By GHAITH ALSAYED and BASSEM MROUE Associated PressJINDERIS, Syria (AP) — A baby girl who was born under the rubble of her family’s earthquake-shattered home has left the hospital and gone to her new home, where she was with her paternal aunt’s family Monday.The girl had been at the hospital since hours after the Feb. 6 earthquake. She was discharged Saturday and her aunt and uncle adopted her and gave her a new name, Afraa, after her late mother.Afraa's mother died in the quake along with her father and four siblings. A day after the infant arrived at the hospital, officials there named her Aya — Arabic for “a sign from God.”Afraa’s story has been widely shared in news reports and people from around the world have offered to help her, with some saying they would like to adopt her. However, the relatives who took her in said that, however hard their circumstances, the best place for the infant is with family.On Monday, Afraa was being cared for by her uncle, Khalil al-Sawadi, who is now living with relatives in the town of Jinderis in northern Syria after his home was also destroyed in the earthquake. Al-Sawadi and his wife have four daughters and two sons and now Afraa will be living with her cousins.“She is one of my children now. I will not differentiate between her and my children,” al-Sawadi, who is also a cousin of the newborn's parents, told The Associated Press on Monday while sitting cross-legged holding Afraa and surrounded by his six children. “She will be dearer than my children because she will keep the memory alive of her father, mother and siblings.”He added that days after Afraa was born, his wife gave birth to a daughter, Attaa.<blockquote class="tweet-quote">While in the hospital in the nearby town of Afrin, the director’s wife has been breast-feeding Afraa.</blockquote>Judicial officials in Afrin had taken over the case of Afraa after the girl drew international attention and some people came to the hospital claiming they are related to her although they had different family names than Afraa and her mother.For days, al-Sawadi was worried that someone might kidnap her and he visited her frequently at the hospital.A hospital official said Afraa was handed over to her aunt's family days after a DNA test was conducted to make sure the girl and her aunt are biologically related.“It was sad and some nurses wept” when she was taken from the hospital, said Dr. Hani Maarouf who had taken care of Afraa since she was brought to the facility. He added that the baby girl was in very good health when she was released.Rescue workers in Jinderis discovered the dark-haired baby girl more than 10 hours after the quake as they were digging through the wreckage of the five-story apartment building where her parents lived.Al-Sawadi recounted how he rushed out of his home when the earthquake happened and found that the nearby building where Afraa's family lived had been reduced to a pile of rubble. Along with others from the area, al-Sawadi said they dug through the rubble in heavy rain for hours until he grew tired and sat to rest nearby.Shortly afterward, someone called him to identify a dead woman whom they found under the rubble. He told people around that she was his cousin, Afraa. Then, they started hearing a child crying and frantically removed the sand that covered the baby, whose umbilical cord was still still connected to her mother.Al-Sawadi said he took a razor from his pocked and cut the umbilical cord and handed the girl to another cousin and they rushed her to a nearby hospital where he was told that the girl was in good health. They drove to another hospital in the nearby town of Afrin where they were told it was full and unable to take more patients. They continued to a second hospital, which was also full, before reaching the children's hospital where she was kept until Saturday.He said during the chaos after they pulled Afraa from under the rubble, al-Sawadi thought that the newborn was a boy and told the doctor to name “him” after her late father Abdullah Turki Mleihan. They later found out it was a girl.He said that the girl was kept in hospital for nearly two weeks until the paperwork for her adoption was done.The devastating 7.8 magnitude earthquake with its epicenter in Turkey’s southeastern Kharamanmaras province struck in the early hours of Feb. 6, followed by multiple aftershocks. Many communities in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria were reduced to piles of broken concrete and twisted metal. More than 44,000 people have been reported dead, a toll expected to rise as search teams find more bodies.The earthquake destroyed dozens of housing units in the town of Jinderis, where Afraa’s family had been living since 2018.Afraa’s father, Abdullah Turki Mleihan, was originally from the village of Khsham in eastern Deir el-Zour province, but left in 2014 after the Islamic State group captured the village, Saleh al-Badran, an uncle of Afraa’s father, said earlier this month.“I will raise her in a way that she will not feel in need for anything,” said al-Sawadi, who buys and sells cars. Surrounded by his children, al-Sawadi asked them if he should give away Afraa to the well-wishers offering to adopt her and they said in one voice, “No.”&nbsp;

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It's a miracle!

