wreak havoc from eastern Kansas and the Ozarks, stretching east to the Tennessee and lower Ohio Valleys. “That rain will freeze on contact and turn to glazing — that’s what sticks to the trees, power lines, roads, cars, car windows, everything,” Mr. Bann said. The southern Appalachian Mountains are also at risk of icing on Sunday and Sunday night. There was an enhanced risk, the second level out of five, that severe thunderstorms on Sunday could form in parts of the Lower Mississippi Valley and bring lightning, wind gusts, hail and tornadoes. From Sunday into Monday, the storm is on track to cross the Appalachians and push into the Mid-Atlantic region, including the Washington, D.C., area, along with western Maryland, Northern Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware. By daybreak on Monday, snow is expected to fall across the Mid-Atlantic region and continue through the day. The storm is arriving at a time when the country is poised to experience what the Weather Service called a “significant arctic outbreak.” Temperatures are expected to plummet to below average in areas east of the Rocky Mountains, reaching as far south as the Gulf Coast and Florida, with the frigid weather lasting into mid-January.

A winter storm in Northern California spawned a tornado on Friday, setting off a warning for people to seek shelter urgently. The tornado was confirmed around 5:30 p.m. local time near Paynes Creek and Shingletown, the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office said in an alert on Friday. A tornado warning, which indicates an imminent life-threatening danger, was active until 6 p.m., the alert said. The Weather Service shared a video captured by the University of California, San Diego, of a tornado passing a grassy area.The warning urged residents to take cover because flying debris and damage to property was expected. The alert covered parts of Tehama and Shasta counties with an estimated population of 2,200 people, according to the Weather Service. A winter storm that brought heavy snow and strong wind gusts spawned the tornado, said Katrina Hand, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. There were no reports of injuries or damage, she added. A winter storm warning was active throughout the day, with eight to 12 inches of snow in areas above 5,500 feet and quarter-size hail forecast. Tornadoes are not uncommon for that part of California and the storms in the region this time of year, Ms. Hand said. She added that the state averages about 10 tornadoes annually, most commonly in the northern half of the Central Valley, where the tornado was observed on Friday. Less than a month earlier, the National Weather Service issued its first-ever tornado warning for San Francisco. The city was spared, but one touched down in nearby Santa Cruz County, where it downed power lines and caused vehicle crashes.

Beware of Blair. That’s the word from the Weather Channel, which, along with the National Weather Service, has issued a warning for the first named winter storm of 2025. The storm is set to arrive over the weekend and linger into Monday, clobbering the Plains, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic U.S. with snow, ice, and freezing temperatures—ensuring that the new year will land as a challenging one for up to 250 million people in 40 states. Winter storm Blair is the result of what’s known as an Arctic Outbreak, which is itself a creature of the polar vortex. The polar vortex is a formation of westerly winds that collect over the Arctic in the winter, isolating the polar region from the surrounding atmosphere and causing temperatures within the vortex to plunge, but leaving surrounding temperatures unaffected. That’s only when the polar vortex remembers its place, however—which it’s not doing this weekend. Instead, a pair of high pressure areas are forcing the jet stream to plunge southward, bringing the icebox air of the polar vortex with them deep into the lower 48 states. At the same time, a so-called blocking high—a static area of high pressure—over Greenland is also forcing the jet stream, and more cold weather, southward. The U.S. will feel the effects of all of this atmospheric activity dramatically. Throughout Saturday, snow is expected to hit the northern and central Rockies, along with the Plains, with precipitation likely extending as far south as the mid-Mississippi valley. The Weather Channel is warning Kansas City, St. Louis, and Wichita, Kansas, of hazardous driving conditions. Lake effect snow in states bordering the Great Lakes will add to the precipitation. On Sunday, the storm will stretch as far east as West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains and south into Oklahoma. Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Louisville will be added to the cities that will face hazardous driving. By Monday, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, S.C., and portions of West Virginia will get their turn to potentially be buried by snow. Accumulations across the affected areas are expected to reach between six and 12 inches. Snowfall will taper and stop at the beginning of the week, but some models have the Arctic Outbreak lasting until the second half of the month, and that is when the majority of Americans should feel its effects. Even as early as Jan. 6., however, Texas and Oklahoma will see lows in the 20s and 30s; by midweek, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Appalachians could see similar temperatures. Local lows next week are projected to reach 23°F in Dallas, 33°F in New Orleans, 21°F in Atlanta, 36°F in Orlando, and 46°F in Miami. The Weather Channel calls for lows in some parts of the Plains, the mid-Mississippi Valley and the Ohio Valley to touch 0°F. According to Accuweather, the cold air from the far north will arrive in pulses, with repeated blasts keeping much of the country below average temperatures. The Midwest and mid-Atlantic states are projected to be from 12°F to 25°F below historical averages throughout at least portions of the next two weeks. All five Gulf coast states—Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—may see snow and ice. A region extending 1,000 miles from western Nebraska to West Virginia could see up to three to six inches of snow, or “enough to shovel or plow,” says Accuweather. And the more snow that falls, the colder it will get, as the planet’s albedo—or reflectivity—increases, meaning that incoming sunlight bounces from the white ground back into space rather than being absorbed by darker surfaces and increasing warming. None of this changes the state of the Earth’s overall climate. The planet is still running the meteorological fever known as climate change. But there is plenty of fluctuation within that larger condition. The first month of 2025 promises to be a reminder of winter’s more punishing extremes.