Newborn Saved From Earthquake In Syria Adopted By Her Aunt

Maia Foley-Weintraub’s 5-year-old son had to spend the night at daycare because she was stuck in snow-stalled traffic for nine hours. In a moment of panic during that time, her van slid down an icy hill, forcing her to use the emergency brake.&nbsp;It took her until 2 a.m. Thursday to make it home safely.“People were just spinning out and getting stuck left and right,” she said. “It was just one thing after another. I did not have any idea that that was going to turn out the way it did.”<blockquote class="tweet-quote">The snow began to melt later in the day but as temperatures dropped and night fell, roads became slick with black ice.</blockquote>Portions of Interstate 80 in California and Wyoming were closed because of impassable conditions. That included about a 70-mile stretch over the top of the Sierra Nevada linking California and Nevada.<figure class="image image-style-align-left"><img src="https://emfservicestage.azureedge.net/news/51018.jpg" alt="boy in the snow"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: digital] boy in the snow</figcaption></figure>The weather also knocked out power to nearly 1 million homes and businesses in multiple states and closed dozens of schools. Weather also contributed to airport snarls. At one point on Thursday, more 2,000 flights were grounded and nearly 14,000 were delayed across the country, according to the tracking service FlightAware.com.<blockquote>Widespread power outages were reported in Michigan, Illinois, California, New York and Wisconsin, according to the website PowerOutage.us.</blockquote>The largest outages by far were in Michigan, where at one point more than 820,000 customers were without electricity, mostly in the state’s southeast corner. Some 3,000 power lines were knocked down after being coated with ice as much as three-quarters of an inch thick and crews were struggling to get the juice back by the end of Sunday, utilities said.&nbsp;“Utilities across the country fear ice storms like we fear nothing else," said Trevor Lauer, president of DTE Electric. “We’ve not had an ice storm in the last 50 years that has impacted our infrastructure like this.”A Michigan firefighter died Wednesday after coming in contact with a downed power line in the village of Paw Paw, authorities said.Winter storm warnings remained in effect in northern Michigan and parts of New England could see sleet, snow and freezing rain as a cold front stretched from the eastern Great Lakes to East Texas, the National Weather Service's Weather Prediction Center said.<figure class="media"><oembed url="https://twitter.com/jeffcosheriffco/status/1625232095185346582?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1625232095185346582%7Ctwgr%5Ea9b235696dbf7f929072487e8f7b90f792ad3e60%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.klove.com%2Fnews%2Fus-and-world%2Fwatch-the-tribute-entire-sheriff-s-dept-honors-fallen-k-9-graffit-life-lost-on-duty-40432"></oembed></figure>

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Kids get to stay home from school.

Coast to Coast Storm

This is the new CK editor with many more options.There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long range forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water.<blockquote class="tweet-quote">For the west coast, El Nino typically means a drier winter, but a wetter spring.</blockquote><ul><li>precipitation</li><li>temperatures</li><li>ocean phases</li></ul>For the west coast, El Nino typically means a drier winter, but a wetter spring, though for California, it may be a combined wet winter and spring. For the east coast, particularly the southeast, winters are generally wetter. The southeast is cooler as well.&nbsp;<figure class="image text-center"><img src="https://emfservicestage.azureedge.net/news/50997.gif" alt="weather"></figure><section class="simple-box row"><div class="simple-col col-12 col-md">Though there is an increasing chance of an El Nino forming, according to the Climate Prediction Center, there is still some uncertainty. Predicting the ocean phases can be quite tricky. The strength and impact of individual El Niño events vary.&nbsp;</div><div class="simple-col col-12 col-md"><figure class="image"><img src="https://emfservicestage.azureedge.net/news/50998.gif" alt="graph"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: NOAA]</figcaption></figure></div></section>If El Nino were to develop this year, it would be a big change from the persistence of La Nina, which has been mostly uninterrupted since the summer of 2020.There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long range forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service.&nbsp;El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water. There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long range forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service.&nbsp;<figure class="image image-style-align-left"><img src="https://emfservicestage.azureedge.net/news/50997.gif" alt="weather"><figcaption>[Photo Credit: NOAA]</figcaption></figure>El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water. There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long range forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water. There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long range forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water. There are increasing chances of El Nino in the long rang<figure class="media"><oembed url="https://emfservicestage.azureedge.net/news/51004.mp3"></oembed></figure>e forecasts, according to the Climate Prediction Center at the National Weather Service. El Nino is a phase of Pacific Ocean water and is associated with the band that develops in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific, including the area off the Pacific coast of South America. Most recently, we've been in a La Nina phase, which is cooler water.<figure class="media"><oembed url="https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1141039841993355264?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1141039841993355264%7Ctwgr%5E052b11598135d7d87ebe3625d4f8ec4234d859ae%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fhelp.twitter.com%2Fen%2Fusing-twitter%2Fhow-to-embed-a-tweet"></oembed></figure>&nbsp;

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The change in Pacific Ocean temperatures has a significant impact on weather across the U.S.

Return of El Nino?

This is a test to find out if this works

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Wildfire Test

WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. official says an American military team's initial assessment is that Iranian or Iranian-backed proxies used explosives to blow large holes in four ships anchored off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.The official says each ship has a 5-to-10-foot hole in it, near or just below the water line. The U.S. military team assesses that the holes were caused by explosive charges.The UAE asked the U.S. to help investigate the damage, which Gulf officials have characterized as sabotage.The official was not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.The U.S. has warned ships that "Iran or its proxies" could be targeting maritime traffic in the region, and America has moved additional ships and aircraft into the region.

U.S. & World

Newborn Saved From Earthquake In Syria Adopted By Her Aunt

Coast to Coast Storm

Return of El Nino?

Wildfire Test

Iran Gets Initial Blame For Sabotage Attacks On Merchant Ships