As the old year ticked off its last minutes, New Orleans seemed ready for the new one. The city had gone through a rough stretch, but things were looking up. The gun violence that surged to harrowing levels during the pandemic had fallen off dramatically. The Super Bowl, returning to New Orleans in February after a dozen years, promised an influx of visitors and excitement. And the city’s best season, the exuberant weeks leading up to Mardi Gras, was on its way. But less than four hours into the new year, a heavily armed man slammed a truck into the celebrating crowds, leaving dozens wounded or dead on the city’s most carefree street. In the news conferences that followed, the mayor of New Orleans and other leaders in Louisiana praised the city’s residents for their resilience amid disaster. It’s a message they had heard before. “The word ‘resilient’ has become synonymous with the city of New Orleans,” Lesli Harris, a city councilwoman, said in an interview, acknowledging that the quality was a source of both pride and exasperation. “We are resilient because we have to be.” Many people in New Orleans have expressed a certain comfort and satisfaction at the strength of the community’s bonds and its collective ability to navigate disaster and hardship. Yet they also wouldn’t mind being able to get by without having to draw on a reservoir of grit and good humor.“You’ve got to suck it up and figure it out,” said Rachel Zachry Dutcher, who works at an oyster bar on Bourbon Street, where she saw the scale of the carnage the morning after the attack. “But at what point,” she said with an expletive, “do we stop sucking up the stuff we shouldn’t have to suck up?” The attack in New Orleans could have happened anywhere that a New Year’s Eve crowd had gathered. But it happened in a city that has had to endure far more than its share of heartache and dislocation. Twenty years ago this summer, New Orleans was four-fifths underwater after the levee system designed to protect it collapsed under the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina. There was talk of abandoning parts of the city altogether. But people returned and rebuilt homes, started businesses and nonprofits, and worked not just to keep the city alive but to make it better than it had been before.There was a sense of promise at the time, punctuated by the Saints, the beloved but long-cursed football franchise, winning its first Super Bowl in 2010. Surveys taken by the University of New Orleans over that decade showed a city that, for all of its many challenges, was optimistic about the future. But that optimism curdled.To some degree, this was fate: New Orleans’s disproportionate share of calamity is in part a function of where it was built, a location that, in an age of climate change, has turned out to be especially precarious. Since 2020, the average U.S. county has experienced between one and two federally declared disasters. In that same time span, every part of the state of Louisiana has experienced at least a dozen. In recent years, New Orleans streets have flooded when the city’s archaic drainage system could not keep pace with the increasingly torrential rainstorms. Hurricane Ida battered the Louisiana coast in 2021, leaving the city without power for weeks and with thousands of tons of uncollected trash. Covid ravaged New Orleans in the earliest stages of the pandemic, infecting and killing residents in those first few months at higher rates than most other U.S. cities and upending the livelihoods of thousands of residents who relied on the mostly low-wage tourism economy. The number of murders and carjackings soared, making New Orleans in 2022, once again, a so-called murder capital. Living in New Orleans had always required some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but it was reaching a point where affection for New Orleans and its way of life was being overshadowed by the litany of complications that came with it. Home and auto insurance premiums soared to unaffordable levels. Residents said they were becoming less and less surprised to find their car windows smashed. When the University of New Orleans conducted its biannual quality of life survey in 2022, the results were bleak. “We saw numbers we hadn’t seen since the 1990s, when we had a murder epidemic in the city,” said Edward Chervenak, the director of the university’s Survey Research Center.Residents who had the resources to leave were increasingly opting to do so. Those who did not have the resources to leave often felt stuck in a precarious position. For them, affordable housing was scarce, as were well-paying jobs, much less the prospect of long-term financial security, residents said. Ms. Zachry Dutcher’s husband, Timothy, said he makes $17 an hour at his restaurant job — and he considered himself lucky. Some restaurant workers were making half of that. (The minimum wage in Louisiana is $7.25.) The only recourse: pick up more hours. “You can’t stop moving,” Mr. Dutcher, 36, said. And yet, Mr. Dutcher is a fairly recent arrival, moving from Colorado over the summer. New Orleans is a culinary destination, he said, that also offers an atmosphere and a possibility for forging a community that he could not find elsewhere. When the citywide survey was conducted again late last year, it showed a curious change. “People were dissatisfied about the city of the last five years,” Professor Chervenak said, “but seemed to be optimistic about the future.” The violence that bedeviled New Orleans in the first years of the pandemic has receded substantially, with major drops in the number of homicides, carjackings and armed robberies. Ms. Harris also pointed out that it is a local election year, spurring an exchange of ideas about the city’s direction and representing a moment for New Orleans to start a new chapter. “I think there was anticipation that we could be on the upswing,” said Ms. Harris, who represents a district adjacent to the French Quarter. “And here comes this attack.”The attack did not just rattle the city, leaving people anguished over the lost lives, wary about what else could happen and suspicious, once again, about whether the authorities might have been able to do something to prevent it. It also interrupted a hopeful moment that the city had been awaiting for years, and left it back in the familiar position of relying on its storied grit. “I’m sick and tired of being resilient, too,” said Calvin Johnson, 78, a retired Orleans Parish judge. But, he said, “you go back over our illustrious history” — 300 years, he said, of disease, hurricanes, violence and inequality — “and this is the place that can withstand all of that and still be something.” On Thursday, Eric Moore, 29, was sitting on a folding chair in a parking lot on Canal Street, waiting along with dozens of other volunteers to give blood. He works at a cafe on Bourbon Street, though he wasn’t there at the time of the attack and doesn’t have much desire to go back soon. “I don’t want to see Bourbon Street right now, at all,” he said. Mr. Moore said he understood that bad things happened on Bourbon Street — shootings have broken out all too often there in recent years — but he emphasized that the attack early Wednesday morning was a very different kind of bad thing. Still, he said, the city would band together and make it through. Again. “We came back from Katrina,” Mr. Moore said. “We got some work to do, some healing to do. But we’re going to be all right.”